Jordan Peterson Reveals How to Sell Anything to Anyone

Jordan Peterson highlights how different personality traits predict success in different types of jobs:

Simple/Repetitive Jobs (e.g., factory work): Success is best predicted by high Conscientiousness (industriousness and orderliness). IQ determines how fast you learn, but not how well you perform once trained.
Complex Jobs (e.g., managerial/administrative): Success is first predicted by IQ (about three times more powerful) and second by Conscientiousness.
Entrepreneurial/Creative Jobs: Success is predicted by IQ and then high Openness (the creativity dimension). Open people are lateral thinkers motivated primarily by interest in pursuing new ideas.

A fundamental theme is the need for balancing opposite temperaments within a team:

The Entrepreneur vs. The Manager: Entrepreneurial types (high Openness) are often an "implementation catastrophe" and need to pair themselves with managerial or administrative types (high Conscientiousness) to handle organisational ability and paperwork.
The Cost of Growth: Most companies are an "uneasy marriage" of these two types. As a company grows, managerial types tend to dominate, leading to a loss of flexibility and creativity, which can make it difficult for the company to shift laterally and ultimately leads to failure.
The Power of Conflict: It is vital to surround yourself with people who will challenge you (e.g., skeptical or disagreeable partners) because they provide necessary constraints on your ideas and ego. This dynamic opposition helps pre-select only the best ideas and prevents impulsive, catastrophic mistakes.

Peterson and Moore argue that artists and creative types often fail to respect the essential nature of commerce:

Selling is Hard Work: Making a great product is only about five percent of the challenge; selling and marketing is incredibly difficult.
Contempt for Commerce: Artists and creative people often have contempt for the business and sales process, which is a mistake that guarantees failure. They must drop their "false romanticism" and develop these skills if they wish to sustain their creative endeavours.
Selling to Companies: Selling to big companies is often a "brutally difficult" process characterised by excessive delays and layers of management where decision-makers are not rewarded for higher productivity, but punished for higher costs.
The Salesperson's Constitution: Sales requires specific personality traits like being Extroverted, Assertive, and Emotionally Stable to tolerate the typically high rate of rejection (50-to-1).

Peterson offers a solution for creative individuals (high Openness) who are also prone to anxiety and chaos (high Neuroticism):

Use a Schedule as a Friend: Individuals who are not orderly by nature need a schedule to avoid nervous exhaustion. He recommends using a tool like Google Calendar, not to design a "tyrant's day," but to design the day that you would be pleased at having by the end of it.
Accept Constraint: Structure is not a prison; it is a "necessary structure and protection" that is a precondition for additional successful creative endeavours.
Delegate Management: It is helpful to have an assistant or a system manage your schedule to prevent you from "wriggling out" of the very tasks you know are right for you.

The discussion concludes with the role of meaning and ethics in life:

Source of Meaning: Most people find the fundamental meanings in their life through the adoption of responsibility.
Ethical Use of Money: If you become successful, the ethical requirement is not to feel guilty about making money, but to think hard about how you will use that money in the most responsible manner possible (e.g., supporting family, investing in community).
The Power of Goals: People need goals because "it's in the pursuit of valued goals that almost everyone finds positive emotion."