Placed beside the best talker

In a phone market in Riyadh, some sellers seem born to it. They greet you from three counters away, they have a joke ready, and they can sell a case to someone who came in for a charger.

Picture a new hire put to work near one of them. He is quiet. He knows the specifications better than anyone in the row, and he is sure that is his strength. He would rather stay at the back, moving contacts and fixing settings, and leave the customers to people who were made for it.

For a while that holds. Then the owner moves him to the front, right beside the talker, and the arithmetic changes. Every buyer the talker charms is a buyer he did not serve. The comparison is public, and it happens forty times a day.

So he starts to learn. Not to become the talker, but to find his own version. He looks people in the eye. He asks what the phone is for and listens to the answer. He finds that his knowledge, offered warmly and early, lands better than jokes with a certain kind of buyer. Within a few months, regulars ask for him by name.

Nothing in him changed except the practice. The presence he thought he lacked was a handful of habits, and the pressure beside him was the teacher.

We like to say that some people have it and some do not. It is a comfortable thing to believe, because it excuses the rest of us from trying.

Presence is learnt. Whether we decide to learn it is the only part that was ever up to us.