With Purpose Success, part 37

Robert Chambers and Katie Ginsberg, whose mission statements you read in the last chapter, looked better than they felt. They weren't unhappy, to be sure. In fact, life had been pretty good to them both. But they were cruising, and they knew it. They were on that life path known as autopilot, which the folks in my Sage Project so earnestly warned about. They were leading a good and successful life-from the outside looking in. But, like Eric Clapton unable to coax just the right tone from his guitar, they expected more of themselves. They did not feel successful- from the inside out. "If you ever get a second chance in life for something, you've got to go all the way," Lance Armstrong, the heroic cyclist and cancer survivor has said. Well, Chambers, an ordinary car salesman nearing sixty, and
Ginsberg, a stay-at-home mom nearing forty, did just that. At midlife they set a new goal and decided to pursue a new dream, and each was able to ignite a passion and discover meaning by building on the skills and wisdom they had acquired in their life. They found a bigger reason to be alive, and it changed everything for them.
Selling Cars with Purpose
Serving on the USS Kitty Hawk during the Vietnam War, Robert Chambers got his first good look at poverty while stationed in the Philippines- and it left him shaken. "We could read it in the papers and we could see some pictures," he recalls. "But really seeing kids begging, not having enough to eat; how skinny they were, how unhealthy they looked just left a deep impression on me." Those images stayed with Chambers over the many decades of his postmilitary life, when he earned his keep as a computer specialist for a phone company, then for a bank, then for an affiliate of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, and finally for his own firm serving several banks in New York City.
But when the stock market crashed in 1987, Chambers's small operation was left in shambles. He shut it down and moved back to Hanover with modest savings and little income (but where he still owned some property) to contemplate what would come next. Could he afford to retire? Perhaps-but he'd have to phase into it with part-time work.
That's when a friend convinced him to go into the car business.
As a car salesman, Chambers became reacquainted with other peoples' poverty in a visceral way. The lot where he worked served many low-income car buyers, which Chambers and other salesmen knew from experience tended to be unsophisticated about car values and loan rates. "I got sick of watching guys high-five behind glass walls" after they had bullied someone "who probably makes $10 an hour" into overpaying for a gas- guzzling jalopy, Chambers recalls.
Such buyers almost always assume they do not qualify for a new-car loan, which isn't the case. New fuel-efficient cars are often available to even low-income households through an attractive manufacturer-subsidized rate. Those are the kind of deals that Chambers tried to find for his clients. But he couldn't control the other salesmen, who led their low- income lambs to the slaughter-taking them directly to the oldest cars on the lot, which also happened to be the most profitable for the dealer.