The Seven Stunning Virtues
We were taught that there are seven deadly sins. Pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, lust, gluttony. The list has been used for centuries as a catalogue of human failure, the tendencies we are supposed to suppress, the parts of ourselves we are supposed to be ashamed of.
Behavioural psychology has a different view. There is no inherently better or worse in human quality. The same characteristic that makes someone a genius is often the same one that makes them genuinely difficult to be around. The drive that builds something extraordinary is frequently the same drive, pointed slightly differently, that burns something down.
Which means if there are seven deadly sins, they are equally seven stunning virtues. It depends entirely on what you do with them.
Pride
Pride in your work means you do not do half jobs. You do not ship something you know is below standard and hope nobody notices. When you put your name on something, when you feel genuine ownership of the output, you are held to a different standard by yourself than any external accountability system can impose.
That is not vanity. It is the internal mechanism that pushes people toward genuine excellence rather than acceptable mediocrity. The people who produce consistently good work are almost always the ones who cannot comfortably live with producing bad work. Pride is the engine of that discomfort.
Envy
Envy is goal setting with an emotional charge attached to it. It is your attention being drawn, sometimes uncomfortably, toward something you want that you do not yet have.
One of the exercises I use with new hires is what I call a beckoning image. An image board of everything they could want in their wildest fantasy. Not a sensible five-year plan. The full unrestricted version of what life could look like if things went well beyond their current expectations. The exercise works because visualising what you covet gives shape to what you are actually working toward. The envy points to the north star. You just have to be willing to look at it honestly rather than feel guilty about wanting it.
Wrath
Wrath is power in its raw form. It is not inherently destructive. Without anger at the company that pours toxins into the ocean, without outrage at injustice, without the visceral response to something that is genuinely wrong, nothing changes. The bad persists because the good is too polite to push back.
One of my favourite observations, which has been attributed to various sources over the years, is that the wicked flee when none pursueth. Evil often persists not because it is strong but because decent people have decided that their anger is not appropriate to express. Wrath, directed with purpose rather than indiscriminate rage, is what moves the world.
Sloth
The best salespeople I have ever worked with have a strong lazy streak. Not the kind that means they sit around waiting for something to happen. The kind that means they are deeply allergic to unnecessary effort.
Lazy people are efficiency machines. They will find the fastest, cleanest, most direct path to the outcome because they genuinely cannot be bothered with the scenic route. They cut through process overhead, eliminate unnecessary steps, and arrive at the result while the hard workers are still preparing their second set of notes. In sales, where effort does not correlate directly with outcome, that instinct for efficiency is worth more than raw hustle.
Greed
A director told me once, directly and without apology, that I would be a far better salesperson if I was greedier and cared more about money. He was right.
A salesperson’s job is to generate revenue. Not to be comfortable with where the numbers are. Not to accept a reasonable outcome and feel grateful for it. To want more, to push further, to be uncomfortable until the number is bigger. Greed keeps founders building when the sensible thing would be to stop. It keeps salespeople calling when the week is technically already okay. It keeps leaders reinvesting when they could be taking it out.
Money is not a corrupting force by nature. It is neutral. The corruption comes from the character of the person holding it. With more money you can choose to do more good, effect more change, build more things worth building. You do not have to use it to be an asshole. That part is optional.
Lust
Lust is not only physical desire. It is vitality. Aliveness. The French call it joie de vivre, the joy of living, and it captures something that the English translation misses slightly. It is the quality in a person that makes them fully present, fully engaged, genuinely excited about what is in front of them.
Charisma is lust with a suit on. The magnetic quality that makes certain people compelling to be around, that makes buyers want to stay in the conversation, that makes a room orient itself toward someone when they speak. It is not manufactured. It is the overflow of someone who is genuinely alive to what they are doing.
A sales representative is a human representative of a company. The more vitality you bring into a room, the more you can influence what happens in it. I am aware of the irony of making this point given that I have a head like a dropped pie, but the principle stands regardless.
Gluttony
Sales is feast and famine. There are seasons when everything converts and the pipeline overflows, and there are seasons that feel like a long walk through a desert with no water in sight. When you have genuinely starved before, you do not apologise for eating well when the feast arrives.
But gluttony as a virtue runs deeper than just appetite for success. It is a rampant desire to taste everything. To try things that are not on the comfortable, familiar list. My dad used to say to me, when we were out for Chinese food as a kid, that I could not order the sweet and sour pork again until I had tried everything else on the menu. He was not talking about food.
The people who stay interesting, who keep developing, who find new angles on old problems, are the ones who have never stopped being hungry for the next thing they have not tried yet. That is not excess for its own sake. It is the refusal to let experience calcify into habit.
Psychologists call it hugging your shadow. The work is not to kill the monster but to learn its name. To understand the quality underneath the label and find where it serves you rather than where it holds you back.
The parts of yourself they told you to hide are often where the gold is buried. The anger, the hunger, the laziness, the pride. Embrace them with enough self-awareness to direct them, and they stop being liabilities.
They become the whole game.
For more on the psychology of sales performance and what actually drives commercial results, there is more at www.outsold.com.au/blogs.
