Defy the Norm, Set a Standard ~or~ “The Jim Clack Incident”
He played for the NFL for 11 seasons for the Pittsburgh Steelers and New York Giants. He earned back-to-back Superbowl rings. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame of his Alma Matter, Wake Forest University. He went on to become a successful businessman back home in North Carolina, before his untimely death in 2006 after a 4-year battle with cancer. His name was Jim Clack.
Google the name, and you’ll confirm the impressive resume. What the biographies and accolades and obituaries won’t tell you, however, is that Jim Clack thought I was nuts. In fact, I think he had a very real and genuine concern about my mental state! If someone with 2 Superbowl rings questioned your faculties, would you be inclined to listen? I did, and here is what I learned.
In late 2000, maybe early 2001, less than 6 months into my first post-grad, “real” job, one of our product vendors guinea-pigged the distributor I worked for into enrolling us into a new sales training program. The kicker, though, and supposedly the unique part of this class in comparison to its 7,284,307,198 competitors (roughly guessing, of course), is that we would take a test that would assess our natural and learned abilities in selling. Thus, the trainers would be able to judge where we needed to improve, and tailor an individual program for each of us.
I had already learned in applying for career-level jobs that people put a lot of store in tests and assessments that seemed to make them think your 22 minutes in taking it qualified them as an expert on your 22 years of life. But so far, I had given these the, “no harm, no foul” view, as they had little impact on me even if the exercise seemed silly. That view was about to change.
I focused on the test. “Selling is more fun than thermonuclear Armageddon. True or False?” Easy enough, I thought. “Selling is my entire reason for living. True or False?” Okay, now they’re messing with me. Am I supposed to agree and prove myself a happy warrior? No, don’t overthink it. Of course selling isn’t my reason for living. “Order these 20 items from most positive to least positive, with 1 being the most positive and 20 being the least.” Let’s see, well they have, “Selling is everything to me” and “Selling sucks” here… either view seems slightly demented. So those are tending negative for me, but where do I place them in relation to “Jetliner crashes.” Am I on the jet? Anyone I know? This was more than 6 months before 9/11, and I had yet to realize that this scenario could also be an alternative to “Islamic mad-men make kamikaze run on White House.” Still, it seemed like number 20 material, no matter how vague and unrelated to selling it seemed. All done. Off to the fax machine to transmit my soul.
A few days later, Gerry, the sales manager (in meaningless title only) and Dave, the real boss, told me I needed to take the test again. I laughed. “No, really. We’re not kidding. Frank wants you to do it again.” I was still laughing, but distinctly less heartily now. “Why? Did I miss a page? I thought I faxed everything over.” “Don’t worry about why. Just sit down and do it over.” “Ooookay!”
I tried to redo it without rehashing all the mental processes I had before. Clean slate.
A few more days, and now it’s just Gerry asking me to come to his office. “Hey, man, Frank wants you to retake that test….” He trailed off a little, which in retrospect I think was a response to what I am sure was an annoyed expression on my part. “But I already did.” “No, just this one part,” Gerry replied. “Just sit down. Forget about everything else. Close your door. Don’t take any calls. Take as long as you need.” My desire to fight the point was being overcome with the opportunity to close myself off from other work for a good half-day. “Alright,” I said, “But I’m not going to be able to get anything else done this morning. If this is the most important thing you think I need to do, that’s fine.” Apparently, it was.
So I sat down again. This time, it was just the section of ordered lists, the so-called “Personality” report. Well, what’s one more go at it?!
I figured I did something different. No one asked for a redo. We went to the first day of sales training. No one said anything directly to me. The weird ordeal seemed to be over. They even passed out the individualized reports.
Jim Clack, in his later years’ capacity as a motivational speaker, was part of this new sales training program. He had talked some the first day, but interspersed with the other trainer. As the first day drew to a close, and we all prepared to leave, Jim stopped me. “Hey buddy, you gotta minute?” “Sure. What can I do for ya?”
“Hey, listen, I just wanted to ask you….” Now his timidity belied his position as an offensive lineman only two decades earlier. “Is there something going on in your life right now?”
“Like what?”
“Well, um, something that you might want to talk about. Something with your family. Something going on in your life?”
“Nope, I don’t think so.” I smiled. This was awkward, and a bit surreal. “I’m doing real well.”
“Nothing?” “No. Absolutely not. But I presume there’s a reason you asked….”
“It’s just that…” Now he was fumbling as badly as Joe Pisarcik did Clack’s own snap on the play Eagles fans would come to know as “The Miracle at the Meadowlands.” “It’s just that… you took the test three times, and each time you answered the same. No one’s ever answered the way you did.”
“Well, I had reasons for the answers I gave.”
“That’s the thing. I know you must. No one could have just randomly picked the same answers multiple times. But your answers seem random. They don’t make sense.”
“Look,” I told the former champion, at the time not knowing any of his history. “The answers make sense to me. They don’t make sense to you because you want to categorize me. It’s not that simple. You gave me a list of extremes. That’s not real life. Real life is not a choice between how much you love selling or babies dying. I sense that you’re being sincere, and I believe you want to be helpful. But this test doesn’t tell you about me. It only lets you categorize certain people. I am a happy guy, and I don’t need a test to tell me if that’s so or not.”
I don’t think Jim ever believed me. He was very nice to me over the next couple of days. He still had kind of a look about him that told me he had no idea what to make of me.
Jim Clack was a successful man, and it made me a little sad when I found out years later he had died. But I never admired the view that you can categorize people and predict success. There are predictors of success, but they are the intangibles. Belief. Passion. Attitude. And I know Jim Clack thought he was able to tell something about those things in me from that test. But that test was based on someone else’s beliefs, passions, and attitudes… people who were probably successful, like Jim. But maybe the most successful people are the ones who redefine those things. I believe the highest success comes from seeing new choices, not rearranging a list of old ones. Godspeed, Jim…. I’m still a happy guy.
Jared A. Chambers
