Daniel Pink argues everyone sells now, whether as teachers, parents, or designers. Master attunement (taking another's perspective), buoyancy (staying resilient after rejection), and clarity (cutting through noise). These human skills, not information access, give you an edge.
Like it or not, we're all in sales now. Big portion of whatever we do, whether we're teachers or art directors or in healthcare, we're all in sales now. What are the qualities that allow us to do this well and ethically? These are the foundational qualities of being effective in persuading, influencing, convincing, moving people. They are the new ABCs: Attunement, Buoyancy, and Clarity. Attunement, perspective-taking. Can you attune yourself to someone else, understand their perspective? In sales, if you're trying to sell computer equipment, but if you're trying to convince an employee to do something a different way, if you're trying to convince your boss to give you a different assignment, if you're trying to convince your kids to clean up their room. Buoyancy. I interviewed a salesman, had a lovely way of putting this. He said the hardest part about being in sales is this: every day you face an ocean And buoyancy is, how do you remain afloat on that ocean of rejection? If we're all in sales now, we're gonna get rejected a lot. It turns out that questioning your abilities is often more effective than pumping yourself up. What do you do during an encounter? It actually, much to my dismay, showed that positivity actually works. Finally, what do you do after an encounter? It turns out that people's ex— Some fascinating research from Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania Showing that one of the best predictors of people's success is how they explain failure, their explanatory style. So that's buoyancy. And finally, ABC— A, attunement; B, buoyancy; C, clarity— is clarity. We live in a world awash in information. Having access to information doesn't give you any kind of comparative advantage. What gives you any kind of comparative advantage is being able to curate that information, distill that information, Take that information and say, all of this is noise, but this part is signal. What you have to do is you have to draw on some very fundamentally human qualities. Can I understand someone else's point of view? Can I remain resilient and buoyant in the face of rejection? Can I help someone make their way through this murk of information and clarify it? Can I help someone identify problems they don't realize that they have? Can I look for ways that, that this other person and I have common ground, so if we reach that common ground, We're both going to be better off. And that I really am convinced that the way to do it more effectively is to just be a little bit more human.
Thank you.
