Chase The Challenge

It's 2:30 am and this is finally complete.
I hope you come back to this post
in the years to come.

I see a lot of people lately using
marketing as a way of presenting crazy things.

Today some doctor was saying
that the Covid-19 deaths
in NY were actually really small.

Oh? Hang on a sec.

Let me check the stats so far.
In the state of New York alone,
there's 16,599 deaths so far out of 282,000 cases.
OK - what's your angle?

He pointed to the whole population of the state of NY.
Then he said "it's like half a percent of the entire population dying."

It made me think of when marketers say
"the cost is less than a cup of coffee at Starbucks."

This is like the credit card game to me.
Is it insanely high interest or affordable low payments?

Cheap marketing is about misdirection.
Instead of looking at the two numbers -
how many are infected and how many died,
he's saying look at the whole population of NY.

Except the entire population isn't infected.
He could have used the entire population of the wold
while he was at it.

Remember when they kept saying
the mortality rate is less than the flu?
Doesn't look that way to me - at least in NY.

If you have 282,000 people confirmed infections
and 16,599 people have already died in less than 90 days
that's a mortality rate of 16.98%.

Imagine Starbucks saying for every 100 customers
that walk into our coffee shops, 16 won't make it out alive.

Too gloomy?
Let's make it shiny and happy.

Let's say someone promises a million dollar check
to 16 out of every 100 people who buys their book?
Not the first 16 people - every 16 out of 100.
You'd like your chances of getting that million dollars, wouldn't you?
You'd be logging into Amazon with your credit card on fire.

So it's just like the flu except there's no cure for it,
no vaccine and no standard treatment.
And depending on how you "play" with the numbers,
it's either a really small amount or tens of thousands of people
are dying with no proven way to stop it.

That's why marketing to me is way more than presentation.

Marketing to me is a way of seeing.
Everywhere you look, every minute of every day.

Marketing is about seeing
the scarcity inside abundance
And the abundance inside scarcity.

Yes- I'll give examples:

Scarcity inside abundance - Fancy coffee beans

(scarcity is imagination before Starbucks level roasters
introduced the idea of a boutique bean.)
vs cheap every day coffee beans that are more affordable.
Bottled spring water vs tap water.
(Selling for premium what everyone has for free in their kitchen sink)

Creating abundance inside scarcity- write a book (abundance)
in just 20 minutes a day, (scarcity)
save a million dollars with just $7 a day(scarcity).


The two examples combine to show possibility
where you might not previously have considered.
Tomorrow's every day hit is today's unknown blind spot.

Need to start a taxi business?
Give everyone an app and tell some people
to use their car to drive people around.
Tell the other people to call when they need a ride.
Collect the money.

Need to start a hotel business?
Give everyone an app and tell some of those people
to surrender their bedrooms to total strangers
and tell strangers to rent them.
Collect the money.

Be sure to take victory lap as the genius billionaire.
Until a pandemic hits and no one wants to risk death
just to ride in a stranger's Honda Civic
or sleep in their spare room anymore.

What?
Doesn't sound as romantic that way? lol

The first step is in seeing the scarcity or abundance.

The second part is the really valuable part.
Especially for right now.

The second part can change your life in a great way.

It's your ability to handle adversity.
Specifically, your ability to handle pain,
how you view it, and how you react to it.
That's how you earn it.
Earning it is being with the challenges
as they are because when you overcome them,
your success is more durable and lasts longer.

You can't fire every client.
There's only so much training you can get before adversity says hello.

In the areas of deepest pain are the longest successes.
You could have been given the marketing plans
for Starbucks before they first started - the blueprint
for a billion dollar coffee company and you might never have made it happen.
You could have been given 100 gallons of spring water
and tried to sell it for crazy amounts and you may have gone broke.

There are two parts to this.
Picking the path
and taking the punches along the way.

Lots of today's marketing
teaches you to avoid as many punches as possible.
To copy what works without always
enduring what it took to create it.

Which as a competitor I love
because I can go down in the trenches
where people are afraid to go and win.
If you're stocking up on how to sell without selling,
you're avoiding valuable conversations.

I know people who were once very successful years ago
because they were hungry for conversations
and situations that challenged them.
They weren't looking for iron clad rebuttals
to silence objections- they welcomed them as a way to connect.

Then they stopped doing some of the things
that made them successful.
Not all of the things- just the ones they didn't like.

And at that point they became like the people starting out.
Both groups afraid of rejection
and seeking any strategy to avoid that feeling.

You can copy what works and slap your name on it.
But you didn't have the battles that happened to make it work.
That puts you at a major disadvantage.

The success is just one part of the reward.
It was overcoming the sweaty palms,
the white knuckles, the absolute fear
of "can I do this again" even when you just did it.

Then you have other people you have to deal with.
They're not all singing to you
and agreeing with everything you say.

That's where a lot of people run into the impostor syndrome.
Because some people are bluffing
and haven't put in the work
they themselves know is needed.

In the parlance of the moment,
they didn’t develop the antibodies
for conflict, stress and rejection.

If you have a lot of days without
the every day occurrences of conflict,
stress and rejection
or days of frantically trying to avoid them
you can quickly lose your feel for navigating through it.

Your fear keeps your eyes open.
Then you have to do something about what you see.

My reputation and past successes
don't protect me from the battles of today.
If anything, they make today's battles harder
because I'll put up with less crap than I did in the past.
That's a potential weakness I have to fight every day.

I try to be aware of things that will be a challenge
even if they aggravate me.
Avoiding unpleasant things is not a winning strategy.
You always need some uneasiness
when you're trusted with other people's lives.
It makes you pay attention.

There's a great quote from an
animator who worked directly with Walt Disney himself.

"There were actually three different Walts:
the dreamer, the realist, and the spoiler.
You never knew which one
was coming into your meeting."
Ollie Johnstone

Notice two of the "Walts" were realist and spoiler.
Not Dreamer and Yes person.

Walt could have just walked in and
said to that Disney animator Ollie Johnstone
"Hey Ollie,
I'm sorry, I was in such a rush to get to work
I missed the sign on the building.
Does it say the Ollie Johnstone company
or the Walt Disney company?
Right Right - Walt Disney! Thanks for reminding me.
I INVENTED Mickey Mouse. Maybe you've heard of it?
Here's the Mickey Mouse template.
Someone go get me a coffee
and the rest of you get to work."

And everyone else could have been like
"Sure thing, boss!
We've got the tracing paper ready."

But he was always sweating the details of his own ideas.

Look at the albums that changed music,
and chances are you'll see box sets
with hours of mistakes
and songs thrown away.

The higher up you go,
the more insulated you
become from the trenches.
You'll have systems in place
that can shield you from harsh realities for a long time.

Like a nice car you bought
with money from your past successes
that smooths out all the bumps in the road.
GPS makes you think your sense of direction is better than it is.
Spell check makes you forget how to spell basic things.

It would be understandable
if you forgot how bumpy the road can actually be.
And even more understandable
if you dreaded bumps in the road
the same way some cats
hate getting wet.

To the outside world, you're the smooth driving,
never lost perfect speller.

But your car and computer know otherwiiiiiiise. 


But sometimes life sneaks up from behind.



No matter how much money you make,
you still have to splash around and get messy.

The great artists and marketers who last
stay close to what scares and challenges them.

Look back at any empire in history.
Look at any pizza place still open on Main street.

If you compete, you compete every day.

Chase the challenge.

Robert