What a boring topic, I hear you think. Listen, I know it sounds bad, and I’m not the type of guy to wank over complex algebra either, but honestly, we’re going to cover off numbers, and when you see ‘The James Smith Game of Numbers’ in the same way I do, everything will be much simpler.
When I finished university with no degree and quite literally nothing to show for the horrendously large fees for ‘education’, I was living with my friends and my old man, Geoffrey Smith, essentially cut me off. Each month, he’d very generously sent me £100 for beer, sausage rolls or the odd emergency taxi. But one day, I looked and the money wasn’t in my bank account.
I called my old man and he said to me, ‘Son, you’re no longer at university. You’re an adult now – you can go get a job if you need some money.’ He had a bloody fair point, but I remained in denial about the entire thing. I waited a week, maybe two, played a lot of games of Call of Duty on my Xbox.*
I vividly remember telling my dad there was ‘no work available’ wherever I looked for it. He said to me something I didn’t think I’d have to hear, not in a million years – something that was going to rock me harder than losing a game of Call of Duty. He said to me, ‘Son, go sign on the dole. I’ve paid enough bloody tax for nearly fifty years, so you may as well see some of it back. That’s what it is there for.’
I wasn’t happy about this suggestion because it made me consider how hard (or not) I’d been trying to get a job, and I didn’t want to lean on the State unless I really had to. However, rent needed to be paid and sausage rolls needed to be bought. Oh, yeah, and beer too. So, I went to the Gloucester Jobcentre, located near where I lived at the time, and experienced one of the most uncomfortable situations I have ever been in.
I was asked all kinds of questions and I found very quickly that if I wrote three lies on an A4 piece of paper in my finest writing, I could get the State to pay all my bills and I could return to a life of Call of Duty domination. However, I opted to use one of the touch-screen machines and I printed a ticket and took the first job going. Within six weeks, after training and driving my dad’s Rover 75 Estate to Worcester every day, I was finally a ‘Sales Representative’ for npower.
What was I selling? Gas and electric. Who was I selling it to? People who already had gas and electric. How was I selling it? Knocking on fucking doors all day, every day.
I took my £12,000 annual salary, and with a spring in my step, I hit the doors for what would end up being bloody months of door knocking to make a living. Waking up each day and knocking away. Two sales a day kept my manager happy. I was fortunate enough not to be in a team with someone micromanaging each knock, and instead I was able to do my hours as I pleased. Some days I’d be home by 2 p.m., others I’d be soaked through with rain and going home with nothing in commission, telling my boss I’d had a tough day.
I’m not sure many postcodes in the UK could beat GL1 for people telling you to ‘fuck off’ for knocking on their door to sell them something they already had while interrupting an episode of Jeremy Kyle. The best I ever got was a cup of tea with an old lady who had a dog with one eye, and I got what was an easy sale because she felt sorry for how fucking wet I was.
Anyway, I’m not here to bore you with Memoirs of a Door Knocker by James Smith. To cut a long story short, one day, close to a breakdown, with my feet fucking freezing and a savage dead leg from rugby training the night before, I called my boss. I was done. I’d rather do bar work or go back to working as a labourer than this. At least when carrying bricks I was warm, could feel my feet and got told to fuck off less. Just about.
My manager told me to wait as he went to his computer. He then went on to say words that would change my perception for ever. He said, ‘James, I have your stats here: every hundred doors you knock on, you eventually make a sale, that’s your average. Some days you’ve made none, others up to five. So go knock on a hundred doors, mate. If you need two sales, then you’d best knock on two hundred …’
And it clicked for me right then – something I had never really thought about before. Everyone has averages to work with in all spheres of their lives. This doesn’t just apply to doors, but everything.
You can be really bad at chatting up someone you find attractive, yet there will be a certain number of people you have to talk to before you get a phone number: for a seasoned expert in the field of dating it may be two numbers obtained from every four people spoken to at the bar; for someone less experienced it may take twenty different conversations with twenty different people to get just one phone number.
You can influence your average in every field you desire. It usually boils down to repetition and experience, but for me, with the doors, it would have been about how I dressed, how wet I was from my day’s knocking or how much coffee I’d had. Some days, approaching a door with a dead leg or a black eye from rugby certainly didn’t help my average.
So let this motivate you, not deflate you. Your ability to manipulate your average in every area of your life is controlled by you and your attitude, your ethos and your audacity. There are a certain number of interviews to attend and uncomfortable conversations to have with people in bars or even at the gym. Where your average is right now is not important, but what you do to positively affect that number is.
Just remember, whether that number is high or low, it doesn’t change the fact that you need to do what you need to do. It’s so often simply a case of getting that first awkward conversation or activity out of the way – a bit of a leap of faith – then, rest assured, it’s all part of the numbers game. We are a walking and talking manifestation of our daily actions and habits. We are a physical representation of what we do each and every day. By taking control of these things we can construct who we are, how we act, what we look like, and how we feel.
* If I could have converted my skills on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare to the real world I could have made a good living, in hindsight.