Two fingers on my right hand are crooked — the ring finger, and the pinkie.
They are crooked because back when I was a junior in college, I cut myself in a freak accident involving a butter knife, which I attempted to stab into the wall in a fit of rage.
(I was an idiot then, but I feel I’ve really, really matured since.)
This momentary, stupid action turned out to have major consequences.
I did serious damage to my fingers. I had to go to the ER to get the bleeding taken care of immediately.
A few days later, I had to go into a three-hour surgery to actually fix my fingers, since I’d managed to cut through the tendons.
After surgery, I had this big strange cast on my arm, which had wires and springs that were glued to my fingernails, to keep my fingers bent at exactly the right angle.
I had to walk around the university campus for months with this monstrosity catching everybody’s attention.
Inevitably, every fifteen steps or so, some college bro would stop and stare at me in wonder. “Dude… what happened to your hand?”
After the first dozen times of getting asked this question, I started to glare at the question asker with daggers in my eyes. If I said anything, I’d bark back, “I CUT MYSELF!” My friend Sam, who was my roommate at the time, would just walk alongside me and chuckle at my canned, hostile response.
But let’s get to work. You may have heard of Cunningham’s law, which says:
“The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.”
It’s not just on the Internet. It can be like that in the real world too.
Questions are supposed to be this miracle sales tool to get people to open up and share their innermost secrets. And they can be. But there are certain situations where questions don’t work, simply because they’ve been asked too many times, or because the person is too guarded.
What to do in those cases? Here’s Bejakovic’s corollary to Cunningham’s law:
“If people don’t want to answer your questions, then make an assumption or statement, regardless of how wrong.”
That’s a bit of a tip if you ever find yourself in situations, sales or otherwise, where doing the right thing normally, asking questions, gets people to glare at you or maybe bark a 3-word answer and then clam up.
Instead of asking them, “What happened to your hand,” just say, “That looks like an injury caused by a butter knife.” If you’re right, you look like a wizard. If you’re wrong, you find out the truth.
Anyways, it’s time for me to go to the gym and work out a bit, to keep my boiling rage under control. (Just kidding. Like I said, I’ve really, really matured.)
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