The literature files this type under risk-taker, which is a compliment wearing a warning’s coat. I have stood beside one for thirty-two years holding the checkbook, and what I want to talk about is range.
Lot 118 was a 7130 with a bad hour meter and my partner had his hand up before the ring man got to it.
I was on the rail with the floor plan sheet, which is where I have stood since 1994, and I got up and went over to him, and I have gone over to him about four hundred times.
“Jarrell. The meter’s been out.”
“I know it.”
“It could have eleven thousand on it.”
“It’s got about ninety-two hundred,” he said, and he did not look at me. “Roof liner’s original. Whoever run it kept it inside.”
It brought forty-one five, we put a thousand in it, and it went to a fellow in Coffee County that August for sixty-three. Now, fairness first, because a man who cannot be fair here has no business setting any of it down. I have watched him do that for three decades and I have never one time been able to see what he sees.
My sentence about Jarrell Kicklighter, in service since about 1997, delivered at the bank, at church, and once, which I regret, in a shop bay in October of 2015 with eleven people standing in it, runs three words: he is reckless.
I would have told you I could support it. Twenty-six major transactions in thirty-two years done on a handshake, and I mean a handshake, standing up, no paper. He bought the yard we are sitting on in 1994 without walking the back half of it. He drives through weather that puts other people in ditches. In 2012 he ran that yard up to something over four million dollars in inventory in eleven months, and I have told the story of 2012 in this county for eleven years, and I told it well, and some of it has to come back.
I am sixty-three. He is sixty-six. There is a valuation on the table and a meeting on the fourteenth of October at which two men decide who leaves with what, and the only continuous record of thirty-two years of this business is twenty-six sheets of yellow legal pad in a fireproof box I bought in 1996 at an office supply in Albany.
I would want somebody in my position to understand what that box is. It is not sentiment. Every one of those pages exists because a thing got agreed to in a yard with nobody present but two men and a dog, and because I could not sleep in a house where that was the whole of it. My wife has asked me twice what would happen if the box burned. Nothing would happen. That is not the point and never was.
The four letters got hung on a wall in front of us in 2012 and he made a meal out of them.
We had taken a dealer agreement on a line of implements and the manufacturer required both principals at a two-day thing in Macon. Second morning they gave everybody a hundred-some questions on a tablet and then put everybody’s four letters up on butcher paper on the wall, and a woman from Chicago walked us through what they meant, and when she got to Jarrell’s he stood up.
He did about four minutes on it. He said if that was true then the boy who sold him a bush hog in 1988 owed him money. He said the paper had a spelling error in it. He had two hundred and some dealer principals from four states on the floor and the woman from Chicago laughing so hard she had to sit down on the edge of the table.
I put my handout in a drawer at the office and I did not read past the first page of it for fourteen years. My reason was not that I took it for foolishness. My reason was that I was already carrying a three-word sentence about my partner that had been doing good work for me since 1997.
ESTP Traits: Eighty Feet
The morning of the eleventh of January, 2008, there was fog on the four-lane south of town of the kind you get here two or three times a winter, where the field air comes off the flatwoods and lies down on the pavement.
We had both been at a sale in Valdosta. I got to where you could not see the hood ornament and I did what a sensible man does, which is I pulled off on the shoulder, put my flashers on, and sat there forty minutes.
Jarrell went through it at forty miles an hour and got home and ate supper.
I have told that story a hundred times at least. It is my best one. I have used it on bankers, on my wife, and once on his own daughter at a rehearsal dinner, and it lands every time, because everybody in a room like that has been on a road in fog and everybody knows what a sensible man does.
Now here is the other part of my case, and it is the part I still believe, so I will set it down flat. That man has never once written anything down. Twenty-six deals. Every one of them a handshake in a yard or a barn lot or a parking area at a sale, and every one of them, and I mean every one, done inside of about four minutes.
What I did was go home the same night and write out on a legal pad what I understood us to have agreed to, and in the morning I would put it in front of him with a pen, and he would read it in about six seconds and put JK on the bottom of it. Page one, March of 1994, three hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars for this yard and what was on it, eleven words, and beside his initials he drew a smiling face. He has drawn one on nine of the twenty-six.
Around here a year is not January to December, it is March to March. In March everybody borrows, and a yard like ours can sell anything with paint on it. By the middle of July the county goes quiet and you can hear a phone not ring. Then a crop makes or it does not, and if it makes, November is when men walk your lot slow with their hands in their pockets, and if it does not, they walk it slow anyway and buy nothing, and you learn to tell which walk you are looking at. That is what an equipment business actually is. Not machines. Somebody else’s rainfall.
ESTP Behavior: The Valuation Meeting
We had a woman out of Macon do the valuation, the second week of April, on account of October.
She was in that yard most of two days. She counted iron, she pulled the floor plan history back to 2004, she asked Wanda for the clerk’s books and got all of them, and on the second afternoon she asked me for anything documenting how major purchases were authorized, and I went and got the box.
She read all twenty-six pages at the front counter standing up. It took her about twenty minutes. She handed them back and said, “This is the best documentation I’ve seen in a family business and it wouldn’t survive one hour in a courtroom,” and I have not decided yet which half of that sentence I am supposed to keep.
Then we sat at the table in the front office, the three of us, with her laptop turned around, and she went year by year the way they do.
She got to 2012 and I got ready, because 2012 is my exhibit and I have shown it a great many times. And she said the buying run in 2012 was aggressive and was correctly timed against the market as it stood, and she moved on.
I said, “That’s what put us in the hole.”
And she said it flat, the way a person reads a serial number off a plate: “No sir, the buying didn’t. Holding it did. Y’all carried peak-market inventory through fourteen and fifteen on a floor plan. That’s the whole loss right there. If you’d cleared the yard in the fall of ’13 at whatever it brought, you’d have come out of that stretch with the second location.”
I said something to the effect that nobody could have known that in 2013.
She said, “Well,” and she turned the laptop back around and started closing things.
Jarrell was in the chair to my left the entire time. He had his hat on his knee. He never said anything at all, and he did not look at me and he did not look at her, and when she left he walked her out to her car and asked her about her drive.
I sat in that office by myself until about six.
Then I got up and went out to the yard, and there was nothing to do out there, and I stood by the fuel tank a while and came back in. His truck was gone. Wanda had left the sale bills on the counter squared up the way she does.
I got page nineteen out of the box that night at the house. September of 2013. It is four lines long and what it says is that the partners considered a full liquidation and elected to hold and to term out the floor plan at a fixed rate for thirty-six months. It is in my handwriting. Underneath it there are two sets of initials and one of them is his and there is no smiling face on that one.
ESTP Strengths and Weaknesses: Twenty-Six Pages
In September of 2013 my partner came into that office and said we ought to run the whole yard through Cord Batten’s October sale, no reserve, and take what it brought.
I remember the conversation and I have always remembered it as one more example of the thing I am describing. He had no analysis. He had nothing on paper. What he had was that he had been at three sales in five weeks and did not like what he was seeing, and when I asked him what specifically he did not like he said the fellows who had been bidding in the spring were standing in the back now.
I said that was not a reason to give away four million dollars of iron.
I said we would hold, and take the floor plan out to thirty-six months at a fixed rate, and move it orderly.
He said, “All right.”
That is the entirety of the argument we had. Two words. He got a Coke out of the machine and went to the shop.
Now, the strength, and I have never had one bit of trouble stating it, though I notice I have always stated it right before I state the other thing.
Nobody in south Georgia reads a machine like that man and nobody reads a room like him either. Ninety-two hundred hours off a dead meter and a roof liner. He can tell you which of two identical tractors was run by a man who was in a hurry. He knows, standing in a crowd, which bidder has quit — not quit bidding, quit, in himself, four lots before he stops raising his hand.
The weakness is no separate item at all. Same instrument, different distance. I did not understand that until this year and I have paid for the delay.
October of 2015. Friday morning. We let eleven people go in the shop bay, and I did the talking because I always do the talking, and about two thirds of the way through it, because Ledger Nesmith was looking at me and because I could not stand there and be the man who did this, I said, “Y’all know as well as I do how much iron got bought in 2012.”
Nobody said anything. Ledger looked at the floor.
That sentence has been in this county ever since. I have heard it come back to me twice at the Rotary and once from a banker in Ashburn who was not even there. Jarrell has never one time contradicted it, to me or to anybody, and for eleven years I took that for loyalty, and while you read the rest of this I would have you bear in mind that I found the silence comfortable.
ESTP vs ESFP: The Redding Dispersal
The Reddings farmed up above Chula for four generations and it came apart in 2015, and the dispersal was in the spring of 2016, and there were something over four hundred lots.
Cord Batten had the block. Cord is sixty-eight, he has been the other auctioneer in this region since I was a young man, and he has called the county fair’s livestock sale for twenty-two years and will not let them pay him for it, and if you ask him about that he will change the subject to your truck.
From the rail those two look like one animal. I have said so out loud. Each of them sees everything in a room and neither can tell you afterward by what means.
Between two and three o’clock that afternoon Jarrell bought eleven lots and every one of them was money.
He told me why on the way home and it took him about nine words. The two buyers out of Alabama had been going hard until dinner and then they went quiet, and it was not that they had what they came for. It was that one of them had stopped talking on his phone and the other one had started standing with his arms folded. Out of floor plan. He read that off two men’s bodies across a sale barn and he was right, and he moved on eleven lots inside an hour while I was still adding up the morning.
At about four they ran a 4440 that had been Fount Redding’s own tractor. Cord no-saled it at eleven thousand. He said the reserve wasn’t met, and there wasn’t any reserve on that sale, and everybody in that barn knew there wasn’t. It came back through at the end when the crowd was down to about sixty people and Fount’s boy got it for eight, and Cord’s commission ate the difference, and to this day if you ask him he will tell you the reserve was wrong.
Same instrument on both men. What it feeds is not the same account. Jarrell’s runs into a working picture of where the leverage is in this room today: who is out of money, what is mispriced, which lot the crowd has quit paying attention to. Cord’s runs into something about particular people that he has never once said out loud to anybody and that costs him money about four times a year.
And if you swapped them you would get neither thing. Put Cord in that crowd and those eleven lots go to Alabama, because Cord was not watching the Alabama boys, he was watching Fount Redding’s son standing at the back of that barn doing nothing. And put Jarrell on that block and the 4440 sells in four seconds to the highest hand in the barn. He would tell you he would have bought it and sold it to the boy at cost, and he might have, and it would not have been the same thing, because the whole of what Cord did was that nobody in that barn was allowed to see it happen, and Jarrell has never in his life done anything nobody could see.
ESTP Careers: A Man You Cannot Send to a Meeting
He has never had a job. He worked for a horse trader out of Ocilla at nineteen and he has not drawn a wage since 1982.
I have thought about what an ordinary company would do with him and the answer is that an ordinary company would put him in sales, give him a quota he would beat by forty percent, and then wonder why he would not come to the Monday meeting. He is not defiant about meetings. A meeting is about a week that has not happened yet, and a week that has not happened yet is not, for that man, a thing you can look at.
What he is worth is entirely in real time, and real time cannot be scheduled, invoiced, or handed to somebody else. Eleven seconds in a sale barn made this business more money in 2016 than my entire fixed-rate refinancing did in eight years, and there is no line on any statement anywhere that says so.
I tried once, in 2004, to put him on the road for the implement line — a territory, a call list, four counties. He lasted five weeks. He did not quit and nobody fired him. He simply kept ending up at whatever was happening instead of at whatever was scheduled, and in five weeks he wrote more business off the call list than the man before him wrote in a year, and every dollar of it came from a farm that was not on the list, on a day he was supposed to be somewhere else.
What a company decides to call that ability, and what three decades of the decision leaves in a retirement account, wants answering by whoever writes the compensation plan. I have only ever written checks against one. And an identical ability, carried into the same room by two different people, does not come back out of that room appraised the same.
What Is the ESTP Personality Type: Range and Resolution
I read the handout in April, the one from Macon, fourteen years after I put it in the drawer. Then I read a good deal more than the handout. On the national board it is about four in a hundred, nearly two men to a woman.
E — a room does not fill him up. A room is where the whole instrument is pointed, continuously, at every object in it.
S — and what it takes in is the actual thing. Not what the tractor represents. The roof liner. The man’s arms folded. What is there, at a level of detail that I have to be told about afterward and still cannot see when I go look.
T — what settles a thing for him is whether it works, checked against a model in his head that he has built himself and will not hand you.
P — nothing is decided in advance, because deciding in advance means deciding on worse information than he will have in the room.
Below the letters sits a ranking of four working parts by how much of a man was fitted out for each. On this one the live present carries nearly the whole rating, the private model is what it feeds, and whatever looks out past the next few months was allotted almost nothing.
Which is the whole thing, and it took a woman from Macon with a laptop to get it into me. It is not that he cannot see risk. He sees more risk than I do, faster, and more accurately, out to about the edge of the yard. Past that there is nothing. Not blurred — nothing. And because what he can see is so vivid, he does not experience the far side as missing.
Which brings me back to the eleventh of January, 2008, and I have to give that one up, because I have had it backwards for eighteen years.
There were nine vehicles piled up on that four-lane that morning, and every one of them was stopped or nearly stopped, and two of them were on the shoulder with their flashers going, which is where I was, four miles ahead. In fog like that the men who get hurt are the ones who stop. You keep moving at a speed you can stop inside of, and you keep the man behind you from arriving on top of you, and you do not sit still on a shoulder in the dark and hope. Jarrell knew that at forty and I did not know it at zero, and I have been telling my version at Rotary since 2008.
The count runs about four in a hundred, men outnumbering women by something close to two to one. And on the rest of the percentages a fellow will run into, I will say about them what I say about any appraisal: find out who ordered it and who put themselves forward for it. Those tables got assembled out of folks who hunted the questionnaire down themselves, or who sat two days of employer-paid instruction, and in my business that is a seller’s appraisal, and nobody lends against one.
What the whole business is worth, one paragraph. Down underneath it a real thing is being measured, and it holds: run the four numbers on a man in January, run them again in February, and they come back near where they were, which is better than any hour meter that has been dropped. The sixteen-way sort those numbers get poured into repeats maybe two times in three, and around here that is a disclosed defect. What nobody has ever established is the move after that, where four numbers get turned into sixteen named sorts of people. Somebody decided on those sixteen. That is a book value. It is not a hammer price, and around here we do not confuse the two.
And a write-up like this one describes a class of machine. You are one particular machine carrying your own hours. Wherever the class description quits fitting is the only line on this page written about your machine, and I would read that line twice.
There is a 1974 tractor at the back of this yard that came with the place in 1994 and has never been for sale. About once a month he walks back there and runs it ten minutes. I have asked him three times in thirty-two years. He says it runs.
ESTP Under Stress: What He Said About 2031
The Thursday after that valuation meeting he came into the office at about seven at night, which he does not do, and sat down in the chair across from me and started talking about 2031.
He had it all worked out and it was insane. In 2031 the auction business is gone entirely, everything is online out of Texas, there is no yard, and there are two of us at that point in our seventies with a piece of dirt on the highway and a tax bill. He had a whole picture of it. He had how it would go month by month. He said the words there won’t be a place for a man to walk a machine, which is a sentence I have thought about every day since.
And I sat there with no idea what a person does with that, because in thirty-two years I have never once heard that man talk about a year that had not happened yet.
What I understand now: when a man’s whole instrument is close range, and something gets in under it and hurts him, the far distance does not come to him as a question. It comes as a finished picture, always the worst available one, and you cannot argue him off it, because no reasoning got him there. He was handed it.
He was fine by Monday. He came in and sold a backhoe to a fellow from Ocilla and never referred to Thursday night again, and if I had not been sitting in this chair when he said it I would not believe anybody who told me it happened. Which is not the same as it not having happened.
And I will put this in plainly, because I sat across from him and changed the subject to a transmission. Hard stretches talk like that. If the thing does not let go — a man still telling you 2031 in month four, sleep gone, the telling come unhooked from whatever set it off — then it has gone past what a business partner is for and past what any page like this one can reach. That is a doctor. That is a licensed counselor. I have gotten a great deal wrong in this account and I do not intend to get that part wrong on top of it.
ESTP Cognitive Functions: Where the Eleven Seconds Go
First working part: the live present, and it takes very nearly the whole of him. The framework names them extraverted sensing, introverted thinking, extraverted feeling, and introverted intuition, first through fourth, and the first one you can watch from the parking lot.
Total, and at a resolution I do not have and cannot acquire. Ninety-two hundred hours. Two men’s arms. It is not intuition and it is not luck, and I have called it both for thirty years, mostly the second one, mostly in public.
Second: the model. Private, unshown, and it is where the eleven seconds actually go. He is not gambling. He is running what he sees against a picture of how a thing works that he built himself out of forty years of iron and men, and he will not show it to you, and I am not certain he could.
The third part is the room, and he works it, and he works it warmly, and he is good at it. Two hundred dealer principals in Macon. Every man in this county trusts a fellow who has never signed anything. Accident does not cover that and charm does not either. He does it on purpose, with the same instrument, and it is the reason twenty-six handshakes have never once gone bad on us.
And the fourth is the far side of the fog, and there is nothing out there. Not weakness — nothing. Which is why September of 2013 arrived in him as those fellows are standing in the back now and not as a forecast, and why he could not defend it against a man with a rate sheet, and why he said all right and went and got a Coke.
I have had to face the shape of that. What he brought me in September of 2013 was the correct answer with no argument attached, because there was no argument in him to attach, and what I brought was eleven pages of argument attached to the wrong answer. And this business runs on paper, and paper is mine, and the paper won.
Nine days after that valuation meeting I called the woman in Macon at her office. I asked her whether the written report could characterize 2013 through 2016 as market conditions.
She said she could do that. I said I appreciated it.
His marriage ended in 2001 and I have always laid that at this business. Dinah told me at a funeral in 2019 that it was never the business, and that in eighteen years I had not once put the question to her.
I still think it was the business.
ESTP Relationships and Compatibility: Standing Next to It
What it is to be next to one of these for thirty-two years: you are never lied to, you are never managed, and you are never, ever consulted about anything that is happening right now, because right now is over before you have finished forming your objection.
And there is no fight. That is the part I would want somebody standing where I stand to understand, because for three decades I read the absence of fights as agreement. He does not argue. An argument concerns something that has already happened, and whatever has already happened is not in the room with him. So what you get is all right, and a Coke out of the machine, and twelve years of believing you won something.
The other side of it is that nothing is ever held against you either, and I have had to sit with what that actually means. In 2015 I said a sentence in a shop bay that took a man’s name and put it on eleven layoffs. He has never mentioned it. Not once, not sideways, not at a Christmas. For years I called that forgiveness and told myself I had a generous partner.
I do not think it is forgiveness. I think a finished thing is not a present thing, and what is not present cannot be worked on, and there is no instrument in that man for going back and getting something. Which leaves me holding a debt that the only other party to it does not experience as outstanding, and a debt like that cannot be paid and cannot be discharged.
Living inside it across a supper table nightly, rather than across a desk with a floor plan sheet lying between, is testimony belonging to whoever has sat in that other chair. And a family and a business do not take the same thing off a man in the same way.
He has been at my house every Christmas since my mother died in 1999. He has never brought anything and he has never been late and he has never once asked me how I was doing, and if my truck would not start on Christmas morning he would have it running before the coffee was made.
ESTP Personal Growth: The Twenty-Seventh Page
The growth material for this one comes down to slowing down and thinking ahead, and I would enjoy meeting whichever man read that page and then slowed down.
The growth I can actually testify to is one item and it is not his, and I want to be honest that this is the discovery that has cost me the most.
In September of 2013 that man did the one thing his equipment does not do. He took what he saw at three sales in five weeks — men standing in the back — and he carried it forward eighteen months and he came into an office and said so out loud to somebody who had the power to act on it. That was the far side of the fog, and he got out there once, and it was correct, and it would have saved this business, and it cost him nine words and a Coke.
He got there. And the man he brought it to said hold.
The fourteenth of October is a Tuesday. I have a number from Macon and he has the same number, and I have told myself since April that the number will settle it. A number will not settle it. There is no line on that appraisal for thirty-two years of a man being right in eleven seconds and a man being wrong slowly, and there is no line for a sentence said in a shop bay in 2015 that eleven people took home with them, and I have not said one word to him about any of it since the second week of April.
Saturday we had our own sale, the regular one, and about halfway down the list they ran a set of four rims off a truck nobody could identify, no tires, rusted, a junk lot that goes in every sale so the ring men have something to do.
Jarrell was on the block. He looked out at the rail where I was standing with the floor plan sheet, which is where I have stood since 1994, and he did not say anything at all, and he waited about two seconds longer on that lot than a man waits.
I put my hand up.
He took it, and he ran it up on me twice against nobody, which is a thing he has done to men in that ring for forty years and has never once done to me, and I let him, and Wanda wrote my number down in the clerk’s book.
Sold. Four hundred and fifty dollars.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.