How to Persuade Without Losing Your Soul

You’re reading an excerpt of Great Founders Write, by Ben Putano, writer, entrepreneur, and book publisher. He’s the founder of Damn Gravity Media, a publishing house that inspires and educates tomorrow’s great founders. Purchase now for lifetime access to the book and on-demand video course.

My junior year of college was an odd one.

Living in my fraternity house, I’d regularly stay up until 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. with my friends. Then I’d be up at 6:00 a.m. to head to work at Northwestern Mutual, an insurance and wealth management company. I was an intern, but not the type that made coffee runs and collected mail. I was a licensed insurance agent.

At 7:00 a.m., I’d be in the office for our agent meeting and to hit the phones. The first hour of every day was spent cold-calling strangers to talk about death and money. Like I said, it was an odd year.

But this experience taught me the art of persuasion. I was a college student (and not a very good one) trying to sell life insurance to doctors, lawyers, and families with small kids. Why would they even take a meeting, let alone buy something from me?

It wasn’t easy, but I ended up in the top 10% of agent interns in the country that year. It was my first taste of making real money (which was quickly wasted), but the lessons learned were far more valuable. As a founder, I use the skills I acquired from that internship every single day.