The Best Self-Help is Free: The Virtue of Self-Promotion

Some people today - and many people historically - look down on self-promotion. But this disdain is unjustified. In fact, self-promotion is necessary if you want your work to improve your life in any substantial manner. Moreover, self-promotion is required for you to get the rewards you genuinely deserve from your efforts.

The contempt for self-promotion arises from the mistaken notion that if you have something worthwhile to offer or have done something truly meritorious, other people will necessarily notice it and reward you for it without the need for you to advertise it in advance. But this is mere wishful thinking.

First, many people would prefer to have a good thing for free than to have the same good thing and pay anything for it - including the time and resources it takes to reward the good thing's creator. So many of them will benefit from what you do but will not exert the effort to make your life any better for it, unless you make it extremely easy for them to do so. If the people who benefit from your work have to take a long time to search for information about you or evaluate your merits, then chances are that they will not. It is simply not rational for them to do so.

But many people, even the ones who would prefer to benefit from your work in the easiest possible way, also have some conception of justice - constrained by convenience. They can and will take a few seconds to recognize the creator of a good work - but only in those cases where the creator makes such recognition possible within a the time span of a few seconds. If you want to enable them to do that, self-promotion on your part is necessary. You need to put your name out into the world and attach your name to the work you do. You need to be unashamed about informing others of your deeds through speech and writing. Then, if others find something good about your work, they will know right away whom to praise or reward.

Moreover, you must not underestimate the effect of name recognition on other people's responses. Most people, when they encounter any kind of information only once, tend to dismiss it as something peripheral to their goals and focus. People are much more likely to pay attention to a person whose name they have encountered multiple times - just as the human mind is much more likely to retain information it has received multiple times and in multiple contexts. The more you put your name out where people can find it, the more likely people will be to search for your other works and find out more about you. There is a law of increasing returns when it comes to name recognition. Each additional time you publicly spread your name or attach it to an accomplishment will tend to give you greater returns than the previous times you have done so. This is because every additional appearance of your name makes it more likely for other people to also notice every prior appearance of your name.

Furthermore, aside from human intentions and psychology, even the best-intentioned people who actively yearn to reward the creators of good works might not find out about you unless you engage in self-promotion. After all, every one of us is faced with a gargantuan information problem. We do not know one hundredth of one percent of what goes on in our neighborhood, much less our city, our country, or the world. If any of us wants to reward a meritorious creator, then either we will have to find him, or he will have to find us. If I start looking for a meritorious creator to reward, I will likely find someone, but the probability that I will find you is infinitesimally small. There are, after all, many worthy people in the world. But if you make the effort to show me what you have to offer by putting your work out into the public arena, then you will have made it much more likely for me to notice you and recognize your merits.

I am not religious, but I think the famous religious saying, "God helps those who help themselves," is right on target. People who make every effort to improve their own condition and to enable others to find about it will often discover that they can make gains in their lives more easily than many others. Many observers will believe that these exceptional individuals have been blessed by God or are just unusually lucky. But the truth is much more easily explicable. The individuals to whom success seems to come easily have done hard work in the past, building up the groundwork for that success by developing meaningful accomplishments and letting others know about them. Their increased technical productivity and good reputation then helped them advance much farther than their peers - enabling them to gain access to opportunities that would have been unimaginable without their prior exertion and self-promotion.

Besides, you would not be doing anyone a favor by asking him or her to do the hard work of discovering you. Other people have their own lives and concerns, and - if unaided by your self-promotion - they will not give you the treatment you deserve, simply because your life is not their focus. They cannot possibly be expected to notice and reward you on their own unless you are kind enough to them to seamlessly integrate such noticing and rewarding into the framework of their lives.

Therefore, those who believe that self-promotion is somehow rude or undignified fail to recognize the greater rudeness that comes about from the behavior of those individuals who come to feel entitled to receive rewards that they did not ask for - because they did not consider it polite to ask. I would much rather have a person tell me frankly, "Look at me and what I have done and what I can do!" - for there is nothing offensive in that - than to have him remain perpetually disgruntled at me without explanation, simply because I failed to give him the recognition that I never knew I was expected to give. If you want anything from anyone, it is much more polite to ask for it directly than to harbor an undercurrent of resentment at that person for failing to read your mind and perfectly know your life and deeds. The meek shall not inherit the earth; they will simply resent everyone else on it and end their lives in bewilderment that nobody did them any favors which they did not request.

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