What I mean is dangerous men don’t run their mouth. They don’t need to. The guy that screams and puffs out his chest and loudly threatens is always a coward. The guy that says nothing and quietly walks out is worth going into protective custody against.
My father was a global top sales trainer and we regularly had billionaires around for a barbecue, in our car on the way somewhere, or visiting their offices. People of genuine, extraordinary success. I have been truly blessed when it comes to mentors and I understood from a young age that being in the room with people like that was worth more than any classroom.
They say there are many key contributions to success. But there was one thing I see in all successful people repeatedly.
The Trait Nobody Talks About
People attribute all sorts of things to successful people. Grit. Emotional intelligence. Adaptability. A willingness to seek peer review and sit with uncomfortable feedback. All of that is true and worth having.
But there is one trait I found across virtually every genuinely successful and intelligent person I have ever met. And it is this. Almost none of them are university graduates. Not because they could not have been. Because they never stopped learning. They had what people now call a growth mindset, although none of them would have used that phrase. They just stayed curious. Insatiably, relentlessly, uncomfortably curious. Long after everyone around them had decided they knew enough.
My father forbade me from enrolling at university when I left school. He said it would pigeonhole me into mediocrity. I thought he was wrong. I was seventeen and I thought I knew better than a man who had trained sales teams on six continents and had the personal contact details of people most executives spend their careers trying to get a meeting with.
He was not wrong.
What I Did Instead
I joined the army. Drove tanks. Did things I cannot fully describe here. By the time I was twenty-five I had risen to Chief General Manager of an investment firm, leading a team of forty people. I had never sat in a lecture theatre in my life.
Then I enrolled at university as a twenty-five year old. On my first paper I received ninety-eight percent, the highest mark in Bachelor of Commerce in ten years. And I very quickly learned something that confirmed everything my father had been saying.
University has almost nothing to do with the real world. Except for STEM subjects and the disciplines adjacent to them, a degree is largely a credential. It teaches you to think in a structured way within a predefined framework built by people who mostly have not done the thing they are teaching. That is useful for a narrow set of applications. It is actively counterproductive for sales and for most of what building a business actually requires.
Why I Give Uni Grads a Negative Score in Hiring
When I am assessing candidates I give a minus one out of ten for an undergraduate degree and a minus two for postgraduate. That is not a joke and it is not inverted snobbery.
It is because university graduates, with genuine exceptions, are insufferable know-alls. They arrive believing they have achieved mastery. They stop learning. You cannot teach them anything because they already know everything, or more precisely, they believe they do, which has the same practical effect.
In sales that attitude is a precise predictor of failure. The hubris, the bloated self-importance, the need to demonstrate intelligence in every interaction. Think about what it feels like to receive a cold call from someone who spends the first ninety seconds telling you how clever they are and how transformative their solution is. You stop listening within thirty seconds. You are looking for the exit the entire time they are talking. That is what a know-all sounds like from the other side of the phone.
Sales is a role where you can never be the master. You must always be the student. You must genuinely and consistently subordinate yourself to the customer, their world, their problem, and their timeline. Not as a technique. As a philosophy. The moment you believe you know more than the person you are selling to, you have already lost the deal.
The Dopamine Trap
There is a psychological parallel here worth naming because it shows up constantly in salespeople who cannot understand why they keep losing deals they think they should be winning.
When you tell people about your plans, your successes, your intelligence, and your capabilities, you release dopamine. Your brain receives a reward signal as though the outcome has already happened. The recognition has arrived before the work is done. And somewhere underneath the surface, your drive quietly switches off because your brain thinks the job is complete.
This is why bad salespeople talk about their track record in front of buyers. It is why mediocre operators post constantly about their wins on LinkedIn before the results compound into anything real. They are getting the reward without doing the work. And they are doing it in front of the exact people they need to be genuinely curious about, which makes it worse.
Shut up. Listen. Learn. The deal closes itself when the buyer feels genuinely understood.
What a Growth Mindset Actually Looks Like in Practice
I have seen it hundreds of times. The most successful people I have encountered in business share an insatiable desire to keep learning and developing long after any external pressure to do so has disappeared. They read voraciously. They seek out people who know more than them in specific domains and they ask genuine questions and actually listen to the answers. They are not performing curiosity. They are driven by it.
Most people graduate and stop learning. They have achieved a recognised level of mastery and they plant a flag in it. The credential becomes the identity. What they know becomes who they are. And because what they know is now who they are, they cannot afford to encounter information that challenges it.
That is the opposite of what success in sales and business requires. Markets change. Buyers change. The information asymmetry that used to define the sales relationship has flipped. The tools, the channels, the psychology of buying, all of it shifts continuously. A salesperson who decided they were done learning five years ago is selling to a market that has moved on without them and wondering why the results do not match the effort.
The dangerous ones are not the loudest in the room. They are the ones who are still asking questions when everyone else has started giving answers.
If you want to read more about how we think about sales culture, sales performance, and building outsourced sales teams in Australia that are built around the right foundations, you can find more at www.outsold.com.au/blogs.
