Telling is repelling, proving is moving
If I have to tell you something, you unconsciously assume there’s a reason I can’t show you.
If I have to tell you something, you unconsciously assume there’s a reason I can’t show you.
If there’s one lesson life insists on reminding me of, it’s this: You can get what you want, but it will never be how you wanted it.
“I can’t write about that, everyone in my industry already knows it.” A friend recently said that to me. They were worried that the marketing content they were working on was too rudimentary, too basic to be impressive. Have you ever worried about that?
When we think about “the future” of our business or our marketing, we’re not considering real events. We’re imagining what might happen. No matter how skilled we may be at marketing, our vision of the future is quite literally a figment of our imagination.
It’s hard to see our own business objectively. It’s hard because we’re so close to it. We can’t see much of ourselves without a mirror, and we can’t always see our own business from the inside, either.
Worrying can paralyze us. It can keep us from getting our marketing work done, from stretching ourselves beyond our current capabilities, and from experimenting with new strategies and techniques.
On May 4, 1844, over an experimental line extending the almost 40 miles from D.C. to Baltimore, Samuel Morse sent four words. A similar message sent just days before would have taken hours to arrive. Now, it travelled the distance in an instant.
The task was to sell a German-made car in America, less than 15 years after the end of World War II. Oh, and it looked and drove nothing like the most popular cars of the day. So how do you introduce a new car in a hostile market dominated by giants?
Why do we put off marketing work we know we should be doing? The fact is, if we aren’t confident an action is going to create positive results, we won’t do it. We’ll procrastinate. We’ll avoid it. We’ll make excuses. It’s not because we’re lazy, it’s because we’re scared.
My favorite cognitive bias is called “déformation professionelle.” Basically, we see the world through our jobs. It’s a bias I certainly have. I see everything through a marketing strategy lens. Often, that just makes me a boring conversation partner. But, sometimes, it actually helps.
If you’re too patient for profit, focusing on growth alone—which is a common problem in modern business—you’ll wait too long to find out if anyone actually wants to spend money on your product.