Having said that, "Learn to Sell" can be told blanket to all aspiring founders, and trying to take on a CEO role.
it's how you nego for a better salary, how you identify real pain points of people, how you charge higher rates, also how you date and how you teach your kids. everything is sales.
more answered in sibling comment.
From my exp/knowledge, most important to start doing business.
- 99% of ideas end just ideas, nothing done, just from some foundations mistakenly considered, doing will be too boring, or not worth time/money/etc. Unfortunately, books and academia, not too helpful, because, usually, books written and academia running, by people, who are not successful in business, but good in write books or in teaching.
Next important thing, don't screw up. Meaning, even experienced people make epic mistakes, which are really easy to avoid.
But for this need to be experienced and open minded, this is not easy. When you do sales, your skin becomes thick and solid, because you lot of time hear refusing, but in product dev (on service even more!) you need to have powerful closed loop with client.
So, in conclusion, two main business principles: 1. hear your clients, who pay money. 2. start/stop easy.
you resist learning it because you're anxious, probably because you got this idea that learning and doing it is cringeworthy as hell. what you resist persists, it might be the sign it's the right thing to do: to start fucking learning it.
check out @bowtiedsalesguy on twitter, his tweets alone will show you a different frame and headspace of how to properly approach these things.
Cute story: I was having trouble getting my 4-year-old to brush his teeth until one night, I had to idea to show him this children's Q&A book that had a page about "why do I have to brush my teeth?" The little cartoon bacteria convinced him that brushing his teeth was a good idea. It was like a light switch in his head; I finished the page and he said, "daddy, I want to brush my teeth now" and walked off to the bathroom.
That's good advice about phobia/obsession.
My daughter is a bit weird about germs. For example the other day, I was handling a deer skull that we found in the backyard, and she was a little put out that I touched a doorknob before washing my hands.
As a kid, I was the same way with germs. As an adult, I'm probably still a bit overly cautious. When COVID happened, I joked that it wasn't OCD, but rather it was training for a pandemic.
My observation of her behavior makes me wonder if it's a nature vs. nurture thing with her. Nurture: Did I accidentally teach her my phobia. Nature: does her brain (like mine) ruminate about everything, leading to phobias when the topic of ruminations is a scary thing like germs.
I'm not a germaphobe, but I think I'm with your daughter on this one. :)
Have you ever heard of prions, e.g. chronic wasting disease?
There is a problem.
Operate the sales.
I remember having the fullstack design and operations of the tech side of the product but the sales and support side of the product (conversion, adoption, tech support, tickets) required the same muscle volume than the tech side did.
So you can double your knowledge rasonably fast but you cannot double your attention and dedicated time.
Selling Sales to Techies - Business of software 2010 https://vimeo.com/96703844