I once read that whatever people really need, G-d gives in abundance. Air, water, the essentials, are plentiful and free. Grains, vegetables, fruit are usually cheap and just grow from the earth. The stuff we don’t really need is rare and expensive.

I didn’t think about a big fancy office, a prestigious position, or a Mercedes. All I wanted was a patch of dirt, a place to put my desk, and an opportunity. That was available everywhere.

I didn’t even have to look. My old landlord gave me back my old space in his basement. No rent. I could pay something when I started making a living. The couple of brochure clients still around were happy to hear I was back. They said they’d recommend a couple of friends to use my hotel delivery service if I just started distributing efficiently again. No problem; what else did I have to do? I was back in the brochure business again. I even found a nice $250-a-month apartment. If I stuck to pasta, I could already support myself. Watch out, world, here I come!

Watch out, right. Not so fast. Used station wagons cost money. You have to work nineteen hours a day to distribute the brochures yourself all night and still be in the office all day to accept deliveries and sell your service to other clients. You have to bang your head against a lot of walls, make “cold calls” till your ego is shot, and still try to think of yourself as a tycoon in the making.

It helps to have a rich fantasy life. I talked to myself all the time. I turned car rides into wagon train expeditions, sales brush-offs into important opportunities, and the like. I guess I needed a lot of ego boosting, and who better to get it from than myself? On the other hand, it’s important for people to dream and visualize success if they have any hope of achieving it. Peter the Great once dressed up in peasant clothes and went to Holland, where he wouldn’t be recognized, to work in a shipyard and learn about real life without the impediments of having to be the Czar. It seems pompous or strange, I know, but for all the years I delivered brochures I imagined myself as a sort of corporate Peter the Great. Doormen might force me to use the servants’ entrance. Stylishly dressed men and women might bump into me, knocking over my bundles, and walk away, treating me like furniture without even saying “I’m sorry.” Former Harvard classmates, in town on business, would gawk and then feign nonrecognition as I knelt down filling the racks, but I was never embarrassed in the least. Under my deliveryman’s disguise, I knew, lurked a future media magnate working his way up from the ground.

It was due to these deliveries that I actually made most of my sales. In the various hotel lobbies I’d wind up finding varieties of brochures amateurishly self-distributed. Those businesses who’d gone to the effort of actually attempting to get their brochures into hotel lobbies on their own ended up being my easiest and most plentiful sales.

There is simply no substitute for being close to the market. I could have sat with my phone book for eternity and never figured out a calling list of places whose brochures I found in the lobbies. Most likely, even had I attempted a call, the receptionist wouldn’t have let me through and I’d not have known to persevere in going after a sure slam dunk. Twenty years and hundreds of millions of dollars in sales later, I think this is still the cardinal rule of salesmanship and business: Stay close to the market and keep your ear to the ground.