The Hunt for Interesting Projects
Sales will always be an icky word. But at the end of the day, you don’t get what you want or need without it.
First you have to sell yourself on doing the work. To point the boat towards a certain direction in spite of information from your family or the news that tells you otherwise.
Selling yourself on the idea that you know best: It’s not an easy task.
Next, you have to sell yourself to others who might want to work with you. If you already had some uncertainties, now they’re really going to come up.
Yet it doesn’t have to be this way. The mind has all sorts of stories about how things are going to work out, and if you notice, most of them are never true. Because the mind is often disconnected from reality.
One of its main jobs seems to be to remove you from the present moment.
One way I like to think of sales is that it’s the Hunt for Interesting Projects.
Internally, we need to be in touch with the work that lights us up.
Unfortunately, we often think about this when doing the opposite - going through the motions with our Least Creative Work.
When we reach out to people to network or find a gig, we must remember that people don’t want to be sold or pitched to.
Yet they do want to be helped. They want to know how they can solve a problem that’s been bothering them for a long time.
They know that the solution to a headache or backpain is a few blocks away in a bottle of advil or a massage. However, they don’t know that the solution to some niche problem at work or home lies in what you offer.
The book publisher or record label that’s searching for something really good is also going through the same type of pain.
You might talk yourself out of sending that email since it’s a lot more comfortable to stay where you are right now, but try changing the language around what you’re doing when you reach out to people.