Arthur Sheldon: A City and Lake Named After a Sales Philosophy

Yes. This happened: Imagine developing a sales philosophy you love.

Then, you buy 800 acres of land, incorporate it as its own city, and name the city after the philosophy.

Then, you dam a lake on the property to create essentially a second lake and name that second lake after your sales philosophy, too.

In 1908, the G.O.A.T. of sales philosophers Arthur Sheldon did just that.

The name of that sales philosophy? AREA. I believe it to be one of the great, forgotten philosophies around professional and personal development.

“Your AREA is what you are.” To Sheldon, just like the measure of the extent of land is its “area”, all four of these make up a person’s AREA.

Sheldon believed that we should focus our personal and professional development on four categories—not just the two we tend to do in most organizations.

AREA:
A = Ability: Developing your intellect or “knowing power”
R = Reliability: Developing sensibilities, ethics, or “feeling power”
E = Endurance: Developing sustained effort, or “will power”
A = Action: Developing the power to act, or “volitional power”

The two we tend to focus on most today? Ability (knowledge and approach) + Action (doing)

Where do we spend very little of our focus?
R = Reliability: understanding how to be better human beings with empathy, transparency, and maximizing our ethical behavior.
E = Endurance: learning how to optimize our physical and mental strengths, energy, and capacity for best effort.

1910 photo from LMHS of the Sheldon Press building on the Area, Illinois campus.

And yes – in 1908, Sheldon bought around 800 acres of land just north of Chicago (which is now the campus of St. Mary’s on the Lake in Mundelein, Illinois). He planned to build a “commercial” (sales) university on it. He incorporated it as its own city. It had its own post office – from which he ran his sales training organization and sent out 10s of thousands of sales correspondence courses.

He named the city Area, Illinois.

He dammed the existing lake, creating a second lake, and named it Lake Eara (just Area’s letters in a different order).

Anna Sheldon, Arthur’s wife and co-developer of AREA.

In a 1911 edition of Business Philosopher Magazine, Arthur Sheldon’s wife Anna wrote about AREA in relation to the education of their own children. She conducted a children’s club, meeting every Saturday afternoon during the summer at Sheldonhurst, for the study and practice of the AREA philosophy. The membership was “always full, and the meetings largely attended and alive with interest.”

She wrote, “every normal mother hopes and dreams that her child will one day become a great man or woman – in one way or another a true success. The is the natural desire of every normal parent.”

One of her quotes from the article that I really loved: “Obstacles are great character developers. Frequent victorious combat with them produces speakers of words and doers of deeds. So it is that a seeming disadvantage, if closely inspected, may turn into a real advantage. Remove not the obstacles. Rather reveal their merit to your child.”

I think it’s a brilliant way to think beyond. Develop all four instead of just the two – yourself, your teams, and even your children: The intellect, the emotive, the physical, and the volitional.

Next, maybe I should announce the incorporation of the town of Transparency, with rides on Lake Pantreyarcs.

I’m a sales keynote speaker who also teaches revenue organizations how to leverage transparency and decision science to maximize their revenue capacity. It’s what I do…teach sellers, their leaders, well…entire revenue organizations how we as human beings make decisions, then how to use that knowledge for good (not evil) in their messaging (informal and formal), negotiations, and revenue leadership. I wrote a book Book Authority listed as the 6th best sales book of all time (𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘺 𝘚𝘢𝘭𝘦), and a second award-winning book (𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘚𝘢𝘭𝘦𝘴 𝘓𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘳).

Reach out if you want to discuss The Transparency Sale sales methodology, or really…anything else (sales kickoffs, workshops, keynotes, the economy, history, etc.)! Email info@toddcaponi.com or call 847-999-0420.

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