Aim For Big
The subtle power of a motivational poster in a retail restroom.
The year is 2000. I'm in college and I work at a sporting goods store. It's a standard retail job - helping customers, stocking the shelves, working the register, and so on - but this company is a bit unique in that it heavily emphasizes excellence in customer service. If you've ever been in a mall Foot Locker (or almost any brick & mortar retail store), you may notice the absence of helpful, knowledgeable staff. People who work there, sure, but most of them are just waiting for you to leave so they can go back to gossiping or talking shit about their manager while they refold the shirts you so rudely touched.
My store is not like this. City Sports in Center City Philadelphia in the early 2000s is the place you go when you need the right thing but you don't know what that thing is. But we know. "I need a new pair of running shoes" is our favorite phrase because it means we can show off our hard-won knowledge about the intricacies of the shoes and how to fit the perfect model. By contrast, "You got them new Jordans?" makes us sad and we take our sadness out on the customers when we tell them to try the Foot Locker on Chestnut Street.
But this story is not about comparing the inventory of a high-brow establishment such as ours to that of the workaday Foot Lockers of the world. Rather, it's to examine the perspective required to maintain that high-brow culture.
The shoe wall is at the back of the store. Though placed deep within, beyond the towering edifice of backpacks, the maze of high-end yoga pants, the smattering of team sports equipment, and the tennis racquet restringing apparatus, the shoe wall is City Sports' defining feature. But being in the city, space is at a premium. So through a door at the left side of the wall lies a long, diamond-plated steel staircase down to the basement where the racks of shoe boxes resemble the warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark where "Top...Men..." were looking into the Ark of the Covenant.
Also down there amongst the racks is the manager's office, break room, coat room, two bathrooms, and the punch clock[1]. Every retail store backroom of this era has much the same setup. Except we have something special. A small sign on the wall inside each bathroom. It's hardly fair to call them signs since they're just two sheets of printer paper with three lines of text in 48-point Arial font. But those three lines are what set us apart, and they read as follows:
Big people talk about ideas.
Average people talk about things.
Small people talk about other people.
The year was 2000 and I was 19. And when I say I was 19, what I mean is I was oblivious. I probably looked at that sign for months before I internalized its meaning. When I did, though, it slapped me awake. It made me realize I hadn't spent even a moment considering my topics of conversation were a reflection of my inner compass. So I flushed the toilet, washed my hands, clocked in, and never stopped thinking about it.
First, I pondered what it meant about the store manager who posted those signs. I realized the culture of excellence the store carried on its back wasn't an accident. It was the result of the high standards set and enforced by management. As a lazy teenager, I did not care for this. But I didn't want to bear the humiliation of getting shitcanned for my laziness, so I allowed myself, kicking and screaming, to hop on board with the program. Posting those signs in the bathrooms was a stroke of genius. This was the pre-smartphone era. There was nothing else to look at in there. So I kept reading it. And I kept thinking about it.
It forced me to look at how I thought about other people. Because how we think about people is how we talk about them when they're not around. Inherently we know it's wrong to speak ill of other people, but knowing what's wrong is rarely enough to keep us from doing it. But something about the juxtaposition of big people vs. small people crystalized the wrongness in a way that made me want to examine my culpability more closely. I didn't want a permanent seat at the small people's table.
Some of our gossip is ceremonial. When people ask how my loved ones are doing, I don't say, "I make it a point not to talk about other people" because that would signal to the interested party that I'm the kind of person who's never seen the opposite sex naked. Instead, I give them an update - punching up the boring bits and tamping down the humiliations so they don't regret asking - and call it done. Other gossip is recreational. These are usually conversations between friends about mutual friends who aren't there to defend themselves from ridicule. These are the brutal truths that comedians often dole out to each other as a mark of affinity, explained thusly: "If we didn't like you, we wouldn't be talking about you at all".
But the dominant reason why we choose to talk about other people is it's easier. For one thing, we don't have to know the faintest thing about the person we're talking about. All we need is their name and a vague impression of their personality and our imaginations can fill in the blanks to portray their lives and decisions in whatever way suits the conversation. Our social nature as humans makes this effortless, and it's usually the first place we think to go. For things and ideas, we need to know stuff. Or at least be curious about the possibility of knowing stuff.
More than two decades removed from my time at City Sports, I've come to believe our little basement bathroom sign was an aspirational message and not a strict dogma. It's unrealistic to make a mission of avoiding talking about people entirely. Instead, the gift those signs bestowed on us was the motivation to aim higher. Elevating our aim toward crowding out the petty gossip with actual interesting ideas was the real mission and the real message of that humble piece of printer paper. It gave every employee a jolt of reflection as we climbed the stairs to start our shift, and a lifetime of perspective to take with us into the rest of our lives.
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