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Comment by aaronsimpson | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. Life in general is sales. Job interview? Sales. First date? Sales. Sales is more than "Here's my product/service. Give me money". It's the art of getting someone to do what you want. I can only speak to American culture, but I feel like most people feel icky about that because the first thought that comes to their mind is the car dealership guy that's trying to sell you garbage like gap insurance that you don't need. Kind of like networking, it feels by definition manipulative when it doesn't have to be.

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I agree with everything except the 'first date'. I'm trying to find a person I'm compatible with, and who I can trust completely with who I am. Rough edges and all. I would much rather torpedo date 1 or 2 with a person I'm not compatible with than string things along for a couple of months and break up when she suddenly discovers those rough edges. This has not been a recipe for quantity, I'm hoping it's one for quality.

That's still sales. People focus on "bad" sales, but "good" sales is about being honest about the capabilities of your offering and finding people who honestly need it. It's a bad practice long-term (both in business sales and dating sales) to be over-focused on short-term closing and not focused enough on long-term satisfaction.

Then where is the threshold for 'sales'?

As in, what is "sales"? It's the presentation of that offer. That might be an offer for a product, for companionship, for an intimate coupling. All of those are a form of sales.

> Life in general is sales

Life in a society... where people are divorced from all material realities and only interface with the social... but that's not life in general. There are, for example, wars.

But then resolution of the conflict is sales.

Wars don't end when people put down the guns, it's when people can reconcile their differences.

War probably wasn't the best example because, although I wasn't thinking of it, there's still that social element.

My point is that war involves people directly interacting with physical reality in ways that aren't mediated socially. Modern high tech people live in a world where popular illusions and perception are much more important than gravity and inertia, but reality still exists somewhere, and sometimes it matters.

I agree that "life is sales". But I disagree with the "it's the art of getting someone to do what you want". I'd argue seeing it that way is THE problem and the reason why people find it icky. Sales is about helping people. About finding people's pain and fixing it. Even if you cannot fix it you still might have helped them - maybe now they understand their pain better. Maybe they didn't even know it existed.

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