I have been sick for the past 6 days and I can’t believe I’m still sick. As my fevers come and go while I wipe the constant snot coming through my nose, I’ve been thinking about one topic in particular: do I have value?
When I’m on reddit, I see countless posts lamenting their romantic life or lack thereof for multiple reasons. Sometimes the reason is genetic, for example: I’m short and bald. Sometimes the reason is because of something they’ve done: I’ve cheated and I never deserve redemption. Sometimes the reason is because of their status: I’ve been massively depressed over the past few years and I don’t see it getting better.
On the other hand I see a very tough job market. I see many people struggling to get a job with a pretty great resume (though with the advance of AI I wonder how many of those resumes are a genuine testimony to their abilities). In this case people wonder: am I just unhireable? Do I need to get a MBA or another graduate degree?
I also work with a lot of coaches on their coaching business and my usual suggestion to them is to start by not charging people and have a client base first. But some coaches struggle to get clients even when they offer it for free, and of course this tends to impact their confidence by a lot. In troubleshooting this, they ask: do I just suck? Do I need more certifications? Or do I need to package my offer better? Do I need to be selling something people are interested in?
All the questions are great questions to consider, but the problem here is that there are too many variables. Is it that I just suck in general and I always need to present yourself better? If so, then how better? If not, then how come I’m not getting hired / dated? How come other people similar to me are getting something and I’m not?
My aim is to simplify this process a little bit by removing the variables so you can focus on what actually matters in getting another person to see the value in you.
Concept 0: The target of your interest is not obligated to be interested in you.
This is a simple truth that’s good to start with, so let’s make this the underlying concept to consider as we add on more layers to this discussion.
What I mean by this is,
- I may like a dog at the shelter but that dog has no obligation to like me.
- I may love Honolulu but the city of Honolulu has no obligation to me for anything.
- I may really want to work at BNP Paribas but they don’t have to hire me.
- I may really like this person romantically but they don’t have to like me back.
This unfortunately leads to faulty follow-up thoughts like this:
- Man, even a dog at the shelter doesn’t like me. I must be unloveable.
- I’m banned from the city of Honolulu for streaking?! After I loved them so much? How ungrateful of them, I hate them!
- I have all the qualifications they’re asking for in the job description, why aren’t they hiring me? It doesn’t make sense!
- Why can’t this person love me back after all my heart’s been poured out for them? What more do I need to do?
Concept 1: Any non-unique, limited entity will have a relative value.
Let’s look at dating first. When you’re a tall guy with a head full of hair, chances are: you may be found attractive. More so than guys who are short and bald (note: I’m only using this example because of the plethora of discourse around these particular physical traits). But, is the value of a short and bald person negative or zero? It cannot be, because it’s better than an even shorter person or an even balder person.
We can continue down this logic in both ways. There’s always someone taller than the tall person, there’s always someone with more hair. There’s always someone taller than the guy in the previous sentence, with more hair. And ad infinitum. There’s always a shorter person too, with even less hair.
So in the grand distribution of all males, turns out most people are in the healthy middle with a value that is greater than zero. Why? Because as long as something exists, it has more value than non-existence.
What about a job? Suppose you’re hiring for a position and you get no resumes. You would have nobody to hire. Suppose you have one resume come in. Good! You can hire them because they’re the only candidate. What about two? Now you rank the values of the two candidates, but both candidates are still better than people who haven’t applied.
You might be saying, but aren’t there instances where you’re the only resume but you’re still not hired? Yes, but in that case the resume is not in par with the expectation of the job description. We’re only considering cases where a value system is already set (in other words, when I’m ranking oranges by their roundness apples cannot count).
One way you can NOT have worth is if the entity is in unlimited amounts. People did not used to buy water, why? Because it was widely understood that it was available in unlimited quantity. So why would I buy water with money? Unfortunately things have changed in that department.
The other way is to have only ONE entity. Have you seen pawn shop show or Americana episodes where the item is so, so unique that its value is undefinable? It’s like property. Property values are assessed with comparables. If there is no comparable because nothing else remotely comes close to that entity, it cannot have a value.
What I’m trying to say is, as long as you exist there is value within you in whatever value system we’re talking about (dating, jobs, getting hired as a coach, etc).
Concept 2: There are people who will gratefully accept the least valuable entity.
Value is usually compared with money. A lemon at the grocery market is like, 50~60c per lemon. But there are more expensive lemons: organic lemons, perhaps. Or lemons with a distinctive flavor profile that only comes from a certain farm. So in those cases the lemons would be more expensive than 50~60c.
Suppose you have some lemons with lots of dents and damages. Those lemons would still be very valuable to children’s centers trying to serve lemonades to the at-risk children (this is actually a true story involving a lemon tree in my front yard and a neighbor).
Just like how things have relative values, people have relative needs. When I just go to the restroom, I have very little need for a restroom for the next few hours at least. But when I get food poisoning, the need for a restroom is so urgent and dire I’d pay great money to get access to a restroom.
Unfortunately there are also people who cannot afford what they need the most. Because of this there is always going to be people who will gratefully accept even the least valuable entity.
My Buddhist teacher always says to people who complain about not finding partners for marriage, “Finding a suitor is really easy. Just expand your search criteria to 20 years up and 20 years down, and especially look for people in the rural countryside. It’s not that finding a suitor is hard; matching your many specific expectations is what’s hard”.
The point of this quote is, there are always people who will want to date you if you’re okay with dating literally anyone, including people who have traits that society deems unattractive. You can always get a job if you’re okay with getting literally any job, like physical labor or sanitation work (especially if you’re okay with getting paid minimum wage!). You can always find a client as a coach if you’re okay with working with literally anyone, not just your ideal client base.
Concept 3: There are people who will generally want anything for free, and there are people who will generally buy anything because they can.
Need and want are separate things. Someone can agree to go on a date with you, some company can want to hire you, someone can want to work with you for free — but it doesn’t mean that they’ll necessarily show up. Why? Because when it comes to exchange of values, there are two notable exceptions worth discussing.
When something is free, a specific psychological behavior arises: not taking it can seem like a loss. Depending on the severity of the loss aversion, this may lead someone to constantly say yes to free things.
But saying yes and actually claiming something are different things; this is why clients who sign up for free sessions tend to be no-shows quite often. This is also why when you post something for free on craigslist there are many people who say they will come pick it up but don’t.
On the other side of the exception tree there are people who have so much money they don’t think about the economic optimization of spending. In many TV shows featuring rich people (Schitt’s Creek, Arrested Development, etc) the characters don’t know the everyday person’s cost of living so they pay exorbitant amounts of money for simple everyday items.
If we’re not aware of these exceptional cases, then we fall into the trap of “this person SAID they needed it, why are they not coming to get it?!”. Having the desire for something and actually getting it are different things, and sometimes people don’t care about the cost of things.
Concept 4: People who can benefit from the entity are not guaranteed to be aware of it.
Here’s probably the most important point when it comes to entrepreneurship (sorry, people reading for dating advice and job searches): the people who can benefit from your work are not guaranteed to be aware of it.
For example: physical rehab. Many people live with the long-term effects of an injury but don’t work with rehab simply because they don’t know how beneficial it can be for them. Other example: credit card perks, such as purchase protection. Did you know that when you buy something with a credit card, it automatically gets an insurance? So if it gets stolen you can submit a claim for it? I had my stuff stolen once and boy did that knowledge come in handy, and if it weren’t for my coworker who told me about it (thanks Dan, although I doubt you’ll ever read this; that makes me slightly sad), I never would have known.
Your work is not being picked up by the people who said they wanted it. Then chances are, it’s probably being picked up by people who just signed up since it’s free. Think of your offering, and think hard about this question: if someone can’t afford the typical version of my offering and don’t even know that it’s out there, what would they be doing right now? How can I be reaching out to them?
Let’s make this about dating and job searches too. Suppose you want to date, then what do you think is a pretty charming quality about you (if the answer is you don’t have any, go back to concept #1)? Suppose you’re a great listener. If someone could really, really use some listening right now but didn’t even know it, what would they be doing? How could you talk to people in that situation?
For job searchers, sometimes it’s a great idea to pitch your position to people who might have the budget. If you’re a GREAT data entry person, and you see your local Bánh Mi shop owner struggling with their books, isn’t it a great idea to do some basic excel for them at a pretty low price? If you have great people management skills and aren’t landing manager positions, what companies would be really struggling from poor management but they just don’t know it? How can you reach out to them?
Concept 5: Presenting the entity as is is the most economic way of creating offerings.
Last concept! Hopefully by now you understand that you, AS YOU ARE RIGHT NOW, have a relative value and there are people who want/need you. But you don’t necessarily want them because of your expectations and criteria, and they might not be aware of your existence.
Could you beef up your status in the relative value ranking? Yes, get that certification, lift that weight, get another training if you want. But it is not a requirement if your only goal is to land SOMETHING. The goal of this writing is to let you know that in order to land SOMETHING, as opposed to NOTHING, you don’t need to do anything.
When you don’t fully understand this truth, the temptation is to lie about yourself and make yourself seem better than you are in the relative value ranking. This will always backfire, because the moment you present yourself a certain way and get accepted for it, the more you have to meet that standard for every second in the future.
This means, impostor syndrome. Constant stress about potentially letting people down. Freezing when people ask you questions. Inability to be yourself because that may reveal your true nature as someone who sucks compared to the resume. And so on.
Showing yourself and offering yourself as you are is the most economic way. It just reduces unnecessary stress and gives you the permission to be naturally you going into the future as well. This concept is actually seen in auctioning too, you can read about auction psychology / auction theory (which is surprisingly a computer science related topic I learned in college).
Congratulations! Now you know exactly what to do to be accepted by someone. Find the people who would gratefully accept your presence and give them the gift of you.