
Sell Yourself, Sell Your Work - ColinWright
https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/SellYourselfSellYourWork.html?te20hn
======
dvt
> ... it is not sufficient to do a job, you have to sell it. "Selling" to a
> scientist is an awkward thing to do. It's very ugly; you shouldn't have to
> do it. The world is supposed to be waiting, and when you do something great,
> they should rush out and welcome it.

Took me very long to get this, and, if I'm being completely honest, I still
struggle with it.

Being smart and humble is a pretty terrible combination. I met _so many_
brilliant people at UCLA and in my professional career that had this twinge of
impostor syndrome. What ended up happening is their less-brilliant but much-
louder colleagues always got the promotions and always got the funding.

~~~
groby_b
It helps to reframe the issue. "Selling" yourself is distasteful for many,
because it smacks not only of loudness & brashness, but of straight up lying.

Look at this instead as a problem of knowledge distribution. In the extreme
case, you do absolutely brilliant work, but tell nobody - how would people in
charge of promotions/funding _know_ you did that work?

That's the first step. You need to let people know your work exists, otherwise
they really can't reward/recognize it. (Or really, in the extreme, you need to
let them know _you_ exist as the very first precondition).

The next step is the fact that you are the person who has likely spent by far
the most time on the problem. You intuitively understand why this is an
incredibly important problem, and why the solution is really, really good. I
guarantee you that the people around you don't. How would they? They've spent
much less time on it than you have.

And so part 2 becomes educating others on the problem and on the solution.

So, no, you don't "sell" yourself. You publicize and educate. It's still
incredibly hard, but it captures the core of what's actually necessary much
better. There's no need to be loud & brash, to paint everything in the
brightest possible colors, but there's a need to communicate.

If Einstein hadn't written a paper on special relativity, he would (obviously)
not have been recognized for it. And if he hand't communicated his insights
very clearly and crisply, he wouldn't have been recognized, either - several
people before him spelled out some of the insights, but in a much less clear
manner.

So, don't "sell", just let people clearly know what you do,and why you do it.
Looking at it from that angle has helped me tremendously getting over the
"selling is gauche" issue.

~~~
amznthrowaway5
> It helps to reframe the issue. "Selling" yourself is distasteful for many,
> because it smacks not only of loudness & brashness, but of straight up
> lying.

But a lot of people who get the promotions and funding are straight up lying.
Selling yourself is distasteful because you can't compete with the dishonest,
you don't want to play that game.

~~~
MattGaiser
I rarely see lying, but you can get pretty much the same result with selective
word choice and hand waving.

Going from 500 words to 30 means a loss of resolution. Just make more of the
words positive and you can greatly mislead.

~~~
amznthrowaway5
Greatly misleading or lying by omission isn’t much better than lying directly.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Exactly. This kind of lying is like return-oriented programming attack.
Technically you didn't lie to them, didn't inject them with malicious payload
straight up - you just crafted your input to guarantee their mental process
generates the malicious payload (the lie) for them.

------
blueridge
This article doesn't resonate with me. We live our lives as if they were a
business enterprise with a balance sheet, always selling, always advertising,
always figuring out how to put our personality on display, always judging our
human worth by our successes or failures, always weighing the _benefits_ of
everything we do. This is the root of many of our modern sociological
problems. We attempt to "justify our existence" by our relationship with work.
Part of exploring the life of the mind is keeping some ideas, maybe even your
most fulfilling work, close to the chest. Life is not all about _selling
yourself_.

~~~
WalterBright
> Life is not all about selling yourself.

Since we are social creatures, it pretty much is. Social mores and niceties,
for example.

~~~
mediaman
Yep. People may not _want_ life to be about selling yourself, but that's the
way it is.

Anyone is free to reject it. And that person is likely to live their life
without their work being recognized, their ideas being appreciated, or their
ingenuity to find the hands of those whom it would benefit.

I wonder how fulfilling that feels?

~~~
WalterBright
No friends and no spouse, either.

~~~
pasquinelli
I have friends and i have a spouse, i never sold myself to them and they never
sold themselves to me. Quite frankly the idea of it is disgusting.

~~~
WalterBright
So, you never do things just to please them? You have no filters on what you
say to them? You're not on your best behavior on a first date? You only bathe
when medically necessary? You dress only for comfort? When you have a photo
taken you don't try to smile and stand up straight?

I'm not buying it.

------
aazaa
> It seems crazy to require that technically talented people should be forced
> to spend time doing something - report writing - at which they're not
> gifted, but how else can the world benefit from their brilliance? Without
> communicating their ideas, their work is lost and might never have been.

Peter Thiel has an interesting take on sales in his book _Zero to One_. He
makes the case that good selling and good teaching are pretty much the same
thing.

The best teachers know how to sell the topic they teach. K-12 teachers in
particular know in their bones how crucial a sales perspective is to getting
an important message across.

The best salespeople sell in a way that doesn't seem like selling. Thiel gives
the example Steve Jobs. It almost seems strange to call what he did sales, but
that's essentially what he did when he got on stage. Another example, is Elon
Musk, who gets his message across without seeming very much like a
salesperson. It's probably no coincidence that both figured out good ways to
inspire their audiences.

So if the word "sell" makes you want to run for the door, consider the more or
less equivalent form: communicate. Or, maybe "educate." If you think
salespeople are all liars, focus your "sales" efforts on conveying facts in
the most compelling way possible - without lying. I find that from this
perspective, the idea doesn't seem nearly as bad. It also presents a much more
actionable path forward.

~~~
bistrodopler
The element people are ignoring is money. You can communicate, teach, etc.
without money coming into the picture. Sales is about money. You can claim
you're "selling" an idea, but the implication is that you're still doing it
for your own benefit or advantage. That doesn't mean it has to be a one-sided
transaction. You may really believe that what you're doing is beneficial for
the other party. But your own interest is an inextricable element of sales.

If your own advantage isn't a factor, there are a hundred words with more
relevant connotations to describe what you're doing.

------
mehrdada
> _If you lock yourself in a room and do the most marvellous work but don 't
> tell anyone, then no one will know, no one will benefit, and the work will
> be lost. You may as well not have bothered._

That's a questionable premise and an entitled perspective from "the world" in
my opinion. If one decides that they don't really give a fuck about the
"impact" of the work on the world and doing it for its own sake, the "world"
has no right to push them to release/advertise for their benefit. The premise
also implies all entertainment is completely useless. Devil's advocate might
argue it's quite the opposite: everything else in the world exists for you to
focus on joy and entertainment and not be bothered with the bullshit the world
brings on to you :)

~~~
apocalypstyx
The thing I find about this quote is, barring the existence of a deity or
secular equivalent, all work is, in the end, lost, everything comes down to
nothing as the universe is overcome by entropy and heat death or the big
crunch. As the song goes: It all returns to nothing, it all comes tumbling
down. Which, of course, leads right back to the foundational existential
question: free of the perceived delusion of eternity, why do anything? Or why
not do everything? Or why, just, why?

~~~
pdimitar
IMO only most of the things come to nothing.

A good way to deal with existential crises in my life has been to ask myself
this question:

"If somebody were to objectively reduce my life to several deeds only and say
that those were my most important actions, which ones would they be?"

This question also helps me put my energy expenditures in perspective. Is what
I'm doing really important to me?

So yes, probably 99% of what we'll ever do will amount to nothing. Makes it
all the more crucial to focus on that important 1%.

------
WheelsAtLarge
Einstein is the ultimate example of selling yourself. Yes, he was brilliant
but brilliant is not enough. He was constantly open to interviews and made
sure the media knew what he was doing. He was so successful that even after
his death most of us know about him even if we don't really understand what he
was famous for. BTW, he did not earn his Nobel Price for his work on
relativity but for the discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.

I bet if he was alive today, he would be all over social media -similar to
Musk.

~~~
onemoresoop
That implies some form of narcissism in the equation. Is this the trait one of
the special sauces?

~~~
tiborsaas
No, I think I show forms of narcissism, but I'm nowhere near successful as I
would imagine. It gives you the drive, but it doesn't give you a vehicle.

What I've observed is that the special trait is being a "people's person",
great conversationalist, communicator and likeable.

~~~
WheelsAtLarge
There are people that can turn all those qualities on and off. I worked with a
manager that was extremely good at it in public and people could not get
enough of her but in private she was plain nasty. She was hired to layoff
staff that were not making the mark and bring in new talent. She was very good
at it.

------
daenz
There are very few channels to "sell" your work or yourself. We need more of
those channels and more "connected" people willing to browse those channels
and trampoline things that are interesting.

Nobody cares about your work, they care about what other people care about.
It's a chicken-and-egg problem. It can only be bootstrapped by some clever
social hack, money, or with someone more connected putting in the work to help
connect people. Someone who is producing high quality work 150% of the time
cannot be expected to spend another 150% effort to required to rise above the
cacophony of other people doing the same thing.

That said, I have done some thinking on this subject, and I'm curious: would
there be any interest in a QVC-for-software-demos livestream? It would be
somewhere where anyone could go on, on a schedule, and show a demo of
something they've made or like to use. It could be for paid software or for
fun projects, and it would be live, warts and all. Does this sound interesting
to anyone?

EDIT>> If you're interested, as either a presenter or a viewer, add your name
and email to this google sheet:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VX1H8wsW-
Do2NflC3__y...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VX1H8wsW-
Do2NflC3__y71lNkreq7Z_xzMA1YECZgF8/edit#gid=0)

~~~
egfx
I built something like this for Shopify. Than Facebook sorta copied my idea
with this storefront news. Anyway, I think this niche is very small and your
better going for lower hanging fruit then starting with a live stream for
software products. There have been businesses like this that were great like
criticue.com but surprisingly they went under due to lack of interest and
adoption. I personally really liked the service. It was better then a
livestream, it was a group of software reviewers giving you feedback.

------
MattGaiser
It is accurate but disappointing.

Just before university admissions, I learned to be a self-promotional person,
so I am guilty of this.

Firstly, you spend a ton of time doing that selling. It takes away from
actually doing work. It is also just distasteful. I hate constantly fiddling
with my bio.

Second, you end up altering the work you are willing to do simply because some
work is easier to sell than other work.

I completely get why people do this as I do it as well, but what is all this
costing society?

~~~
Applejinx
Absolutely true, absolutely a valid criticism, but it's sort of a 'first level
selling'. If you look into people who are REALLY good at what they do, things
start to look real different and the value system you're concerned about goes
out the window.

Read some of Guy Kawasaki's stuff. That guy is stupidly good at selling, had
much to do with introducing the Macintosh back in the day, but it is anything
but a burden to him, and if he found he was grinding away selling junk because
it was easier, he'd jump out the window.

There is NO substitute for being able to try and convey your excitement about
something you're REALLY good at and REALLY care about, and when you are able
to bring that to bear, everything is different. I make my living on Patreon
'selling' open source audio stuff I make, and one of my PRIMARY arguments
there is, 'this is amazing! Because it is completely liberating! Getting paid
this way I get to make weird stuff that maybe only one person will like better
than anything, because I NEVER have to hold back and alter things to fit in
with what I think the market will bear!"

And it's true… but there is also a market for people who want stuff off the
beaten path. I never spend anything on advertising or marketing, and it costs
me quite a lot in discoverability, but there is also a market for people who
want someone that will not SELL to them in the normal sense, who seems to be
out there just doing, and never comes knocking expecting to make 'a sale' or
hyping their latest nonsense.

It's not as big a market as the mainstream. But the mainstream simply does not
serve everybody.

The bottom line is, if you expect to sell stuff, the most enduring way to do
that is to be yourself and then hope like hell there's a market for YOU…
because you can fake it, but you can't really get away from who you are. But,
if you're prepared to just go full tilt and be consistently who you are, the
connections you build are not disposable and don't require trickery to
maintain.

When everybody got hit with coronavirus lockdown and were facing great
financial risk and the loss of their livelihoods, I worked out an arrangement
where I declared that I cut the price of everything more than half, and told
all my people on patreon that they should cut back or cancel what they were
giving. And I braced myself, certain that I could withstand it: I'd run the
numbers and I'd be able to tough it out.

And of course they all did the opposite and gave more, and I got upset and had
to be told to allow people to be generous when they wanted to. Because I'd
really meant it, it wasn't a 'bit'. And because that was who I really was…
yeah. So I got the opposite of hurt, and had the opposite of being out of
work. And now I'm trying not to overwork like a madman, knowing that people
cared, but also that they wanted me to be well.

If you can be yourself as hard as you can, and it's a self worth being, the
idea of 'selling yourself' seems pretty ridiculous ;)

------
antonzabirko
I've seen this pushed before. Unfortunately, the more you focus on advertising
the less you focus on technical knowledge.

Let the two be separate, because the world has enough 'leaders'/'advertisers'.
What it needs now is technical knowledge.

~~~
snazz
Everyone who has the deep technical knowledge also needs to be able to
communicate with others who don't have it. There's a difference between being
an Internet personality who can code and being a programmer who can write
English.

Even if locking yourself in a room for months is a requirement to coming up
with new science (which I highly doubt), solving problems for the intellectual
gratification is useless on its own unless the new knowledge is shared.
Writing is simply the highest-bandwidth medium for distributing technical
knowledge to a wide group of people, so even the most in-the-trenches
technical people need to be good at it.

~~~
antonzabirko
It's really not as you say in practice. Semantically yes it never becomes
released, but eventually excellent work spreads naturally.

In the current internet setup it is hard to grow organically, but that's a
result of this same mentality. It reinforces politics and showmanship, which
is why those skills dictate the market and coincidentally the internet.

~~~
servercobra
But how does excellent work spread naturally? If I publish some truly
wonderful language or package on GitHub, would anyone notice without me
promoting it? Or if I find some surprising result from an experiment, write it
up, put it on my blog that I don't promote, will anyone see it? And if so,
how?

------
paulpauper
>Doing technically brilliant work may be enough for your personal
gratification, but you should never think it's enough. If you lock yourself in
a room and do the most marvellous work but don't tell anyone, then no one will
know, no one will benefit, and the work will be lost. You may as well not have
bothered. For the world to benefit from your work, and therefore for you to
benefit fully from your work, you have to make it known.

no kidding. but the other possibility is that you tell the world but no one
cares,which is likely the most probable outcome. Look at all

>But you still have to sell! You now have to sell your company's product or
service, you now have to get known so that people will start to use your
product or service, or people will constantly visit your website, which then
attracts advertising. Whatever, you need to sell! A company lives and dies by
what it sells.

>Some people say that the sole purpose of a company is to make money. Others
are more idealistic and say that it's to make the world better, or to make
their employees' lives better, or some other goal. But without making money,
everything else is moot.

Some of the biggest acquisitions and valuations have been in companies that
make little to no money or lose money.

~~~
john_moscow
>no kidding. but the other possibility is that you tell the world but no one
cares,which is likely the most probable outcome.

Well, there are 3 components to it:

A) Find a relevant problem to solve. I.e. market research.

B) Solve the problem. I.e. engineering.

C) Convince your audience to try your solution. I.e. marketing/sales.

A successful business requires all 3.

>Some of the biggest acquisitions and valuations have been in companies that
make little to no money or lose money.

Because their actual product is the expectation of future profits, and their
customers are the investors. Ethics aside, it's the same pipeline, really.

------
alexashka
If you replace 'sell' with _communicate_ and 'advertise' with _inform_ , I
think everybody's going to agree.

Clear, concise communication is important in any human relationship - it
doesn't matter what line of work you're in, unless you're living in isolation
somewhere :)

These mythical creatures who create incredible work but fail to communicate it
- really? I wouldn't call Linus Torvalds a communication genius and yet when
you create something other people want, word gets around and your software
gets used.

We could all use a reality check - most of these mythical undiscovered gems
are doing above average work that wouldn't benefit that much from better
communication, hence it doesn't happen. The cost of re-learning your
communication patterns to better match others' expectations is high and yet
the reward is often that others will find you a little less stand-offish.

------
julianeon
The missing piece here is: How do you sell it? How do people find out about
your work?

These days (especially in a quarantine world) that means SEO, writing to the
search engine, and to an extent, social media.

So while I don't love it, either, I'm increasingly learning to see
_sophisticated_ social media usage & SEO as part of my work.

~~~
collyw
Any chance of going into more detail about what you see as sophisticated
social media usage? A link would be good.

~~~
julianeon
I'm still early in the learning process, and I wouldn't feel confident going
beyond the most basic google search results, right now.

But clearly, having an audience on Twitter, and possibly a good relationship
with online publications or reporters who can help get your message out, where
you can guest blog or become known as an expert, is good for business.

And if there's some way that your work can become a product that translates
into sales that can be reached through Instagram, Pinterest, etc., then it
helps to know that too. Sounds weird, but I worked at a tooling startup that
advertised on Instagram and apparently got good results from it.

------
inetsee
After reading this article I scrolled down the list of other blog posts by
Colin Wright and I found one at the very bottom, from 2011, entitled
"Withdrawing from Hacker News":
[https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/WithdrawingFromHackerNews.htm...](https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/WithdrawingFromHackerNews.html)

There was a comment thread from that article here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2402730](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2402730)

I wonder if Colin has decided to re-join Hacker News, and if so, would he care
to comment on the changes to Hacker News since 2011 that prompted him to
change his mind.

~~~
ColinWright
I went away for quite some time. In response to the HN discussion you quote,
quite a lot of people got in touch, and as a result I ended up making a few
quite good friends, and many more contacts.

After a while I submitted a few things, and commented on a few things I was
pointed at, but I didn't ever come back and read in the same way that I had
been doing.

And it remains thus. I submit things I think the community might be interested
in, and I dip in occasionally. But my participation is not as it once was.
During "lock down" I've been commenting about once a day, I look at the "Front
Page" most days, and "newest" most days, but I don't comment much. Looking at
the trends and what the community usually finds interesting, and especially
looking at the responses to some of the comments I make, I don't feel that I
have a lot to contribute.

~~~
rhythmofrest
Hi Colin, you gave your juggling talk at my high school sometime before 2009.
I already considered myself both a juggler and a programmer, but your talk
inspired me on both counts, and taught me something about being cross-
disciplinary in the things we enjoy and pursue. I've been a professional
software dev for 8 years but I still think about your talk, your software, and
your website. Thanks for encouraging young people like me.

~~~
ColinWright
Hi there ...

That's a lovely comment ... thank you. Feel free to email me and we could
perhaps arrange to meet and have a coffee sometime. Contact details in my
profile.

But equally, feel free to stay anonymous if you prefer!

------
rubatuga
This is an unfortunate truth. People aren't waiting to cheer you on as soon as
you release a work.

~~~
yamoriyamori
Something about academia too, which doesn't really prepare us for the
'selling' part of life/coding. Every term/semester is nice and discrete, with
a culminating project/exam, and then the next one is suddenly ... complete.
The only required external attention was either the prof who did the grades
(who's paid to view your work) or your parents who want to see your
accomplishments.

------
WalterBright
Ironically, everyone posting in this thread is trying to sell their opinion on
it!

------
grawprog
>>Selling" to a scientist is an awkward thing to do. It's very ugly; you
shouldn't have to do it. The world is supposed to be waiting, and when you do
something great, they should rush out and welcome it.

Half of what I did as 'public engagement' was basically selling people the
idea that they should take time and care about these animals we were
researching and in fact money should be spent protecting them.

Most of grant proposal writing is very much selling the idea of your study or
project to the government or organization that's willing to give you money.

------
charleskinbote
> If you lock yourself in a room and do the most marvellous work but don't
> tell anyone, then no one will know, no one will benefit, and the work will
> be lost. You may as well not have bothered.

Maybe this article should be called "I sell, therefore I am".

The quote from the article, to me, sounds ridiculous. I don't lock myself in a
room and do marvelous work for other people, so that they know it exists, or
so that it will last longer than I do -- and I suspect many other creators
feel similarly.

------
teknopaul
Dont sell yourself.

Be honest. Be modest.

Work hard for your own satisfaction.

If you make a modest living doing something you enjoy, consider yourself
lucky.

Unless you want to be rich and famous. In which case, kiss arse and big
yourself up all the time.

~~~
cambalache
Yeah son, but doing it that way wont get you accepted in YCombinator with all
the cool kids here. Dont tell me you dont want to be the next Lizzie Holmes.

~~~
teknopaul
I think there are a few grey beards lurking :)

------
brlewis
This Hamming quote is gold. I like the way it tells how to put "know your
audience" into practice:

... ask why you read some articles and not others. You had better write your
report so when it is published ... as the readers are turning the pages they
won't just turn your pages but they will stop and read yours. If they don't
stop and read it, you won't get credit.

------
Apaec
One other thing is that if you don't sell your work, someone else might take
it, rebrand it, and sell it for his own profit.

~~~
viraj_shah
Sadly I agree. I've seen this a few times in Silicon Valley. You take an open
source project from here, take another one from there, take some code from
someone's Github, forget about the licenses (because who is going to figure it
out?), and you put it all together overlaid with some nice graphics and you've
got the start of a business/startup. Take that, show it to investors, and go
raise a bunch of money.

~~~
bhargav
Does that really happen often in Silicon Valley? Any offenders that you know
of or just a hunch?

~~~
lain_
Don't think anyone would "turn someone in" in particular to answer you but it
happens all the time. Commercial software businesses thrive on open source,
and even of the successful ones only _very_ few concern themselves with giving
back to the individuals whose work they used or the open-source world in any
way. (edit) I'm not against it per se, but it's sad how it's only take, take,
and take.

~~~
bhargav
Yeah I feel you, but think about it from the other perspective. We use
PostgreSQL but may not have the expertise or budget (since man hours = cost)
to contribute to the project. Open Source is and can only thrive by the
amazing volunteers that contribute to them, it can never been an obligation;
specially for appearances sake.

------
nogabebop23
>> then no one will know, no one will benefit, and the work will be lost. You
may as well not have bothered.

This runs counter to a lot of great works. They were completed, known by and
benefited first and foremost their creator. The fact that the rest of us know
about them is just a nice side effect, not necessary.

------
jonnypotty
If you don't advertise your work there is no point in even having done it.
Perfect way to sum up our pr/advertising world. Not the way I value things, or
my own work. There is more value to things than people 'perception' imo.

------
liudoutang
"... you can either do it in such a fashion that people can indeed build on
what you've done, or you can do it in such a fashion that the next person has
to essentially duplicate again what you've done ..."

I like these words

------
hoseja
>then no one will know, no one will benefit, and the work will be lost. You
may as well not have bothered.

The same is true if you expand your perspective into timescales just slightly
larger than the usual human one.

