Back when I was in retail, there was an old saying: “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.”

I believe there’s real truth to that idea. I was a good salesman. Not the guy who crushed it every month and won the trips, but consistently solid. Upper mid-pack most of the time. I made a living. Paid the bills. But I watched the real killers, the ones who could sell anything to anyone, get the management promotions.

Almost every time, they failed at it.

They knew how to do it their way. They just couldn’t break it down for someone else or adjust when the person in front of them didn’t respond the same way they did. So they got frustrated and either quit or got sent back to the floor.

Meanwhile, I kept at it, and eventually I became a Store Director for a major consumer electronics retailer. I ended up with the store that was dead last in a division of 152 stores. By the time I was done, it was in the top 10% of the entire company for profitability.

Not because I was the greatest salesman. Because I spent time watching what worked and what didn’t. I treated sales like something I was still learning. I studied the company, the customers, and the people I was supposed to lead. Then I taught to their strengths instead of demanding they copy mine.

That experience never left me.

Lately I’ve been thinking we’ve flipped the script in an ugly way.

It used to be that if you couldn’t do something at the absolute highest level, you might still have something useful to offer by teaching it, because you understood the struggle. Now it feels like too many people who hit a wall just get angry at the ones who kept going. They didn’t fail and learn. They didn’t become students and then teachers. They failed and blamed.

We’ve seen plenty of fraud and embezzlement cases in the courts lately. In a lot of them, it looks like people hit a ceiling in their work and chose resentment over becoming a student of something new. Instead of treating a possible setback as information and finding another way, anger seems to have become the path they took. Anger can easily be the spark that ignites the fire of crime.

What you rarely hear is “I didn’t know enough and wasn’t talented enough, so I studied harder or found another lane.” If only more people uttered these words.

I knew early I was never going to dominate sales. So I became a student of it. That knowledge is what let me lead a whole store and later go on to other leadership roles. The people who stayed locked on “I should be the best at this one thing” often stayed stuck there.

I’m not saying every failure is a character flaw or that circumstances don’t matter. Life is hard. But the difference between the ones who eventually move forward and the ones who stay angry seems to come down to whether they treat failure as information or as proof that the whole thing is rigged against them.

The game is hard. It always has been. The people who figure out how to play it a little better, even when they weren’t naturals, are usually the ones who end up teaching the rest of us something worth knowing.

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