7 ms·
> ... 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. Th
by dvt 6y ago
> ... 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.
- paulpauper 6y agoSorta 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.
- dvt 6y agoEven if this were true, Facebook is an extreme (as in, 0.000001%) outlier. It's difficult to draw conclusions.
- antonzabirko 6y agoThis is the truth. The way our market defines success doesn't mean that thats what success is. Sure, you can abuse it and sell your product even if it's bad, but look where that has taken the world.
- nerdponx 6y agoZuck didn't have to sell Facebook. I feel like that's only kind of true, and only at first.
- fxtentacle 6y agoDidn't he have marketing partners who later sued him?
- tobyjsullivan 6y agoIs this really true? Like at all? Is it likely that he built Facebook v1 and registered thefacebook.com and sat back waiting for organic traffic? 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.
- flir 6y agoNah, the magic sauce (IMO) was the progressive roll-out. When only .edu addresses were allowed in, it was exclusive and regular joes were desperate to get in. Google successfully pulled the same stunt with gmail, but failed dismally with google plus.
- pjc50 6y agoThis is extremely false; lots of people had similar ideas at the same time. They all had to be sold to their audiences, and their investors. Zuckerberg had an advantage in starting from a very prestigious university. 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.
- kgin 6y agoI guess the larger point is: he didn't spend much time telling people how great facebook was. He created something with utility and rolled it out in a way that would provide maximum utility to each additional person signing up. (Replicating existing networks in order of diminishing prestige)
- brlewis 6y agoZuck was talking to Harvard's newspaper about Facebook shortly after he started coding it, and as soon as it was finished he sent it to a 300-member email list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook#Facebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook#Facebook 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.
- groby_b 6y agoIt 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.
- WalterBright 6y ago> "Selling" yourself is distasteful for many, because it smacks not only of loudness & brashness, but of straight up lying. 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.
- WJW 6y agoSome types of selling are like that, but it would be incorrect to say that all types of selling are like that or that some salesmen don't consistently rely on straight up lying. Some bad apples spoil the basket.
- timClicks 6y agoI 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.
- atoav 6y agoMost 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.
- symplee 6y agoAny 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?
- Goronmon 6y agoI 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?
- enriquto 6y ago> 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.
- pvaldes 6y agoScientists time counting does not work like that. At the end what you discovered will help people forever, how may time you spend to achieve it, is not (or at least shouldn't be) so relevant. 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.
- agumonkey 6y agoI 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.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoI wonder if boxing has its own flavour of kayfabe. 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.
- agumonkey 6y agoYes. 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.