I see your point... I really liked this story though. What I'm doing right now is building the pre and post-sales engineering/support groups for a hardware-based startup. We're bringing a new and interesting product to market, and several of us are out in the streets everyday saying "Hey! Want to buy a hot dog?". Tradeshows, marketing events, pretty much all the standard stuff. And, like the hot dog man, we're doing very very well with it so far.

Every day, though, I must hear about how the industry we're in and the world in general is cutting back spending, slowing down their purchases and so on. It would be very easy to listen to this news, and scale back our efforts and go off to cower somewhere. If we did this, we'd surely sell much less hotdogs than we do now.

A big part of my job is keeping folks in the sales team motivated, focused and ready to spot hot-dog selling opportunities. This story was deeply parallel to things encountered at our startup every week. It was a bit inspiring to me, and I thought it might also be a bit inspiring to people who are in the same position.