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.

Selling is often conflated with trying to trick people into doing something they don't want to do. This is ultimately counterproductive. Selling is helping others get what they want, and in return you get what you want.

I didn't say that.

I did say it was counterproductive. Making a career out of selling means you're going to need repeat customers, and customers don't return when they realize they were hoodwinked.

People who sell me what I want make a lot of money off of me because I keep coming back for more.

Sales has earned a slimy reputation. Slapping the word in front of hard, earnest work to brand it as something better than it is, is lying.

Clear communication has nothing to do with sales because sales has nothing to do with anything other than making a sale. Real problems and real solutions are motivated by more complex worldviews than “profit good”.

It certainly does. It produces the best kind of sales - transactions that work well for buyer and seller.

> cars

I asked the prof who taught my accounting class about his career in used car sales. He said you could tell a good dealer from bad by how long he'd been in business. A good lot will last more than 5 years, because by then he'll be running on repeat business rather than running out of suckers in the community.

> houses

I've moved around Seattle a bit. I only deal with one agent now, because she's honest and reliable, and I recommend her to anyone who asks. Real estate agents rely heavily on recommendations from satisfied customers.

> Real problems and real solutions are motivated by more complex worldviews than “profit good”.

I'm pointing out that the path to great profits is not by lying - it's by building a track record of satisfied customers. And that's how the best salesmen operate.

Consider insurance salesmen. I gave all my insurance business to one Charles Kern, who was very old school in that he always personally went way out of his way to take good care of all my insurance needs, including claims. His prices were higher, but were damn well worth it. I was very sad when he passed away, and have not found another agent since who was like him, and I'm correspondingly less loyal to them.

I have a similar relationship with my business accountant, who I've been using for 35 years. He's expensive, but he's earned my loyalty and I don't hesitate to recommend him to others. (And I started doing business with him from a recommendation by a friend of mine.)

And that's darn good salesmanship.

Here's an incomplete list where I've seen dishonest sales, and expect that the entire market category is thoroughly corrputed by such:

- Cases where you buy something very rarely (like cars or houses).

- Cases where there isn't much choice in the first place (banks, telecoms, ISPs, but also SaaS products).

- Cases where there is a steady flow of new customers, and repeat ones are unlikely (lots of e-commerce, in particular on big e-commerce platforms).

B2B sales are different but incentives there aren’t the same as for individuals—I might take more sales pitches in private life if someone was paying me to do it, it wasn’t my money on the line, and so on.

Actually, I take that back: recruiters sell to me quite a bit. Though they’re trying to convince someone else to give us both money, not me to give them money, so that’s a bit different in that I’m not purchasing anything they’re “selling”.

Before I moved to a smaller town, there was a grocery store I bought regularly from due to optimal location and relatively middle-level prices. I was pretty sociable back then, and befriended some employees. This eventually led to them warning me about buying meat on certain days - turns out, they were forced to wash stale meat with detergent to erase the bad smell, and sell it as fresh. I recently confirmed it with one of the ex-employees, turns out their manager actually opposed that, but this was forced by the higher ups in the management of the whole shop chain.

That, and bunch of other stories (some second-hand, some first-hand), essentially ruined my trust in regular small business.

I've been investing in stocks ever since my first job. I've done reasonably well, and I focus on companies that focus on making their customers happy - and they do better than average long term. That's great salesmanship.

Only bread, cheese and processed products in original packaging, so I guess this proves your point. But they are doing fine to this day, because there's only so many people you could tell (for various personal reasons I didn't want to pursue anything serious, like ratting them out to safety inspectors and hoping they didn't bribe the local inspector, like a certain bookstore I know of... but that's another story), and people tend to stick to their local grocery stores anyway (price and location sensitivity).

For what it's worth, despite that I'm now distrusting businesses by default, I try to compensate for that; if there's a store or service provider that I feel treats me fairly, and I don't see any obvious signs of deception in their overall business practices, I tend to stick to them despite cheaper options available. I feel fair business should be rewarded, and I do my best to put my money where my mouth is in this area.

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.

You can compete with the dishonest. Just because many liars are sellers, doesn’t mean all marketing is lying.

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

We're exposed to brilliance from others all around us, but we only see our own repeated failures. But that's a very biased sample. Others also stumble. But those stumbles are invisible. Likewise, your own past success is likely to be drowned out by the noise.

I have had positive results due to this a few times. Though I was not "selling" myself, but product of some company at retail stores. I had never done that before so didn't know anything about "selling". Hence I did what I thought was acceptable to me i.e. educate customers and explain the solution, the only additional thing I did was to understand the customer's requirements first. That helps in calibrating the message for specific audiences.

I personally found this to be helpful. I find it more comfortable to document and present internally to my companies than to the public at large. I've tried blogging, but it feels pointless. At least with internal presentation, I hear positive feedback from it. Maybe it is just that one person six months later who messages me that I saved them days of work.

I think a lot of folks think franchise auto dealers or traveling Hoover reps when they think about "selling". I've always found that sort of "get someone to give me their money for something no matter what" process is better equated with "hustling".

I have a few great relationships with real salespeople through my work, and for them it's about lining up their products with the people that truly need them for the price the products need to sell at.

I've tried to learn that as a lesson for self-advocacy and network building as well. I actually don't mind a cold call on LinkedIn from someone where our work might really benefit each other.

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 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.

I struggle with that two, and that's one of two big things. The other thing is: how so many things around us are balanced by adversarial relationships instead of cooperation. From nature, where ecosystem equilibrium is just a slow-moving frontline of life forms fighting and starving, to markets, where price determination relies on companies fighting over customers and ever pushing on each other. It's all so incredibly wasteful.

Yes yes yes yes and yes yes and yes. I cannot stop seeing waste and adversity. It's 2020 and nobody is really fearing anything critical but we still roam with our paranoia on it seems.

I assume (bedroom theory) that with some cooperation level we'd cut the effort of everything 50%.

I think human groups also need leaders otherwise they just don't see the whole picture and don't function well because everybody is trying to defend his cubicle.

ps: I don't know about kayfabe, maybe there's a bit in boxing, there's also paid matches .. I believe on average the competition is real enough.

How do you know whether you are part of the "brilliant" versus "less brilliant" groups you've mentioned here?

If you spend more than 10% of your time dealing with emails instead of doing science, then you are probably on the "less" side.

And a lot of the time spent in science is about painfully compiling info. Emailing people can have a lot of sense in that part.

He wasn't even the first person to come up with the idea at Harvard. Heck, there were two similar projects at Cambridge when I was graduating in 2000. And a dating site.

I mean, my entire knowledge of the launch of Facebook comes from watching The Social Network so take it with a grain of salt. But wasn’t he a prolific LiveJournaler (writing about his projects amongst everything else)? I’d think that fits this article rather exactly.

I have a side project where you rate statements 1-5 for their truthfulness. "Zuck didn't have to sell Facebook" makes me feel like I need to add even lower numbers.

I feel like that's only kind of true, and only at first.