What's up everyone? This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew.

Welcome back to Founders Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you the business builder,

the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business,

a team, or a new product. This week on Founders Journal, we're doing things a little differently.

We are dropping a mini series all about how to start building. We're focusing on the mindset of

an entrepreneur and the skills you need to go from idea to reality. That means instead of just one

episode Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, this week we're giving you two. A new show that you won't

want to miss plus a classic episode you maybe haven't heard before. You're listening to a classic

episode right now, number three in the series, but make sure you catch today's new episode as well.

In today's classic episode, I am examining our perception of sales and why any modern

business pro needs to take their sales or storytelling skills seriously and to the next level.

Let's hop into it.

Sales is the number one career skill and it's not even close. I feel full conviction in saying that.

And the reason I feel full conviction is because I feel like we've been taught our whole lives

to think of sales as a second class skill. Memes have been made out of snake oil salesman.

People frown upon sellers being only focused on money and nothing else.

When you hear the word sales, what do you think of? For many of you, it'll be

someone with a headset in a boiler room style office or a spam collar trying to sell you on a free

trip to the Caribbean or a scene from Wolf of Wall Street. It was the same thing for me in college.

When I went to the University of Michigan and I was in the business school there, sales wasn't

explicitly frowned upon, but it was just never talked about. There was no sales class in our

core curriculum. The most sought after jobs weren't sales jobs. They were investment banking or

...