Ask HN: Selling one's self

2•it_is_beautiful•45m ago

I'm having a hard time.

I lack the skills to sell myself.

I have a hard time communicating, even this post. It feels like I'm looking through 100x zoom, I can't find a clarity of message. I used to sit to write résumés for hours and hours, to come up with nothing of value.

Lack of schooling and lack of real-world experience contributed. I didn't get interviews, and when I did, they weren't impressed. Mia culpa.

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While others worked publicly and sent out hundreds of résumés, I worked privately and sent nothing for years. Years!

Now I'm trying to be practical and freelance, which I've tried twice before. There are a lot of jobs that I have the skills for easily, but when I try to write my profile, or my past projects, I spin out endlessly.

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Concretely, although I don't have any major projects shipped, I do have a lot of previous software with relevant problems I solved. I can show the problem, the code, and the results. For example, extraction from a PDF -> Script -> SQLite database. I don't have to say:

"This was part of an unfinished project I did, blah blah blah."

I can just show it and say I worked on it. Whether contracted or my own code, it does what it does, and as I'm contracted for jobs, I can show those results too (if the client is ok with it.

But I just. Can't. Get. Moving.

It's been so many years. It's like an asymptote, I can't break through it. I just need to break through it once, get some momentum. For this concrete (freelancing) problem, any advice?

Comments

skx001•32m ago

Start with this while I come up with a thoughtful comment of my own.

https://www.swyx.io/marketing-yourself

verdverm•20m ago

Resumes and freelance profiles are not sales in the traditional sense. If you want to do better in freelance, you'll want to reframe how you think about it.

Putting that aside, I highly recommend the book "To Sell Is Human" that reframes "sales" as something more, i.e. convincing a child they need to brush their teeth before bed is also "sales"

It was one of the books that helped me through this, The Challenger Sale if you want to read something more akin to traditional sales.

Another avenue you should consider is getting a professional resume / career coach. A good one will ask you questions about what you want in a job before looking at what you've written. They bring experience and have seen 1000s of resumes to know what works, and are tuned into how that changes over time.

> But I just. Can't. Get. Moving.

Another book recommendation, "The Now Habit"

books are going to be much better than what you read online

1. they get you away from the portal to that anxiety

2. they are long, thorough, well thought out, with many examples/anecdotes for you to potentially connect the dots through