We often understand something better when we see it in comparison with something else than when we see it in isolation.

The second erroneous belief, and a reason that some people disdain sales, is the myth of the moneygrubber: that being effective requires being greedy and that the best (and perhaps only) way to succeed is to become a coin-operated selling machine.

It’s easy to dismiss the one-word pitch as more simplistic than simple—the ultimate dumbing-down of a message. But that misunderstands both the process of formulating a one-word pitch and the galvanizing effect of its introduction. Reducing your point to that single word demands discipline and forces clarity.

negative events can clarify positive ones. They equip Hall not with weak-kneed dreaminess but with tough-minded buoyancy—the proper balance between downward and upward forces.

One essential—and ultimately ironic—reason for this development: The technologies that were supposed to make salespeople obsolete in fact have transformed more people into sellers.

Irritation, he says, is “challenging people to do something that we want them to do.” By contrast, “agitation is challenging them to do something that they want to do.”

Beyond that balance of positive-to-negative, life becomes a festival of Panglossian cluelessness, where self-delusion suffocates self-improvement.

Some analysts project that in the United States, the ranks of these independent entrepreneurs may grow by sixty-five million in the rest of the decade and could become a majority of the American workforce by 2020.

In the world of moving others, I call this ability “social cartography.” It’s the capacity to size up a situation and, in one’s mind, draw a map of how people are related.