HackMake

Selling Success

Eli Saslow, in a great piece for The Washington Post:

In a country built on optimism, Frank Firetti was the most optimistic character of all: the American salesman — if not the architect of the American dream then at least its most time-honored promoter. He believed that you could envision something and then own it, that what you had now was never as good as what you would have next. Since the country was founded, it had climbed ever upward on the spirit of people like him, on their vision, on their willpower, on their capitalism. But now, when he traveled from house to house to sell his monuments to American success, he sensed that spirit waning.

This piece tells an incredible story. It’s one that makes you question whether what Firetti—and the American Dreamer in all of us—seeks is right. We wont to want but we should focus that want, not on some thing, but ideas and people.