Sell yourself, sell your work

It also depends on what you’re selling and who you’re selling it to. Do it too much, and you’ll incur the wrath of the mob—or worse, be ignored into oblivion.

In the software world, salespeople are almost universally hated because of how obnoxious they can be. I recently attended a Couchbase talk, and now the salespeople are all over my inbox and LinkedIn DMs. You don’t want to sell your work like that.

While not all work needs to be published, monetized, and advertised, this piece only focuses on the kind that needs to be done but isn’t.

I absolutely agree on writing about software. I don’t write to advertise my thoughts. Writing is the process that helps me think deeply about a topic I’m interested in.

While I write for myself, and my blog[1] usually focuses on the things I’m currently tinkering with, it has garnered a solid number of readers. I even got hired at two places because someone higher up read my writing at some point. So I believe the author is encouraging everyone to publish and advertise these kinds of work.

[1]: https://rednafi.com

This is what I was thinking too when I was a child. But now that I got to see how adults actually act I feel like a lot of these concerns related to selling are irrational.

If you have a new product and you want to market it to a wide audience then you have nothing to worry about because you have nothing to lose. Being "ignored into oblivion" doesn't mean that you can't try again, and nobody knows you so you won't attract a mob. The world is so vast that no matter what you do and how hard you try to sell something, your actions will affect very few people and leave only a barely noticeable footprint.

Maybe this is exactly what the problem is -- we now have means to connect with the whole world through the internet, but we tend to treat these connections quite conservatively as if it's our close circle. It's not acceptable to make yourself hated by a friend, but I think it's absolutely fine if it's thousands of strangers instead as long as it's done for what feels like a good cause.