# The Greatest Salesman in the World: Why I Give It 3 Out of 5 Stars

> Source: [https://icharles.com/articles/the-greatest-salesman-in-the-world-why-i-give-it-3-out-of-5-stars](https://icharles.com/articles/the-greatest-salesman-in-the-world-why-i-give-it-3-out-of-5-stars) (canonical)
> Author: Chuck — iCharles, https://icharles.com
> Published: 2014-11-13 · Updated: 2026-07-07

## Why I even picked this up

Sales gets treated like a dirty word. People hear "salesperson" and picture a used-car lot. That's backwards. You sell yourself in a job interview. You sell yourself on a first date. You sell your kid on eating vegetables. You sell your idea to your boss. If you're bad at selling, you cap your ceiling in basically every part of life, and that's why I grabbed The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino. It's got great reviews on Amazon and shows up on every "best sales books" list, so I figured it was worth the seven bucks.

## It's fiction, and I don't do fiction

First thing to know: this isn't a business book. It's a story, set in Roman times, about a young man trying to sell a robe and failing at it. Someone hands him a stack of scrolls and tells him that if he masters what's in each one, he'll succeed. That's the whole structure. Each scroll is a principle wrapped in a couple pages of story.

I'm not a fiction guy. I don't watch movies, and I haven't owned a TV in three years. The one exception is when I've already read the book, like American Sniper. This one doesn't really earn that exception. The story here is just scaffolding to hang the lessons on, not something worth reading for its own sake.

## Skip the first 50 pages

Straight talk: the first 50 pages are boring. Nothing happens until the scrolls actually kick in. If you pick this up, skip ahead to around page 58 and start there. You're not missing plot. You're missing setup.

## The scrolls that actually landed

Once the scrolls start, each one is built around a single line you're supposed to repeat and internalize:

- "I will greet this day with love in my heart"
- "I will persist until I succeed"
- "I am nature's greatest miracle"

Each gets its own short chapter, maybe two pages. The persistence one is the piece that actually stuck with me. Most people quit right before the outcome would've shown up. That's the real takeaway I pulled out of this book: consistency compounds, and most people don't stay in the game long enough to see it pay off.

## My verdict: 3 out of 5

I'm giving this 3 out of 5 stars. It's a decent overview, but I don't think it's worth the price, even at seven dollars. Mandino was clearly a great speaker and writer in his day. He actually tells his own story, not a Roman-times parable, in a different book of his called A Better Way to Live. I'd point you to that one before this one.

If you want to get genuinely better at selling, skip the parable and go straight to Tony Robbins' Mastering Influence program. It's the most in-depth material I've gone through on the subject. I've also got Brian Tracy's Advanced Selling Techniques sitting on my shelf. I haven't read it yet, but at around 300 pages, it's hard to imagine it not delivering more than this did.

## Who should read it

If you want a quick, feel-good primer on persistence and self-talk, and you don't mind a Roman-times parable wrapped around the lessons, this'll do the job in an afternoon. If you're already serious about sales and want tactical, in-depth material, skip straight to Mastering Influence or Advanced Selling Techniques instead.