A few weeks ago, over coffee, a friend asked where most of my business actually comes from. I told him the truth: writing publicly on X is my primary acquisition engine. I post daily, build distribution around systems thinking, and convert that attention directly into money.
He recoiled slightly. "I could never do that", he said. "I just hate sales. Putting yourself out there and pitching people feels cheap."
He thought he was making an aesthetic statement about taste, but he was actually describing his very expensive allergy to price discovery.
When people say they hate sales, what they usually picture is value extraction, meaning the sleazy stereotype of convincing someone to buy something they don't need, the telemarketer using high-pressure tactics to push crap onto unsuspecting retirees, the boiler room, the used car lot.
But that's not sales.
Legitimate sales is nothing more than incentive alignment made legible: discovering what someone values, proving you can deliver it, and structuring the trade so that both sides walk away better off. And once you accept that definition, it follows that if sales is an exchange of value, then most of what looks like ordinary human interaction is, in some meaningful sense, a negotiation over terms we've simply agreed not to name:
A friendship is an ongoing trade of loyalty, emotional regulation, and shared context
Dating is the mutual pitching of character, vitality, and trajectory
A job interview is a pitch deck for your future competence
And so on. The credentialed class spent the last century inventing an entire vocabulary of euphemisms so it would never have to say so out loud.
Nobody gets to opt out of the market, but you do get to choose how many middlemen take a cut of your offer to shield you from the transaction. And nowhere is that bargain more explicit, or more quietly accepted, than inside the modern firm: in exchange for a stable monthly wage, an employee surrenders a massive margin on their output to an employer who absorbs market volatility, manages client rejection, and handles the actual selling on their behalf. Which means that when an educated professional claims they are "above sales", what they are really saying is that they will happily accept a fat discount on their lifetime earning power just to keep their hands clean.
And I get it: direct distribution is uncomfortable. Inside an institution, you can coast for a decade on credentials, pedigree, and corporate dynamics without ever discovering if your mind produces anything the world actually wants. A direct offer in an open market strips that insulation away immediately: if nobody buys, you are forced to admit your offer was either mispriced, or unwanted.
You can dress up the fear of such outcome as intellectual purity. Many do. But unfortunately for them, the internet unbundled distribution, which means the safety of the corporate shelter is evaporating whether you asked for it or not, and you either learn to price your mind against the open market, or you spend the next thirty years begging a single employer to tell you what you are worth.
Either way, you are selling.
