To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

Cannon-Brookes draws a distinction between “products people buy” and “products people are sold”—and he prefers the former.

the balance of power has shifted—and how we’ve moved from a world of caveat emptor, buyer beware, to one of caveat venditor, seller beware—where honesty, fairness, and transparency are often the only viable path.

Clarity on how to think without clarity on how to act can leave people unmoved.

his job is to influence employees—so they do their jobs with zeal and with skill.

Unchecked levity leaves you flighty, ungrounded, and unreal. Unchecked gravity leaves you collapsed in a heap of misery,” she writes. “Yet when properly combined, these two opposing forces leave you buoyant.”15

One of the most effective ways of moving others is to uncover challenges they may not know they have.

The conventional view of economic behavior is that the two most important activities are producing and consuming. But today, much of what we do also seems to involve moving. That is, we’re moving other people to part with resources—whether something tangible like cash or intangible like effort or attention—so that we both get what we want.

Some analysts project that in the United States, the ranks of these independent entrepreneurs may grow by sixty-five million in the rest of the decade and could become a majority of the American workforce by 2020.

“People usually know themselves way better than I do.”