The main character in Death of a Salesman makes his living by persuading other
people to buy his products. A salesman can only count himself successful if he constantly increaseshis turnover. The routine of selling is very repetitious and draining, so the
salesman has to cultivate personal qualities that will help to generate enthusiasm
and optimism in himself even though the person to whom he is selling might
appear uninterested.
At the time this play was written, many Americans were reading a best selling
book called How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.
Basically the thrust of this book was to demonstrate how human relations could be
exploited for practical gain. This is why Willie believes it is so important to be not
just ‘liked’ but ‘well liked’. Because if you are ‘well liked’ people will be
prepared to trust you and therefore buy what you have to sell.
"Selling is the only job in the world in which a man is paid exactly what
he is worth, and not what someone else thinks he is worth. He should love
selling for this reason, and this reason only. He has accepted a man’s job,
and it will be entirely due to his own efforts. If he fails, it will be entirely
due to his own weaknesses."
Alfred Tack, Sell Better - Live Better (1958)Using information from the article "Generation Sell" and the introductory notes above, respond to the following prompt:
What might it be like to sell yourself over and over again? What could be the positive and negative effects of this lifestyle?
You are constantly telling people what you are worth and what you can do. But in the end, you are just comparing yourself to everyone else around you and what they have to offer and what you do not. At the same time, you are constantly thinking about who you are and what you have accomplished throughout your life making you feel good about your past. If you are constantly comparing yourself to others it may push you to be better than the people around you. In a way it helps a lot but at the same time it is not.
ReplyDeleteI feel like to sell yourself over and over again is strenuous and tedious. At first, I can see this being fun meeting a bunch a people to sell items too. However, doing the same thing over and over again can cause boredom and insanity. This is a job that you can never improve or get worse. It just stays the same. The positive to this job would be that if you are good then you will succeed. The quote above defines that by saying, " Selling is the only job in the world in which a man is paid exactly what he is worth." This means that if the person who is selling may prosper if he is good at what he does. If that person fails, then it will entirely be his fault. That could be a positive and negative in the way that you can control your own destiny. This could turn out bad or good.
ReplyDeleteDevin Ruot :)
To sell yourself over and over again would be a very daunting task, but after a while it would just seem normal and you would not notice that you are even selling yourself. When you do something for a long period of time, it becomes second nature and becomes part of your personality. The positive effects of this is that you’re selling yourself with out actually selling yourself; essentially you are doing as you are suppose to do. Also, you could impress those around you by just being “you”. The negative effects of this are you begin to reach a shady area of are you being true to yourself, or true to the “market.” Is this really what you want, or is this what you know you need to do in order to spark interest. You can, sometimes, turn into more of what you want to sell rather than what you are.
ReplyDeleteTo sell yourself over and over again would be like to be artificial and shaped into this product that you think would be appealing to people. It's almost as if you are labeling yourself and selling yourself as a product and not as a human. The value of who you are is lost in what you are trying to make yourself become. It relates to us with college and how we sell ourselves to our parents. Our resume is our advertisement and that is how people judge us...on how we represent ourselves.
ReplyDeleteSelling yourself over and over again I think would get very tiring over a long period of time. I think it would be challenging to keep people interested in you if you are constantly selling yourself. It would be hard to constantly keep creating new and interesting ways to sell yourself to keep people buying your product. A positive effect of this lifestyle could be that the success rate can be rapid. If you are good at selling yourself it would be easy to make a lot of money and to build your business. A negative effect of this lifestyle could be that there is a fierce competition between people in the business world. Everyone is trying to be better than each other, and this causes for a very intense competition.
ReplyDeleteSome of the benefits of this lifestyle could make you believe more firmly in your best qualities. But also, if you're constantly "selling" yourself, you're also constantly judging your success by if other "buy" you. You may be more inclined to ignore some aspects of yourself and inflate others, which would lead to a skewed sense of self. Overall, I would think that this would be a degradation to one's lifestyle and is not to be persued.
ReplyDeleteIf I were to sell myself over and over again, I believe that I as well as my peers would eventually become overwhelmed and break. Selling ourselves would cause us to always want to be better than the person next to us. It would cause us all to become enemies, secretly or out front, making us envy each other and competitive. As students, we have to sell ourselves to colleges, making our resumes as "bulky" as possible, and trying to compete with all other students around the nation as well as the world.
ReplyDeletePositive effects of this lifestyle would include making us more interesting people, because we would need to add aspects that would make us more "wanted." Selling ones self would cause them to make more money if they were good at it. If a person sells themselves to a huge company, and they get the job, they will make a lot of money.
Ultimately, selling ourselves is a problem, and puts too much pressure on our generation. We will always feel the need to sell ourselves in order to be accepted.
To sell yourself over and over again is like to expose you and your morals and values over and over again. This can tear you down or build you up every time you are forced to sell something again. When selling a product it is more then the product that is on the line. It is if the people like the seller and their attitude. If they don't see eye to eye with you, you have no chance in interesting the customer. This process over and over can wear you down and you don't even stand a chance against this vicious cycle.
ReplyDeleteThis is Emma Caldwell
DeleteSelling yourself over and over again is basically like showing people what you can do. But after you keep doing it over and over again you start to feel like you aren't worth anything. The postives would be that you would really know yourself well. You would know all your weaknesses and all your strong points. But there are a lot of negatives you would start to feel down on yourself, like you are never good enough. Comparing youselves to others would make you always want to do better than the others but there is only a couple postives compared to the many negatives of constantly having to sell youself.
ReplyDeleteAfter a while it could be a bad thing to be selling yourself again and again because at the end of the day you could start to doubt yourself and your self worth especially in hard times and days where people don't buy as much. This could also help you be more of a people person as you are dealing with people all day and perfecting the art of charming others.
ReplyDeleteSelling yourself over and over again becomes very mundane and repetitive. The article talked about the development of Generation Sell in regards to the band, Vampire Weekend. Vampire weekend is a growing popular band and one of their first albums is "Contra" (which means opposite). Contrary to popular bands of the 80's and the punk rock bands claiming to want to descend into a nihilist anarachy, Vampire Weekend is a self productive, self motivated band. This is positive, because that's what gets them to where they are. The article continues in saying that our generation is not judgmental, rather self deprecating which is the opposite more negative side of the spectrum.
ReplyDeleteThe positive and negative effects are going to be weighed dramatically different from each other. The negative aspects of this life I believe would be a lot more prominent, because of comparison within others, what you want to hide from others, the "bubble" you would create around yourself, and the labels you would give yourself and would have to live up to, implying that you can't change now, you'd have to be satisfied with who you are and what you've done. The positive aspect I guess would be that you would try to be the best you can personally be, and that the people interested in the traits you specifically have (no one can ever be the same as anyone else as long as they're positively and uniquely themselves) would give you confidence. But the repetition and both positive and negative feedback I believe would lead to an unhappy lifestyle.
ReplyDeleteSome positives of selling yourself would be that you would feel that people like you. Some negatives would be that people may just be using you instead of actually liking you. People are always trying to get others to like them, especially if you are trying to sell something, but it could all just be a lie in order to gain something. Just like in the book How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, it is about how to use people for your own personal gain which is one way that people convince others to buy what they are selling.
ReplyDeleteConstantly being asked to sell yourself over and over again could hurt someones pride. When applying for schools students are forced to compete with others. We are trying to show that we are the best fitted for a school when people with better grades, more money, and more extracurricular are betting us out. We are asked to constantly compare ourselves to these perfect students. After a while it effects the students in a way that they don't feel like they are good enough.
ReplyDeleteSelling yourself over & 'over again could become repetitive & boring, but it could also cause you to self evaluate yourself. This self evaluation would force you to look at both your positive & negative characteristics. This would give a person the opportunity to improve themselves & continue doing what is positive. By causing one to look at their negative characteristics it could cause depression & lack of self worth or could cause a complete turn around in the the person. Or selling yourself could cause lying to those you are selling yourself to in order to have a better chance of selling yourself/product. Selling yourself could also cause you to change who you are completely in order to have a better chance at marketing. Selling yourself could either cause a better you or create bad habits (lying) or less self worth
ReplyDeleteSelling yourself repetitively has positives and negatives to it. It could be good because you each time you go to sell yourself you can use different plans of action. If you were quiet at first, when selling, and it made people uninterested then next time you would have a chance to try out some new tactics. The life would be one full of constant change.
ReplyDeleteThe downside of having to sell yourself constantly is that nothing is guaranteed. In this type of business there is always going to be let downs in performance or others just being critical. The other thing is that there is so much pressure for you to perform because it could be the difference of you and your family eating dinner or not. The weight of the family is banking on your success.
I think that the effects of selling yourself over and over again would make you an entirely different person. You would become a branch of the product you are selling, if the people like the salesman, than they will like the product. Therefore, you bend your personality based on what people want to see, and that would change you as a person. Positively, this kind of life style could make you a better person. People would probably like you, and you could get along with most kinds of people. You would be a "nice" person. On the other hand, you are also pretending to be something you're not. You may not be as happy on the inside as you appear on the outside, because you are not what you really want to be.
ReplyDeleteI think selling yourself would be very stressful and worrisome and I feel that it would take a physical and mental toll on you. You would become a person who is so wrapped up in what other people think about you that you might not like who you become. You wouldn't necessarily be aware of who you are either until someone points out to you what you have become. One of the positives about selling yourself could be that you have lots of people who like you so you don't need to worry about many people hating you. The negatives of this could be the mental state it puts you in. For example if someone doesn't like you then it's a big deal. You get so wrapped up in who people want you to be and it would be overwhelming to make everyone happy all the time.
ReplyDeleteI think that having to sell yourself constantly would be repetitive and intolerable. Although having to be a positive person in front of your perspective clients would force you to learn to handle stresses of daily life and seem vibrant and interesting, always having to put up that front would be exhausting. Knowing that how much you eat that night is dependent on the number of sells you make puts a lot of pressure on you and would most likely make you seem like a pushy person. It would also make you into someone you are not. At a certain point, there will be no distinction between the "salesman" you, and the real personality of you, as you will have lost all of your uniqueness, whether its your snarky attitude or sardonic humor, to having to be nice and pleasing all the time.
ReplyDelete