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

Chapter 14

This is Chapter 14 of The Best Self-Help is Free, a treatise by Mr. Stolyarov. You can read all chapters of this freely available treatise here.

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.