I’ve worked for a global advertising agency, a global PR firm and a high frequency trading firm, but no where did I learn as much about how to make a living as I did when I was working women’s shoes at a Bloomingdale’s.

A lot of that has to do with context.

I graduated from college in June of 2005 with about eight thousand dollars in credit card debt. Being in the red was unfamiliar territory for me. I grew up in an affluent suburb of Chicago in a family that had a lot of money, until one day — when we didn’t.

I went to a state school and got a liberal arts degree so my employment options were limited. My greatest accomplishment until then was graduating from ASU in four years (I am the twelfth person in ASU history to do so).

I also needed my own apartment. My mom’s place wasn’t set up for another person and my dad lived in a two-bedroom apartment with my younger brother. In the summer of 2005, selling shoes was the best opportunity I had to pay down my debt and get my own place.

The gig I ended up getting at Bloomies paid ten percent commission (no base) and returns counted against you (this last point is important and I’ll explain why later). Shoes and jewelry were the only departments that paid commission; all others paid around ten bucks an hour. As funny as it sounds, the jobs in shoes were hard to get. My degree was probably what separated me from the other applicants.

I took the job and got an apartment in the city with one of my best friends from high school. I took two trains and a bus everyday to get to work, which was depressing. Especially when I thought about friends who had “real” jobs at real companies downtown. I would have killed for the ability to wear something to work besides a black suit and a name tag.

I’d come home from a long day of selling shoes, crack open a beer and gaze out of this gigantic bay window we had in the living room that pointed south down Sheffield Ave. In the foreground I’d see people milling around, going in and out of the bars or catching cabs, and in the distance I’d see the Chicago skyline. I would stare at the buildings that were literally larger than life, all incandescent against the darkness of Lake Michigan, and imagine different futures for myself — futures that didn’t involve selling shoes.

I look back at this period in my life with a little bit of nostalgia and a lot of pride. Here are some of things I learned back then, some of which took a while to set in, others I started espousing right away:

In business, you control your work ethic — and that’s about it.

When you sell on commission your pay is derived from only two variables: luck and how hard you work. You can get lucky and have a whale walk in during your shift looking to buy six pairs of expensive heels and boots, or you could get stuck all day doing returns and selling Spanx. But the amount of hustle you put in is completely up to you.

The quicker you went up and down the stairs in the stock room to fetch a batch of shoes, the more time you had on the floor to roll the dice on new customers. The more you learned about what they wanted, and the more options you showed them, the more you could sell them.

I approach everything in life now with the same mentality. Work as hard as humanly possible since it’s the only thing that’s completely in your control. Life will throw you curve balls and change ups, your job is to hit the easy ones.

Real salesmanship is about creating lasting value.

When I was selling shoes, returns would get deducted from my commission checks. So if I sold $10,000 worth of merchandise but had $700 in returns, I made $930 that week: (10,000 x 0.10) — (700.00 x 0.10). It was a smart system that meant you didn’t just have to sell the shoes, you had to make sure they fit. You had to make sure your customer loved them and that they wouldn’t catch a case of buyer’s remorse once they got home.

Every good sales person knows you make the real money on your return customers, on “the come back.” You have to sell with precision. If you want to create lasting value, your salesmanship has to stick.

Most of life is about selling.

I may have stopped selling shoes at a shopping mall, but I’ve never stopped selling and thinking about things within the context of a one-on-one sales dynamic. Many of life’s biggest opportunities and relationships begin as a conversation between a buyer and seller.

Often times, the upper hand (or edge if you’re into trading terms) is gained by being in control of who’s in control. It’s ironic, but the key to selling is making the buyer think that they’re the seller because the buyer is the one with all the control. The act of buying implies that you have options. Selling implies the opposite. Buyers can buy any number of things. Sellers try to sell the things that bring them profit. It’s all about role reversal.

A job interview is an opportunity for you to sell yourself to a company or for them to sell the company to you. The art of the job interview for the interviewee is to turn the tables on the interviewer. If you can ask the right questions and make them start selling you then you’ve got the job. If you blather on … and … on about all of your various positions trying to sell the person, you probably won’t get the job, or worse yet, the job probably isn’t worth taking if they offer it to you.

Dating can be about selling too. If taking someone out to dinner, sitting across a table from them, and pitching them on your life story isn’t a sales meeting, I don’t know what is. And just like the job interview, everything from what you wear to how you shake the person’s hand is being scrutinized. You’re basically trying to sell the other person that you’re someone worth spending time with.

These are just a few of the reasons I believe that the art of selling provides most of the subtext to our everyday lives. Sometimes you’re the one being sold; other times you’re the one doing the selling; and every time there’s more to the transaction than what ends up on paper.

I wasn’t really selling shoes. I was selling something else.

When I walk into a Starbucks, coffee has little to do with why I am there. I’m there because I want a ten-minute break from work, some good conversation, and that euphoric buzz that I can get from a can of soda or any other caffeinated beverage.

Starbucks is a business that understands what they’re selling — and it’s not coffee. They brand their stores as a “third place” (home, office, Starbucks) where people can go to do the mundane things that give them solace. That’s why you see people sitting there with their laptops. And that’s the real reason why so many people think they have the best coffee.

Every credible study on purchase behavior indicates that people make buying decisions based on emotion, not logic. They use logic and reason to back up the purchasing decisions they have already made.

When women would come into my shoe department they didn’t want shoes per se. They wanted something that would quell their anxiety about a date, or a party, or a job interview. They wanted something that would boost their confidence and make them feel better about themselves. Sadly, some just had nothing better to do, or worse, had a lot of money but nobody to share it with.