What Anna Sorokin Taught Me About Selling Myself
During Easter break, I watched Inventing Anna, a Netflix series about Anna Sorokin—a Russian-born woman who convinced New York’s elite she was a wealthy German heiress with a sixty-million-euro trust fund.
She had none of it. No wealth, no inheritance, no foundation. What she had was something else entirely.
Balls. Chutzpagh.
She infiltrated the most exclusive social circles in one of the world’s most status-conscious cities. She convinced wealthy, sophisticated individuals to fund her lifestyle and her ambitions.
She stayed in luxury hotels without paying. She used forged bank documents to apply for a twenty-two million dollar loan for her so-called Anna Delvey Foundation. She manipulated friends, systems, and assumptions with a consistency and a composure that was, frankly, remarkable.
Throughout the series, one uncomfortable and persistent question kept returning to me: What kind of mindset does that take to achieve that?
Not the theft. Not the fraud. As despicable as it was. I am deliberately putting all of that to one side, because what I want to examine is something more crucial. On the face of it, she looked the part, spoke as though she belonged, and acted as if everything she wanted was already true.
She asked for things that most people would never dare to ask for. She approached people that most of us would talk ourselves out of approaching. She held a version of herself so firmly that other people accepted it.
Here is the uncomfortable proposition I would like to offer you:
There is often something in behaviours we find distasteful that we shy away from, but if adapted, could actually benefit us. I am not suggesting you defraud anyone. I am suggesting that we honestly look at the gap between Anna Sorokin’s unfailing self-belief and our own, and ask what it is costing us, and who would you need to be for a fraction of that to be possible.
Because if you are selling your services, and ultimately you are selling yourself, these are useful questions.
What would you ask for if you had her level of conviction? Who would you approach if you did not hold yourself back? What fee would you set if you truly believed your work made the difference it could? How much further could you progress if you stopped letting your beliefs define what is possible?
She was not superior to anyone. She did not have better credentials or a stronger track record. What she had was an absolute refusal to let her current reality limit her projected identity.
She decided who she was going to be, and she acted on that decision with a consistency that made others believe it, too.
That is the lesson: not the crime, but the belief.
For those of us who sell our services, the lesson is straightforward. Build something real and then stand in it fully.
Do not shrink your identity to make others comfortable or your fees easier to swallow. Learn to articulate, with evidence, the specific difference your work makes. When you do that, clients do not discount you. They do not question your fee. They see what is in front of them, and they decide accordingly.
Anna Sorokin built perceived value without substance and paid for it with her freedom and her reputation. The opportunity in front of you is that you have the evidence to prove your value, but you have to present or defend your services with the same conviction.
You can be famous for a short time for all the wrong reasons, but a lifetime of notoriety awaits, because in the end, crime really does not pay. Or you can build something for all the right ones.
The show is worth watching. Not to admire her, but to question yourself about the distance between her self-belief and your own. How far are you prepared to go?
And then to ask yourself, honestly, what would you be prepared to do to close that gap?
Until we meet.
Morton
