> ... 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.
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.
I took the humble approach to promoting Rust in Action for most of its development. It felt awkward as a writer to also be a marketer. But that meant many days with 0 sales. Now I'm more active, I regularly hit 10 sales per day and I haven't had a no sales day in 2020.
Most people have a fixed image of what selling yourself looks like: overly confident suit wearing people with nothing behind it yelling empty slogans at evetybody and their mother unsolicited just to see what sticks etc.
That is false. You can very easily sell yourself without ever lying or overstating anything. If all you have is a small CLI tool on github, selling yourself could be as simple as posting the link to the right people. Selling yourself could mean going to some event and talk to likeminded people, it could mean explaining some person what you are doing etc.
It is not about overly praising your own stuff — it is about not underpraising it.
I struggle with how much of life is shallow seduction. I cannot deny reality but I still hate it.
I don't want to sell, I want honest look. It makes me happy and motivated to do better. I should go into boxing at least there's some truth in survival.
Any ideas as to a better system that can be designed and implemented under which these brilliant, but quiet, people have a higher probability of getting funding, becoming recognized and having an overall greater impact?
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.
How do you know whether you are part of the "brilliant" versus "less brilliant" groups you've mentioned here?
Sorta agree with this but look at the success of Facebook. Zuck didn't have to sell Facebook. He put the idea out there and it was an instant success. if you find yourself having to sell too hard, maybe your idea is not that good.
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.
You shouldn't need to sell yourself to find joy, contentment, fulfillment; those who try are doomed to be miserable.
But, selling yourself is still important; even if your sense of self-worth and etc isn't tied into recognition, it is still something humans crave, and it has societal value. If you are doing anything of value to others, the only way it can achieve that value is by letting those who would value it know it exists. That's called "selling". Without it, what you've done has no value outside of yourself.
That's not to say (to your point) that something done just for yourself is without some sort of objective value, but it certainly has no value to society (by definition), and we are social creatures; we all have a desire to have at least some of our work be valued by others.
> 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,
I think this is a very American thing to do. In most other cultures this is not true. Notably the OP is presumably British and my British grand parents most definitely were not "always selling" nor "putting their personality on display".
We're in a constant state of signalling. Think some book mentions that most of our actions are driven by our need to signal or convey something to parties.
So, I'd argue we are always "selling" ourselves in one way or another, both unconsciously and consciously.
> 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.
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.
I've got to say that I don't agree at all with the teacher analogy. People get so caught up in thinking that teaching is about the subject that they are teaching. It's not. It's 100% about the student. If you are a teacher that is astounding at presenting the material, you will provide an incredibly enjoyable experience for the students who would have already have learned the material on their own. They others will similarly be entertained, but will struggle and just assume they are stupid because they have failed to learn from such an incredible teacher.
However, I learned from a very good sales person that sales is all about understanding the other person and making sure that you present an interface that they can relate to. In that respect, I agree that teaching is just like that. You need to get into the mind of each student and understand how they think and what they are feeling. You need to be understanding and compassionate and to open the doors that they didn't know existed. Very, very good sales people do the same thing.
I've come to the conclusion that sales, at its very best, is one of the most wholesome and wonderful jobs you can have. What is better than connecting people who need something to the thing they need? What is better than making them feel good about taking action to making their life better by fulfilling their needs?
The problem is that most sales people aren't actually that good at sales. ;-)
> 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 :)
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?
You're mixing up terms and inferring "entertainment" when that's not what's being talked about. The operative word is "work" which is used in contrast to "play"
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.
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?
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.
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?
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 ;)
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.
> Let the two be separate, because the world has enough 'leaders'/'advertisers'. What it needs now is technical knowledge.
I think that without those with the technical knowledge leading in their own right, then other self-proclaimed leaders will do their best bet at understanding, and will often get critical parts wrong.
> Unfortunately, the more you focus on advertising the less you focus on technical knowledge.
If the law of diminishing returns applies, it's better to spend time on improving multiple skills or knowledge instead of focusing on just one. I don't think you need to be an expert in advertising for it to be useful to you.
>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.
>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.
"but the other possibility is that you tell the world but no one cares, which is likely the most probable outcome."
There's some truth to this. To take Hacker News as an example, there are many excellent projects posted in the 'Show HN' section that get no traction at all. And then there a few lucky ones that suddenly take-off. There's no "wisdom of the crowds" moment that propels one project to success over another because it's more worthy or excellent - it really is random in so many cases.
We think success = product excellence: how else could a product rise to a leading position in the market or to such pre-eminence unless it was better than the alternatives? But the mountain of successful products that range from mediocre to terrible shows that product excellence isn't always the key ingredient to a product's success.
Lest this all sounds too negative, I agree with the original article that documenting and pursuing your idea is absolutely worthwhile.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
[+] [-] dvt|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] timClicks|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atoav|5 years ago|reply
That is false. You can very easily sell yourself without ever lying or overstating anything. If all you have is a small CLI tool on github, selling yourself could be as simple as posting the link to the right people. Selling yourself could mean going to some event and talk to likeminded people, it could mean explaining some person what you are doing etc.
It is not about overly praising your own stuff — it is about not underpraising it.
[+] [-] agumonkey|5 years ago|reply
I don't want to sell, I want honest look. It makes me happy and motivated to do better. I should go into boxing at least there's some truth in survival.
[+] [-] symplee|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Goronmon|5 years ago|reply
How do you know whether you are part of the "brilliant" versus "less brilliant" groups you've mentioned here?
[+] [-] paulpauper|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blueridge|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lostcolony|5 years ago|reply
You shouldn't need to sell yourself to find joy, contentment, fulfillment; those who try are doomed to be miserable.
But, selling yourself is still important; even if your sense of self-worth and etc isn't tied into recognition, it is still something humans crave, and it has societal value. If you are doing anything of value to others, the only way it can achieve that value is by letting those who would value it know it exists. That's called "selling". Without it, what you've done has no value outside of yourself.
That's not to say (to your point) that something done just for yourself is without some sort of objective value, but it certainly has no value to society (by definition), and we are social creatures; we all have a desire to have at least some of our work be valued by others.
[+] [-] rb808|5 years ago|reply
I think this is a very American thing to do. In most other cultures this is not true. Notably the OP is presumably British and my British grand parents most definitely were not "always selling" nor "putting their personality on display".
[+] [-] WalterBright|5 years ago|reply
Since we are social creatures, it pretty much is. Social mores and niceties, for example.
[+] [-] dfabulich|5 years ago|reply
Showing people that you care about them (and their interests) might be a/the purpose of life, and this is one example of that.
[+] [-] guevara|5 years ago|reply
So, I'd argue we are always "selling" ourselves in one way or another, both unconsciously and consciously.
[+] [-] aazaa|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
If your own advantage isn't a factor, there are a hundred words with more relevant connotations to describe what you're doing.
[+] [-] mikekchar|5 years ago|reply
However, I learned from a very good sales person that sales is all about understanding the other person and making sure that you present an interface that they can relate to. In that respect, I agree that teaching is just like that. You need to get into the mind of each student and understand how they think and what they are feeling. You need to be understanding and compassionate and to open the doors that they didn't know existed. Very, very good sales people do the same thing.
I've come to the conclusion that sales, at its very best, is one of the most wholesome and wonderful jobs you can have. What is better than connecting people who need something to the thing they need? What is better than making them feel good about taking action to making their life better by fulfilling their needs?
The problem is that most sales people aren't actually that good at sales. ;-)
[+] [-] mehrdada|5 years ago|reply
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 :)
[+] [-] tambourine_man|5 years ago|reply
You shouldn’t count on it, of course, if recognition is important to you.
[+] [-] apocalypstyx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] warent|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WheelsAtLarge|5 years ago|reply
I bet if he was alive today, he would be all over social media -similar to Musk.
[+] [-] onemoresoop|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daenz|5 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] egfx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] willcipriano|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MattGaiser|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
Let the two be separate, because the world has enough 'leaders'/'advertisers'. What it needs now is technical knowledge.
[+] [-] snazz|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] joshz404|5 years ago|reply
I think that without those with the technical knowledge leading in their own right, then other self-proclaimed leaders will do their best bet at understanding, and will often get critical parts wrong.
[+] [-] ujki1|5 years ago|reply
If the law of diminishing returns applies, it's better to spend time on improving multiple skills or knowledge instead of focusing on just one. I don't think you need to be an expert in advertising for it to be useful to you.
[+] [-] paulpauper|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] open-source-ux|5 years ago|reply
There's some truth to this. To take Hacker News as an example, there are many excellent projects posted in the 'Show HN' section that get no traction at all. And then there a few lucky ones that suddenly take-off. There's no "wisdom of the crowds" moment that propels one project to success over another because it's more worthy or excellent - it really is random in so many cases.
We think success = product excellence: how else could a product rise to a leading position in the market or to such pre-eminence unless it was better than the alternatives? But the mountain of successful products that range from mediocre to terrible shows that product excellence isn't always the key ingredient to a product's success.
Lest this all sounds too negative, I agree with the original article that documenting and pursuing your idea is absolutely worthwhile.
[+] [-] alexashka|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inetsee|5 years ago|reply
There was a comment thread from that article here: 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|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rubatuga|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yamoriyamori|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grawprog|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brlewis|5 years ago|reply
... 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|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nogabebop23|5 years ago|reply
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.