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I’m sick of hearing this phrase “competitive” thrown around when someone is trying to sell me their goods or services. So many sales pitches come down to the ambiguous description of a product being”competitive”. But what does this actually mean? Competitive compared to what? And who decided that the overall price of a specific product was competitive in the first place? What about the current gas prices? Are those competitive too? I thought the word competitive was derived from the word “competition”, which doesn’t necessarily guarantee fairness at all. Obviously the entity making the most profit decides on what is “competitive” and what is not.

This does not only stop on the commerce level. I see this same lingo being used on many job postings online as well. Instead of being transparent about the salary range a company is willing to pay for a position, the HR department throws out a description reading, “Competitive Salary”, as if this means anything at all.

Hopefully they will do us a favor and provide comparisons when trying to entice us with this line. That way, we might have an idea of what competitive scale is being described. Not everyone is as naive as the sales force thinks they are, and most of us are savvy enough to see through semantics like this. It is only a matter of time that these knuckleheads start backing up their big talk with some real numbers.

I have personally found that when businesses are more forthcoming with their services or the reasons for their prices, I’m much more likely to trust them and become a frequent customer.

This is a flashback of those used-car salesmen back in the 90’s who used to quickly talk over the customer when they pointed out noticeable defaults in the vehicle. “Oh don’t worry about it…because it is competitive pricing“.

I’m guilty of this one big time. I always find myself telling other people what I do and what I am working on, as if it is the utmost importance or relevant data. To be honest, I’m sick of everyone telling me what they do and as equally sick of telling people what I “do”. Does anyone else notice that this topic gets injected into the vast majority of our conversations in life. It is like clockwork when you meet someone, they are going to lay on you the big line “so what do you do”? And I never questioned this nasty habit until now and I must ask myself: WHY DO I HAVE TO DO ANYTHING for you to talk to me? Or for the conversation to be interesting. I mean, I understand you want to get to know me better, but honestly I do not think you can summarize the majority of people by hearing a quick blurb of what they “do”. Does anyone realize that usually we cut out all the most embarrassing and lame parts of our lives when meeting people for the first time, and we end up making our lives seem like some action film, instead of telling people how our lives actually are. (not so ground breaking or amazing)

It is good to learn more about people, but can we find some creative ways to network? I mean can you ask someone what they dreamt of the night before or something off the wall like that. Why not? Is that too personal of a question?

Imay have a cynical idea on professions, routine, and accepted trends, but I do know that there is a big difference between what people say that they do vs. what they ACTUALLY do. For that matter, there is even a bigger difference between those things and what they really want to do. The truth is that many of us work particular jobs because they where available and worked out, not because we really want to do those things for the next 80 years.

I propose that instead of asking people what they do, we ask each other what they WANT to be doing. Who knows, it might make for a more interesting conversation.