Michael Scott's Best Sales Secret That You May Want To Use Too

Summary:

• The Office was a hit NBC sitcom that aired from 2005 to 2013.
• One of the leading characters, Michael Scott, portrayed by Steve Carell, was purposefully portrayed as an incompetent manager.
• However, the viewers cracked the secret of his successful career.

There is no other show like The Office. While other sitcoms struggle to relate to many parts of the audience, limiting themselves to family setups or very specific workplaces, The Office pushes the boundaries and shows the most generic company you can imagine. The more generic the setup, the easier it is to imagine yourself as part of a chain.

While not many people would want to end up working at a place like Dunder Mifflin, some of us simply don't have many choices. The absurdity of what goes on behind the closed doors of many businesses like this one, put on the screen for everyone to enjoy, is exactly what makes the series unique. It helps you look at the chaos of your own life from a different perspective.

But even behind the worst of The Office's characters, there is always a deeper backstory. Steve Carell's Michael Scott, seemingly completely insufferable and incompetent, is one of the best examples of this.

How Did Michael Scott Become a Regional Manager?

While it's not surprising to see someone struggling to manage a position, it's not always easy to understand how they got there in the first place. Such is the case with Michael Scott. And he provides a perfectly adequate answer himself when he tells Ryan about his motivations for becoming a salesperson in the first place.

All he wanted his whole life was to make friends. Throughout the show, we see how this seemingly innocent desire turns out to be disastrous in the office environment because of the lack of hierarchy and personal boundaries. At the beginning of his career, however, this was the key element of his performance.

If you want someone to like you, you do everything in your power to find out more about them, and you hold onto those details and use them to your advantage. This is how Michael was able to get close to even the biggest clients.

“Michael remembers everything about his employee's personal lives, and his client's personal lives. He reminds the Turtles Guy that his daughter is allergic. <...> He's a dipsh*t when it comes to facts and trivia and logic, but he remembers everything about everyone,” Redditor Abe_Bettik said.

Whether he is like this out of genuine concern for the people around him or out of a childhood desire to make friends is debatable. Either way, it worked well for him and made everyone appreciate his salesmanship, even if his management skills weren't half as good.

If you want to watch The Office again, you can stream the show on Peacock TV.

Source: Reddit