Note: Some time ago I published an article entitled About My Art: Why I Strive For Quality Over Quantity, with which this article dovetails nicely, so if this one resonates with you, then you might consider heading over to that one…
It’s been a long time, but once again I recently took a chance and bought a book about internet marketing & sales, a currently popular book by an author who claims that he’s made millions using the techniques and processes conveyed in the book.
And once again, I found it nauseating, and wanted to toss it in the trash can (the specific author & book shall remain unnamed, as I don’t wish to promote them).
Because as usual, instead of focusing on offering value and quality to people, the author insists that we should manipulate their emotions, and get them to buy impulsively.
This is why I suck at sales, resulting in the dismal reality that all of my online ventures—be it Lifeology Blog, or Lifeology Store, or Lifeology Bookshop, or my books on Amazon—have not (yet) seen any appreciable success.
I don’t want to manipulate peoples’ emotions to trick them into buying something from me. It annoys me when sales people (or social media ads, or “click funnel” websites, or commercials that interrupt me, etc) try to do that to me (it doesn’t work anyway, I avoid making purchasing decisions based on emotion), and so I reject the thought of doing that to others, even if I could make more money doing so.
That’s simply not who I am.
On the other hand, getting people to mindfully recognize quality, uniqueness, authenticity, and value in our present culture of noise, distraction, short attention span, superficial values, mass conformity, knee-jerk emotions, mindless consumption, etc. has proven to be a difficult—if not impossible—nut to crack.
This brings to mind my first exposure to this reality, a statement by Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) in his excellent book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big:
“If your view of the world is that people use reason for their important decisions, you are setting yourself up for a life of frustration and confusion. . .Few things are as destructive and limiting as a worldview that assumes people are mostly rational.”
That hit me like a gut punch…it was the first time it ever occurred to me that people generally don’t make their purchasing decisions based on reasoning or rationale—but, apparently, based on their emotions.
But still. Manipulating people’s emotions to get them to buy from me seems underhanded at best, and I don’t know that I could do that to people and still be able to sleep at night.
UPDATE 7/15/25: Seth Godin also recently said on a podcast (sorry, I don’t recall which podcast I was watching at the time):
“People aren’t going to buy something from you just because you worked really hard on it.”
That one also felt like a gut punch…I mean, if that’s true, then where, exactly, does “hard work” fall in the philosophy of success?
So considering the above two statements, I can’t help but wonder if using my intellect and creativity to create sensible stuff—as well as working really hard on them to make them the best they can be, to do the best work I can do—is where I’m going wrong?
(An aside: I’m also coming to believe that that’s also why I can’t get any traction on social media, and thus have had to seriously question the rationale of spending much time/effort there, and as a result continually reduced said expenditure, and am now to the point of having left all of the mainstream social media platforms…)
*shrugging*
I suppose all I can do is keep saying, as Seth Godin also advocates, in seeming contradiction with his above statement:
“Here, I made this…”
—with the hope that eventually people will start to notice, and then maybe some of my creative work can transition from merely really expensive hobbies to at least some semblance of an actual business. But until then, I suppose I’ll just keep creating…and continue to focus on quality over quantity, authenticity over superficiality, creating something remarkable and/or unique…my own Purple Cow…
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