The simplest answer to this question is: sell.

Are you feeling frustrated by this answer? Let’s focus on this – how do you feel when you hear that making money requires you to sell? Can you name that feeling? Can you check your body and see what part of it feels tense at that moment? Maybe your stomach is flat or your fists are clenched? Now can you focus on your thoughts? What’s going on there – maybe some old story, like “but that sucks” or “I can’t do that”? Remember the feeling, the thought, and the sensation in your body. This can be the starting point for your growth. And if you want to change something, make an appointment with your therapist and tell them about your thoughts, feelings, and body somatic symptoms about selling.

So, is selling the only way to make money? Of course not – there are other ways, like stealing or robbery, but they are inhumane & illegal and the problems that arise with such methods are not worth using. You can also invest, but there is a problem here too – investing is mostly about preserving and increasing the value of the money you already have. So you have to have money in order to invest in the first place.

Sure, you can receive inheritances, gifts, tax refunds, etc., but none of this is entirely the result of your own actions – it is mostly a decision of the other party, so it does not quite meet the definition of “making” money.

Going back to selling, on the other hand, selling can also be illegal if you are selling prohibited substances or goods, which varies depending on the area where you are selling. Or if you are selling stolen goods, you are already committing a crime. But these are things you already know and are certainly not the reason you feel the way you feel when you hear that you have to sell. So let’s delve into the selling.

In his book “To sell is human: the surprising truth about moving others” the author, Daniel Pink says, that most people, when they hear “sell,” imagine a used car salesman with some typical 1960s behaviors: cunning, deceitful about the car’s history, and always trying to overprice something that isn’t worth it. But now we’re in the 21st century, and today there’s a different “vision” of a salesman, and these are online influencers and advertisers who aggressively and constantly promote various things through themselves, exaggerate their value, and most of all, don’t care about the real benefit to the customer if they can manipulate that same customer into buying. The game has changed, and so have the methods of selling.

And if you dig deeper and find that you’re actually turned off by sales, mostly because of your ideas about how you should sell, I totally get you. For example, a friend of mine recently told me while we were walking the streets of New York: “I’m starting a third job,” and when I asked her if she could develop an online course and offer it via Internet, she bluntly replied: “I’m a teacher – showing my ass on Facebook is not my vision of how things should be done.” And I understood. Because there is a lot of provocative content bombarding from every corner of the web, metaphorically of course, because the web, in my opinion, simply has no corners 😉

The other problem with all this fakery and oversaturation with ads that are becoming more and more aggressive and vulgar is that in the first place, most of them are just shouting louder and louder because they have nothing valuable to say or the way they say something is not understandable to the audience. It’s just that the ability to express yourself, including what and how to say it, is an art and requires talent and skills that a huge part of digital creators and amateur advertisers do not have, so they compensate by trying to constantly impress us. I think the example I’m going to paraphrase is also from Daniel Pink’s book: can you imagine someone explaining to a foreigner whose language they don’t understand how to get to the airport? Such a person unconsciously raises their voice, as if they have to shout louder for the foreigner to understand, but the end result doesn’t change – the language is incomprehensible. The same goes for a lot of advertisements and pseudo-influencers. Besides, most of them really just need attention and have no idea what they sell, so even though they’re online all the time, they’re trying to steal our attention by flooding us with themselves, without promoting anything valuable to us, the potential consumers of their content. This is the reason you feel disappointed after reading the next AI generated book or watching the next AI generated video without any real value inside. By the way, there’s a really good article about online content by Curianic and it is explained there why the algorithms of technological platforms are a major contributor to this online idiocracy.

On the other hand, most of us aren’t extroverts, so we don’t like to put ourselves out there in public, and while we can do it with some compromise from time to time, it’s not our favorite thing to do. Most introverts are such good writers and creators precisely because they need time alone to be able to dive deep into the flow and come up with amazing creations. Which is not possible if they are constantly being interrupted by other people engaging in social interactions with them, like influencers do.

And here’s the thing: maybe you’re not embarrassed by the idea of ​​selling, but by the belief in how you should sell. Because all these online “gurus” are telling you what to do and how to do it, and that just doesn’t fit who you are, right?

So, the billion dollar question is: can you sell by being yourself, instead of acting like someone you’re not or giving up on sales altogether? If you want to dig deeper into this topic, please leave a comment like “I want more.” The world may really need your content, and if you change your mind about how to sell your ideas, because selling itself isn’t bad, it’s not selling that can be the real loss. Not for you. For the world.