3 Reasons Why Engineering Schools Should Teach Selling

In general, engineering schools get the reputation of teaching incredibly bright students to solve extremely complex problems. Most people who have interviewed engineers right out of school know that the majority of these students are not exactly the most charismatic individuals out there. However, I propose a change in the generic engineering curriculum to include at least one course in the art of selling for three main reasons.

Note that for the remainder of this post, I refer to recent college graduates in engineering as simply 'engineers' and I know that all engineers are not the same, but I am talking about the majority of these 'engineers'.

First, selling is pervasive in all aspects of life. These engineers will soon be applying for jobs after graduation. Their sheer intellect is usually not enough alone to convince the interviewer for the job due to the fact that engineers have trouble articulating their thoughts. The engineer must sell him or her self to the employer. Furthermore, any time the engineer has a grand idea, he or she must also persuade others to believe in their idea. This persuasion is directly related to one's selling ability.

Second, an engineer can create the best product, but if they can not convince others to buy it, the product quality becomes irrelevant. In today's society, people buy things not because they need it, but because they want it, which is inherently different. Engineers are taught to create products with incredible sophistication and a plethora of features. However, this is not exactly correct. Engineers must create products that consumers want in their daily lives. The only way engineers can figure out what people actually want to spend their money on requires selling, communication, and feedback from the customer. All of which is not taught in engineering curriculum.

Lastly, engineers must utilize communication and social interaction throughout their job, personal life, and relationships. Engineers become great problem solvers, but they lack the necessary communication skills to ask the right questions. No matter how affluent an engineer is, they becomes irrelevant when they spend their time answering a question that customers do not care about. The only way that an engineer can uncover the correct question to answer is through means of communication and social interaction with their customer. Engineering schools do not train their students to seek the right answer, but rather utilize as many convoluted formulas as possible on their tests.

How to Increase Personal Performance: Activities of Fortune

I, along with every other human being on this planet, want to reach my own individual potential. In order to understand how to increase performance, one must dive under the skin and into the human brain. In a recent TED talk that I watched, Dr. Alan Wilkins described what lies at the abyss of the human psyche. 

The human system is composed in these layers, in order from external down to internal.

Therefore, we can see that performance is at the top and has five underlying factors. At the bottom, lies physiology. Physiology is raw data coming into the body. Some examples include the light waves from your computer entering your eyes and the carbohydrates from the food you just ate entering your body as nutrients. 

Per the title of this blog, I claim that there is a straightforward method to changing the physiological stimuli which enter your body. Danial Priestly describes one of the key factors to becoming a key person of influence is to create your own luck by putting yourself in lucky positions. For instance, watching TED videos instead of mind numbing television is one way to begin towards increasing your luck. In order to create your own luck, you must immerse yourself in lucky situations, which I call "activities of fortune".

Once you surround yourself with activities of fortune, the positive physiological data will slowly start improving your emotions, all the way up the pyramid to change your behavior and increase your performance. People say that most of life (90%) is what happens to you, but I beg to differ. If you engulf yourself with activities of fortune, such as reading instead of listening to news or teaching others instead of shopping, you will enhance the physiological input entering your body.

However, there is one caveat. You must love the new situations that you place yourself in. If you simply watch a TED video because this blog suggests it, you will not take anything away from the video. You must enjoy the video itself, which will cause your eyes to pick up on the subtle signals which will change your life by improving your performance down the road.

On a side note, this concept can be expanded to sports, such that, you need to not think about the basketball shot or golf putt, but rather appeal to the physiology data in personal practice before the competition even begins. For instance, imagine playing a sport. If you love the sport, you live the sport. If you live the sport, you play several hours a day, watch the professionals on TV, and talk about this sport with friends. While you think you are merely enjoying yourself, you are in fact placing yourself in activities of fortune, which will in turn increase the positive physiological effects entering your body, resulting in an increase in your performance.