Success Hack #6: Get a Free Lunch

The other day a post on 𝕏 inspired us to invent a new Success Hack.

Scott Belsky is, of course, 100% correct. At a certain level of the career ladder, everybody needs some success at selling. To get the job, you must sell yourself. To succeed at the job, you must sell your vision internally and externally. Picking up sales skills will help you even if you are planning to keep your nose in your computer 24/7.

This also illustrates the wide gulf between this goal (i.e. “improve sales skills”) and what we like to consider a quality success hack. Understanding the right direction you want to go into is easy, yet it doesn’t get you any farther than the myriad failed New Years Resolutions. (“Improve sales skills!”, “Lose weight!”, “Eat better!”.)

We use Success Hacking as a way to think about how to create the roadmap to actually achieve these goals. Understanding that you want to sell better is great, but the tricky part is how do you turn it into a habit that develops your sales skills. To be a good Success Hack, you need to find an easy way to actually practice selling, and then figure out how to do it every day. After a year, your sales skills will be finely honed like a craft.

In this spirit, this inspired us to propose the following new Success Hack that we’re calling “Get a Free Lunch.” Here is how it works: every day when you buy your lunch, negotiate the price. That’s it. When you’re buying your lunch, take the opportunity to ask for something more. “Can I get an extra apple?”, “Are there any discounts?”, “Could I get a discount because ___?”, et al. Keep testing different asks until you find out what’s effective, or until you arrive at the coveted free lunch.

It’s an easy way to practice your sales skills every day. Within a year, you would be a lot better at selling. We just made it up so we don’t know if it is successful, but we would love it if you tried it and reported back with your experience. Yet in theory, it fits neatly into our framework for a quality success hack.

Compounding Benefits: 👍

What happens if you become 5% better at selling each day? What if your lunch costs you 20% less per day? If this in fact happens, the benefits will accrue to you over time, producing compound benefits! Since lunch is something you eat daily, there is enough frequency for something to stick.

One successful entrepreneur I know followed this in a similar way. He was a big believer in what he dubbed the “hyperlocal patronage” concept. He would continually test out different restaurants in the area until he found those who were receptive to providing him deals, then he would utilize and promote these companies aggressively.

Diffuse Benefits: 👍

We immediately got some concern that it may be tough to haggle with a food truck. However, I see it very differently, in that there is literally no way to lose but many ways to win.

If you ask your food truck for a discount and they decline, there is literally no downside. Perhaps you’re slightly embarrassed, but this is something you have to get over if you’re to gain sales skills. So even in the worst case outcome, there’s the small upside of building a callous to rejection.

Yet there is the opportunity to achieve upside. Maybe after a week of asking they’ll relent and give you a free drink or dessert. You may learn the contours of what they can provide, so you get the upside of understanding the world better. Or maybe you’ll start going to the food truck that does give you discounts. Maybe you even get your free lunch. There is literally only upside, so from the economists’ point of view it is completely irrational not to ask.

Easy to Implement: 👍

Despite the concern that it may not be “easy” to implement, I’d argue that it practically only requires speaking five extra words (“Could you give a discount?”), so it’s about as easy as it comes. Also, you probably eat lunch every day, so it’s easy to build this as a habit. Of course, if you succeeded and actually got your free lunch, what could be easier than that!

For more information, see our comprehensive list of success hacks.

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