Selling is lying.
If you didn’t need to lie, you wouldn’t need to be there.
Or you’d call yourself an evangelist.
Or people would be flocking to you, instead of you begging them for an audience.
Bottom line, selling is convincing people they have a problem when they don’t believe they do, or care that they do. Even if they do have a problem you can solve, if they were interested in solving it, they would call you, not hope that you would call them, and that isn’t selling, that is fulfillment. The purpose of selling is to convince someone to pick you instead of someone else because it benefits you irrespective if you are the best pick for them.
Making people care about something they don’t care about is different. I don’t even know what to call it — maybe it is activism, but that seems wrong. It isn’t evangelism, which is just, “I think this is wonderful and I want to tell you about it, but I don’t care if you also think it’s wonderful when I’m done; me telling you is what’s important.” But we need to call it something, so I’m going to use “heeding” to mean “the act of convincing someone to care about paying attention to something that benefits them if and only if they accept responsibility for it.” which is not a definition I can find in a dictionary, so… neologism!
When we talk about heeding in this way, we are not talking about activism, which has a component of “believe me when I say there is a problem” that is similar to heeding, but which also brings with it the inseparable element of “and what we ought to do about it is what I tell you to do” that, in effect, absolves the listener of responsibility for conceiving how to be responsible for the thing that is going to benefit them. It’s the rental car of problem solving; all the long-term problems are someone else’s, but all the immediate benefits are mine, plus the cost of the rent. Activism works for big problems that are right in front of you and can be dealt with in a short period of time — abolition, sufferage, civil rights — but doesn’t work well for big problems that are far off and take decades to deal with — climate change, racism, classism, sexism, all the -isms — because without asking, and getting, people to conceive for themselves what being responsible for solving the problem means, they don’t stay invested in solving the problem because it isn’t of immediate concern and that lack of immediacy makes it easy for it to become “somebody else’s problem”1.
The incentives, logistics, methods, and doctrines of both selling and activism are, with respect to heeding, off by a matter of degree. But when you follow the azimuth they chart, you miss the destination by miles because the journey is long. Manufacturing consent to living with arriving at the wrong destination, is selling.
So, the premise implied by the title is that anything worth convincing people they have a problem your thing can solve is, self-evidently something that they are already seeking, and thus you aren’t selling, you are just fulfilling their orders. And these are the best products. And by extension, products that need someone to convince the customer they have a problem that it can solve are the worst products.
Scaling this is hard (because scaling anything is hard) and indeed, scaling heeding is harder than scaling most things precisely because we don’t want it to scale. We rely on, even enjoy, our blind spots. In fact, our civilization doesn’t really function without them. Unheeding is the main trick of humanity, as a superorganism, that let’s it create, use, and maintain hyperobjects.
- from Douglas Adams’ Life, the Universe and Everything, “An SEP is something we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem. That’s what SEP means. Somebody Else’s Problem. The brain just edits it out, it’s like a blind spot.” Heeding is the practice of deliberately breaking Somebody Else’s Problem filters and un-editing out the blind spots. ↩︎