Og Mandino’s The Greatest Salesman in the World starts off fairly harmless—in that vague, Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist self-help kind of way—but by the end, I found it rather detestable.
The Greatest Salesman in the World isn’t actually about sales; it’s more of a ‘secrets of success’ book. It centers in on Hafid, a wealthy old man who’s looking to give away his prized possession of 10 scrolls of successful salesmanship to a rightful heir. Each of these 10 scrolls contains a principle like “Persist until you succeed” and yes, the short book winds up sharing each of these scrolls. It’s not quite as broad as allegory, but it’s still ambiguous enough that it’s an everyman’s guide to success. In many ways, you fill it in based on who you are—your challenges, your values, your goals—and that’s where I ran in to problems (so I’ll be ranting a wee bit long in this review).
While I don’t think The Greatest Salesman in the World is the type of book you can spoil, as I’ll give away certain parts in the upcoming paragraphs, consider this your warning. The book contains several blunt Christian undertones—so blunt, in fact, that I think you’d have to be dense to miss them. At first, I figured many readers would feel like they got a bait and switch, as the book isn’t exactly labeled as Jesus-tastic, but by the end I found it quite offensive. To be fair, Christian books live in a weird universe when it comes to criticism. As you can’t possibly cover every theological angle in a book, you’re unfortunately always open to criticism, but on the flip side, by that same measure, you always have a shield against that criticism, too. Given that I’m a Jesus lovin’ fella and this is my review, this is the area where things get awkward:
Late in the read, the Apostle Paul—yeah, Paul from the New Testament—shows up and gets these 10 secrets of success scrolls from Hafid. Now I didn’t pounce on the chapter about kinda sorta praying to an ambiguous God doing something somewhere—as I figured it was part of this catch-all, sell a million copies by being vague routine—but I’ll rip on this specific point: The inference is that the Apostle Paul ‘successfully’ spread the good news of Jesus because he was a great salesman who believed in himself, see? Not because God worked through him, but because Paul learned these 10 fancypants scrolls. Given that the Bible teaches that God wants people to get to know Him—and that, thankfully, isn’t based on any man’s work, good or shoddy—you can see how this effort message is a problem. But this is what irks me: The Greatest Salesman in the World is the type of nebulous philosophy book coated by ‘God wants you to be successful’ Christianity that I can see it being dreadfully popular in the western church. Sure, God cares about your desires and dreams and who He made you to be. Additionally, He not only likes hard work, He usually honors it (as covered by books in the Bible like Proverbs), but there’s more to the equation than just you. If you haven’t noticed, the world is a vast, messed up place full of questions, so if you make your faith all about how you can be really, really good at something, you’re likely missing what Jesus is all about.
Hebrews 11 lists a bunch of faithful people in the Bible. It says a peculiar thing about them (listing verse 13 here, but verses 39-40 also cover it): “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth.” The point is, there was more than their desires, and even with things God promised them, they didn’t get them before they died. So if God didn’t give the things He promised to the people apparently on the right track in this life, why would He somehow guarantee the things that aren’t promised, like a successful business or a happy-go-lucky existence? Again, God likes hard work, a successful business can be a blessing, and yeah, The Greatest Salesman in the World advocates giving to the poor, but all of this is rather short sighted. Maybe if the book were less blunt in its Christian overtones I’d pass it off as that ‘vague sells’ point I’ve been harping on, but it’s specific enough on this aspect to be dangerous. For most people, they won’t view it that way, but when it comes to me and my review, I’m chucking Og Madnino’s philosophy far away. One star and boot across the room.