How to Sell Yourself by Joe Girard: A Review

I picked up Joe Girard's How to Sell Yourself from the library, expecting a sales manual. What I got was more like a mirror.

Girard's central claim is simple and a little uncomfortable: before you sell a product, a service, or an idea, you sell yourself—every single day, whether you're a salesperson or not. The person interviewing for a job is selling themselves. The friend asking for a favor is selling themselves. Even the version of yourself you show up as each morning is a pitch, and Girard's whole book is about making that pitch one you'd actually buy.

That question sits at the heart of the book: would I buy me? Girard suggests asking it every morning, and not moving on until the answer is yes. It sounds almost too simple to matter, but I found it sticking with me longer than most of the tactical advice that came after it. Girard asks you to check in with yourself first, and be honest about what you find.

Girard doesn't separate the inner work from the outer work, and that's what makes the book hold together. He talks about grooming and posture in the same breath as belief and persistence, because to him they're the same project. Standing tall isn't vanity; it's evidence you're presenting to the world and to yourself. The packaging matters because what's inside deserves to be noticed.

Where the book surprised me most was in how much of it is about other people, not yourself. Girard insists that selling yourself starts with paying full attention to the other person: listening with everything you've got, remembering that they're not interested in what you have to say until they've had their say. He talks about smiling as a kind of welcome mat, something you offer before anyone has earned it, and about extending yourself to others as a way of extending your own influence. None of this reads like manipulation. It reads like the plainest version of decency, dressed up as sales advice.

He also lays out four guidelines for selling well: be your own best customer, put yourself in the customer's shoes, don't get behind a curtain, and be bigger than your product. The last one is particularly striking. Whatever you're selling, whether it's a car, a service, or an idea, you have to be more convincing than the thing itself, because the thing itself can't speak for you.

The persistence chapter is where the book earns its keep. Girard, a former car salesman, has no patience for people who play it safe. He writes that talent won't save you, education won't save you, only persistence will, because the world is full of talented, educated people who never pushed through. His line about cars stuck with me: a car parked safely in a garage is protected, but that's not what it was built for. Neither are we.

If the book has a flaw, it's repetition. Girard leans hard on affirmations and daily mantras, and some readers will find the "say this three times each morning" structure formulaic. But I think that's partly the point. He's not selling you a new idea; he's selling you a discipline, and discipline only works if you actually do it, not just read about it.

What I took from this book isn't a sales technique. It's a standing question I now ask myself most mornings: would I buy me today? I am working towards making it a 'yes'. Girard definitely convinced me that's the right question to be asking.