Why didn’t I scream about it everywhere like a lunatic? Maybe to keep an excuse ready for my possible fucking defeat. I’m starting to think my fear of selling runs deeper. Because I understand the theory. Of course I do. But I keep finding mechanisms to save myself from defeat, from humiliation, from someone questioning the price of what I offer. From being called a scammer.

Not all ice cools the same

Every time I think about sales, the same old line comes to mind: a good salesman can sell ice to an Eskimo. That’s the line, that’s the word it uses, and nobody has updated it since roughly 1955. It implies cunning and persuasion, sure, but it also tells us the salesman is someone so persuasive he can sell you what you don’t need. In Mexico I’ve also heard that a good salesman will never go hungry. And once, working at a hotel, the sales department declared itself the most important department of all.

So when I try to use logic, my brain short-circuits. Because I think: people buy what they need. But… is that true? Why did that man buy the ice? What did he tell his wife when he got back to the igloo hauling even more of it? Did he look himself in the mirror and say, “Damn, Amarok, that guy really was a good salesman. He got me”?

Okay, okay! I know the whole thing is an exaggeration. I know it means a salesman can sell anything to anyone. Which is exactly the point: people buy what they don’t need.

That’s how the salesman gets him: he sells him unique ice, the ice that will make him happier, or maybe the ice that will make his wife love him more. Or some fucking quality that hypothetical genius piece-of-shit salesman invented, and now Amarok is sitting on a surplus of ice. There he is, staring at his special ice, thinking it’s special, in a special corner. Damn, they really got you, Amarok.

Then I think: every time I’ve wanted to create a product or a service, I understand I’m supposed to solve people’s problems, a need, heal a pain. And what the fuck does that have to do with anything! People don’t buy for that. Unless the word need is what’s wrong here. Because if you think about it, belonging, feeling unique, owning something with a story of its own — those are needs too. Same with problems. Sometimes we just invent them. Having a big, perfectly functional nose isn’t a problem, but you’d swear it is and you go get it fixed. Same with pain. We don’t need to eliminate boredom, but Netflix doesn’t hurt. Amarok now knows he owns the most beautiful fucking ice cube in all of Nunavut.

This is what luxury brands figured out. To some people, buying a watch that costs more than a hundred thousand dollars is absurd. Or a Montblanc pen (God, I love those bastards). Or a Mercedes-Benz. The watch tells time. The pen writes. The car moves you. And people need that, but they choose the expensive ones for other reasons. Amarok's ice cools like any other ice. But his cold doesn't feel the same.

Ten-thousand-dollar ice

Yesterday I went to a Hormozi video to understand more about selling. Flexing those enormous biceps, he said: sell something very cheap to a lot of people, or something very expensive to a few. He recommends starting with expensive. Sell to people with money, the people carrying those lovely wallets stuffed with green. It makes sense: fewer clients, so I could take even more care with each one. Should I have made a luxury book club? Damn, I want those biceps.

Amarok, my friend, did you drop ten thousand green on ice, or just a thousand? Hormozi would have sold him luxury ice. Meltwater from the Swiss Alps. Definitely better than selling regular ice at ten dollars a pop to a thousand of Amarok’s friends.

While heating up a tuna empanada I listened to “The four-letter code to selling anything,” where Derek Thompson explains MAYA (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable), the theory of Raymond Loewy, the father of industrial design. Loewy said we’re torn between two forces: the love of what’s new and the fear of what’s too new. So, as Thompson puts it, “To sell something familiar, make it surprising. To sell something surprising, make it familiar.” A guy who designed trains was giving me the best advice I’d found for creating a product.

Go back to my examples of unnecessary luxury and they all fit. They’re surprising and familiar at the same time. The luxury watch is still a watch. Same with the car and the pen. They just made them more surprising. The ice Amarok bought is the ice he already knows, only fucking better.

Now I think about Graza, that green bottle of olive oil with the fun design. It’s oil, like a hundred other brands on the shelf. But it’s green and fun. Cooking is green and fun now. Your salad is green and fun. It’s oil. But it’s green and fun.

I sold zero spots in my book club. I made it cheap. Maybe it’s still not green and fun enough. The truth is I just haven’t screamed about it everywhere like a lunatic.

Translated from the Spanish by the author, with help from Claude.

But I envy them. Because I make things: concepts, products, services, and I freeze when it’s time to take them out and sell them.

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On top of that, as a writer I proclaimed myself an artist, and I doubled down on the belief that selling goes against art. That one and plenty of other lies I told myself so I’d feel guilty for wanting to monetize my talents. All it got me was depression, debt, and a lot of resentment toward my own art. Ten years like that. But it’s over, bitches.

This boy is going to learn how to sell. He’ll learn the tricks and the techniques, he’ll dive into the psychology behind the reasons we buy. I’ll create products and services, some genuinely useful, some deeply absurd, to understand what actually drives a sale. Every attempt logged in an article, and a beautiful final installment for you, paying reader: the whole adventure, behind the scenes, good photos, tools, and a deep dive into my magnificent mind, which is now the mind of a writer and a seller (will be, but you get the point).

I’m going to research methodologies, use tools like Claude or ChatGPT to mock up my products fast, because yes, I’m doing this alone. There will be failures, wins, drugs, drinks, fights, arguments, debts going down or going up, truths revealed, lies exposed, hair, dust, dicks and vaginas, all of it. Okay, not exactly. That’s just the adrenaline talking.

There will be sales: that’s the only thing this experiment cares about. With a few small rules imposed, obviously. I won’t try to sell anything illegal or anything that could hurt people; nothing that’s a scam, because I despise that. All legal, all in good faith.

There will be challenges, I know. One of them is that I’m in Mexico, and the market here is complicated. But I won’t close myself off to selling to a wider market outside my country. Because the internet unites us today, brothers.

Will my addiction to over-optimizing paralyze me before I ever hit the market? Will I be stopped by this belief of mine that selling is immoral? Be my witness, and let's sell and sell and sell and sell and sell until I drown in cash.

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Translated from the Spanish by the author, with help from Claude.

In the afternoon: eat and back to my desk. At night: dinner, walk the dog, and back to my desk for a while.

This repeats Monday to Friday. And as I think it over; it’s not so different from what would happen if I went back to working in an office. Routine is something you can’t escape; and I don’t mean that in a bad way. Daily life isn’t supposed to hold an adventure. Life is slow and it happens one day after another.

Now, of course there are differences between working from home and in an office. Leaving the house already means hundreds more possibilities in a day; you might crash your car, pick a fight with some rival, or see a Dr. Simi dancing in the street. The chats I used to have in the break room or while I poured myself a coffee. The meetings. Having a team under me. Being around more people. In the end that’s what it is: more people.

At home it’s just me, my wife, and my daughters, the family dynamic. They tell me about their days, their life out there, and I’m here. I give them advice and claim to know every single thing they’ve been through: because I lived it too, in school. I remember my adventures as a kid and I remember that despite being extremely social, I felt more at peace staying home. Not one day did I choose to go to school: I was forced. That tells me something about myself — that school wasn’t the problem; it’s mandatory structures, the idea of having to do what has to be done, that frustrates me and chokes my freedom. I like to choose. Let me choose what I want to do. That’s why I chose to work from home.

And even though “I think I like this little life” echoes in my head every day; this life charges me a price. I discovered I’m not as likable over WhatsApp, and even less over Google Meet or Zoom. Screens seem to block that charisma I’ve always cashed in on, the one that got me promoted in barely a year and a half at KPMG (yeah, let me brag a little); the one that got me hellos and smiles by the ton in the office hallways.

So my career seems to have slowed down ever since I made the call eight years ago to work from home and on my own. And if you add that my work was mostly ghostwriting, it looks like I’ve simply done nothing. You can’t go through life saying: “See that excellent article by so-and-so? Well, he doesn’t even think that. Maybe he doesn’t even have that knowledge. I’m the genius behind it.”

It’s the fucking screen’s fault, it inhibits me, it hides me. My face distracts me. I see myself: stupid, and handsome, and stupid and handsome, and stupidly handsome. I see myself. That’s the problem: I SEE MYSELF. And like Foster Wallace said: writers are terribly conscious of ourselves, of others, of what they think of us; so on a video call I’m hyper-conscious of myself… because I’m there, and here at the same time. My brain fills with intrusive thoughts. You’re blinking too much. You’re touching your hair too much. They caught you spacing out. So I start acting and my performance gets weird: I sip coffee, I drink water, I flex a little, I smile, I hunt for my best angle (left or right), and I lose myself. Things I’ll maybe never know about myself in an in-person conversation. But on the video call I see myself and see myself. I see myself too much. I think too much. My god.

And over chat? I send you a dancing monkey or a meme with so many layers it makes an onion look like a dumbass. This was always part of who I am. Whoever knows me in person gets that absurd layer of mine. Whoever doesn’t know me in person just gets confused: what the fuck’s wrong with this guy. Just hand over the article.

Sweet solitude

Reading helps me understand myself, to know other human beings. With those universal pains: love, money, freedom, and the system. Loneliness. The essence is almost always the same. It seems we’ve all lived the same thing; we’re a fucking redundant species. Loneliness is the same today as a thousand years ago. We’ve all felt like we don’t belong; that our time isn’t the right one. All this to say I feel lonely from working remote? Looks like it. That’s how my brain works; that uncontrollable little bastard. Alone but happy

Yeah. Sometimes I go for coffee and there’s no one. Nobody to tell me which person slept with which other person, that we won’t hit the budget, or that they’re about to fire somebody. I just stare into the void and listen to the silence. In that coffee room, the one where I’d look out the window and horses ran by (weird, right? This is Mexico) and I ached to be that free. Like BoJack in that episode where he watches the horses run. We just can’t have it all. Grow up, little guy.

I never pictured myself as a writer writing from the tower, no contact with people. It creates a strange distance, because I live in a virtual world and not the other one. And I want to come back… little by little. To get grossed out by humanity again like when I was a kid.

These are my first steps. Written under my name. Putting my thoughts out into the world for people to make their own or throw away. But let them out of my head. Let them explore the world, go corner to corner. Then I’ll come out. I’ll go back to the humans. Because I’m human and feeling like I don’t belong fills me with terror — the terror of turning into an alien.

Or maybe not.

Because I eat breakfast without rushing. Because I walk my dog slowly. Because I eat with my family beside me and not next to that idiot who smelled bad. Because I get to have breakfast with my wife every day. Because I’ll find ways to get my career back. I’m going to tame the screen and my charisma will punch through; I just have to figure out how to be myself on video calls. Seriousness only kills jobs, business, and everything that’s fun.

Will I go back to an office? Never! At least not a traditional one. But preferably none at all. I like that my prison is my home. A prison that makes me feel free.

That’s the glitch.

Translated from the Spanish by the author, with help from Claude.

The machine and me

I remembered my childhood: the sleepless nights playing Pokémon Ruby. The hours and hours I spent as a kid in front of Encarta. Whole afternoons crawling through the Cartoon Network websites. The obsession with finding something new and interesting. It wasn’t even the writing, it was everything else it could do: give me information, advice, ideas, more. It talked to me about physics, history, finance, even literature. The guy knew everything. It wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t human, but it was something that made me want to write to it just to find out what it had to say.

I used it to write everything I didn’t want to write. My plan was simple: finish this fast and you’ll have more time to write what you love. The machine hooked me and I ended up with more than five writing gigs. I went from writer to editor of a machine, to an expert prompter cranking out text. The repetitive shit that had me sick of it all turned into this: ask the machine to write, copy, paste, fix. Over and over. Seven in the morning to eleven at night. No time (again) to write what I loved.

The plan changed: make all the money you can, then take fewer jobs, you’ll have money and time to write whatever you want. Then it all fell apart. More people found ChatGPT and the formulas got obvious: in short, it’s not X, it’s Y, delve, em dashes, etc. They started asking me to run my texts through shitty AI detectors. Others tried to automate their whole copy department and published the worst hallucinations. They concluded the machine did it badly.

How naïve. Because almost nobody noticed the machine had gotten better. A lot better. That’s when I switched to Claude and the cycle started all over. Now it was even faster, fewer mistakes, less editing. This time I might actually get more time to write. And yeah, I finally did. But something had changed in me. Sure, my personal texts — the ones that actually matter, the ones that come out of me — those I wrote without the machine; but something made me doubt and I started asking it for feedback. The editor I never had showed up! Finally someone pointing out my redundancies, my excess adjectives, my need to tell the reader how to feel. The advice wasn’t bad, but I started getting dependent, started asking myself if I actually knew how to write. Because the ideas were mine, the writing was mine, but the corrections were Claude’s. Is this what we’ll be in the future? Hybrid writers? I just wanted a goddamn editor, for fuck’s sake.

These days AI splits people. On one side, the ones who reject it outright and prophesy the consequences we’ll pay for letting it grow. On the other, the enthusiasts forecasting a future full of possibilities that’ll improve our species. I’m always in the middle: a lukewarm fucking fence-sitter. I’m an insider. A writer handing more power and use to the one thing best equipped to replace me.

Who needs writing?

Few people know there’s a huge difference between a professional using Claude or ChatGPT and a regular person. The ones who aren’t soaked in the craft are the ones producing those obvious texts everyone’s already spotted. The others, the editors and writers with experience, are undetectable. They were, from the machine’s first version. Those are the ones we’ll focus on. Because I’m one of them.

Anyone who tells you they can spot it is lying. Because their ego’s too big, because they’ve never used these tools, or because the only texts they’ve ever seen were written by amateurs. Can I prove it? Yes. Because until right now you believed a human wrote this. Just kidding. But I made you doubt, didn’t I?

Which means the gap between a human text and a machine one doesn’t exist. For now you still need the prompter, but soon it’ll be one machine asking another to write; maybe a third one edits and another publishes. Or a single one does the whole thing. In seconds they’ll produce masterpieces: thousands upon thousands of Quixotes churned out in minutes.

But the writing community thinks it’s found an answer: the mistake as a response to perfect structure. A typo here and there. A crooked sentence, out of order; things you’re not supposed to do, the opposite of the style manuals. Sorry, comrades. Those mistakes can be faked. I can ask the machine for them.

That’s how I know that somewhere someone has already opened their phone, looked at a text, and their heart clenched, their guts turned, they even lost their breath. Not knowing there was a machine behind it: with a human helping it or on its own. Because the reader’s going to feel something either way.

Writers are different. The words my fingers type I felt and I lived. The machine produces without risk, without consequences, without fear, without exposing itself to shame. My texts are personal. They’re the ideas circling my head while I brush my teeth and when I close my eyes at night. I circle them and stalk them; I set them down one way, then the other; I change the order, then throw them out. Until they come back: that’s when I hold them. I go to my computer and spit them all over the blank page. Nobody dies from not reading. Writers die from not practicing the craft. Our fingers rot, the ideas pile up, stacking one on top of another and another and another until we can’t take it anymore.

The days of detecting AI text are over. Soon even the most mediocre will be able to generate essays, articles, poetry, whatever. It won’t matter if it came from a human or not, only that it makes you feel. The text will be the text no matter where the hell it came from.

Writing will only be useful to me (the craft, I mean), to other writers. Because I need it. Readers don’t need us anymore. We need writing, because we can’t live without it.

Will what the machine makes be better or worse? Maybe the same. I don’t know. I really don’t know. For my part, I’m going to keep experimenting, keep looking for new roads. Because I need it to live.

This is the glitch.

Translated from the Spanish by the author, with help from Claude.