SEEKING REPRESENTATION
The Rainmaker’s Laboratory
AMY LEAVITT
ABOUT THE BOOK
One summer, in need of money, a quiet, unworldly, philosophically minded young woman answered a blind ad that promised some. It was, to her dismay, for a sales job, and her work soon became a dual quest: How can I put food on the table while taking seriously the Socratic question of how to live a good life? Recoiling from sales industry dogma and reading widely in literature, philosophy, and science, she managed, over four decades, to create a humanistic, holistic, and collaborative enterprise—all feminist virtues—that smashed most sales records of her time.
Defying easy pigeonholing, The Rainmaker’s Laboratory is neither a success story nor a linear, prescriptive ‘how-to’ narrative, but a curated selection and striking montage of a seeker’s lab notes that capture the unruliness of self-discovery—jottings, maxims, reckonings, paradoxes, self-admonishments, theatrical scenes of everyday happenings—in lively conversation with such unexpected companions as William Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Donald Winnicott, Lewis Hyde and Iain McGilchrist. Filled with cascading questions and transdisciplinary insights, The Rainmaker’s Laboratory invites the reader into the laboratory as Leavitt thinks through daily conundrums and conducts eclectic experiments on fear and failure, ambivalence and aporia, value and exponential growth, risk, beauty, rhythm, politeness, the blues, and more, always returning to the primacy of words and language.
Ultimately, The Rainmaker’s Laboratory is a deep manifesto for love, insisting that professional and commercial relationships resist commodification and remain fully human, flourishing autonomously. Providing an antidote to the narrow clamor of algorithms and AI, it invites readers to consider their own daily predicaments and presence amid a world of selling and being sold. Both rainmakers and any inquisitive reader will find unforeseeable turns of mind; innovative, useful practices; and haunting, simple wisdom at the crossroads of craft and commerce, poetry and money, expertise and imagination.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
EXTRACTS
The Rainmaker's Laboratory is where I learn to manufacture, in sustainable quantities, the word yes.
Birth of The Rainmaker's Laboratory
Fear is tangible, like a block of wood, and I am a woodcarver.
Fear Étude
I can sell when I feel afraid, but not when I feel ambivalent, which is why ambivalence matters.
Ambivalence Étude
I believe, as the saints say, that it is not that one must know someone to love them, but that one must love them to know them — that truth flows from love.
Truth Étude
Meetings make cowards of us all.
Alchemical Meetings
An objection is a revelation. We reveal ourselves when we speak. What we object to is who we are.
Objections
To say that beauty moves us is to say that it initiates changes in behavior — we are moved to move differently through the world.
Beauty Étude
I have my own quiet, runic way of selling. I don't function dictatorially. I try to provoke the client to find the answer I want him to find. He's got to make it his own.
The Expert Trap Étude
When we sell, we violate Kant's injunction that we should never treat a living being as a means rather than an end. When we sell, the best we can do is both.
Dual Quest
Voices atrophy from lack of use. Salespeople seldom develop cobwebs on their voices; we use them as a cook uses her pepper mill.
Conversations Étude
My role is not to tell someone what to do, but to make them conscious of what they are doing.
Web of Coherence Étude
My colleagues and I share our sales scripts as if they were bootlegged recordings of our favorite musician.
Competition and Cooperation Étude
Numbers aren't substitutes for arguments.
Numbers Étude
I am too shy to market, but not too proud to beg.
Personal Introductions Étude
As visual information begins as reflected light, so words in conversation are refracted by voice.
Using Language Étude
Festina lente — hasten slowly: This is the tempo of my sales.
Rhythm Étude
Why wouldn't you use poetic language in service of a sale? It is designed to awaken ears, hint at something that matters, tap into deep human rhythms.
Poetic Voice Étude
To hedge is to gauge, to reckon. Its sound is hmm…
Risk and Leverage Étude
For Winnicott, the psyche is not inside us but between us. There is no Other. We are inextricable; there is only Relationship.
Relationship Étude
To fail differently is to make new mistakes. In truth, it is not easy to make new mistakes — we are so comfortable with our old friends. Try it: Make a new mistake!
Failure Étude
ABOUT AMY LEAVITT
Amy Leavitt has five decades of experience in corporate boardrooms and conference rooms, theater rehearsal rooms and classrooms. She has been admitted to two Halls of Fame in Fortune 250 companies, delivered multiple keynotes, and was named by Financial Planning Magazine one of the ‘top ten’ financial advisors in the US, considered “an icon to her peers… a legend.” In the second half of her sales career, she took up the study of voice, teaching the craftwork that underpins a finely tuned instrument capable of conveying the complexities of inner life, working with a wide range of people from bullied children to Shakespearean actors. Her 2019 article published in Voice and Speech Review is the journal’s second most viewed article of all time. To her astonishment, she has found that her work with the human voice places her in the same laboratory of puzzlement, conducting the same investigations, as her writing and rainmaking work — affirming Oliver and Young’s words: ‘Tain’t What You Do (It’s the Way That You Do It).
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