We recently made a pasta dish that my sister recommended to us. She warned us, “Don’t use all the black pepper in the recipe. It’s way too much”
But we decided to try the recipe as is. Certainly that’s the way the dish was intended – maybe my sister just doesn’t like pepper as much as us. But we immediately regretted it. My sister was right – it was way too much. The pepper completely overpowered the rest of the dish.
Building great things is as much about addition as it is about subtraction.
Most construction lumber is made out of softwood. Fir, pine, wood from trees that don’t lose their leaves. It’s plentiful, fast growing, cheap, and easy to work with. But it’s relatively soft and weak.
Hardwood is from deciduous trees: walnut, oak, maple, etc. These trees take a lot longer to grow, and the wood they produce is expensive, and it’s harder to work with. But it’s the beautiful material they make family heirlooms out of.
When selecting the materials to make up your business or next project, you can choose cheap and fast. And often that’s the right course of action. But understand just like using softwood, you may be sacrificing longevity, durability, and polish in the process.
Or consider the alternative, to slow down, think things through, and grow consistently. It’s not necessarily the easiest path, but it may be the ticket to building something that lasts for the long haul.
No one wants their reading experience interrupted by a pop up asking us to subscribe for email updates. And yet every blog, news, and ecommerce site invariable follows the same template. Page loads. Wait 5 seconds. Pop up appears with tiny, hard to click close button, and the same damn passive aggressive guilt trip: “No, I don’t like to save money”. “No, I have plenty of leads.”
And we do it because everyone else does it. It works! Or at least, that’s what best practice dictates. Or maybe it’s because our marketing software made it easy to implement. Whatever the reason, it’s symptomatic of a broader addiction to best practices. And relying completely on best practice often means succumbing to marketing myopia – and focusing on our business goals over the needs of the customer.
We’ve got to start raising questions when we get too hung up on best practices, especially when they seem contrary to the customer experience. Or simply ask yourself: “If I hate this practice, why would I want to subject my customers to it?”
I often joke that “marketing automation” is a bit of a misnomer. There’s a ton of emphasis on the automated (or appearance of automated) elements, while sidelining most of the manual work that makes it happen. It is a bit like the mechanical turk (no not that Turk), where the appearance of automation magic turns out to be a bit of a facade – more often than not, most marketing automation teams are still heavy users of duct tape and rubber bands.
It was fun talking about this, and finding the line between humanity and automation on the Trendspotting podcast recently. You can listen to the episode below.
I watched the Star Wars movies all the time as a kid. It feels like I watched them tens of thousands of times. Certainly enough to “wear out the tapes” I imagine. But of course it was probably less than 100 times. More likely less than 50. Yet when it comes to our memory of events, the difference between “A million times” and “a couple dozen times” aren’t often too far apart.
We tend to overestimate the actual effort we put forth, and underestimate how quickly we can learn from repetition. So if the work you’re doing requires repetition – remember that you may not need to “wear the tape out” to get there.
We switched to making pour-over coffee in a Chemex every morning, from our old method of using an automatic drip coffee machine. It’s easily one of the more hipster things we’ve done, but it was done for practical reasons too. The automatic machine was just a frustrating mess to deal with – it was a pain to clean, and it would frequently overflow. Plus, the coffee it made was just meh. But at least it was automatic.
The Chemex is a completely manual process. You’ve got to heat the water in a kettle. Preheat the glass coffeemaker. Grind and measure out the coffee just right. Pour the water over the grounds in stages, and wait for it to filter through.
On paper, it sure sounds like a lot more work.
But in practice, it’s not. It turns out the time it takes us to make morning coffee in the chemex versus the automatic machine (factoring in cleanup, setup, etc) is pretty similar. And that’s not even mentioning the quality differences.
Too often we make decisions in work and life based on how it looks on paper. Not how it works in the wild.
Are you working a certain way because it appears more efficient? Is it worth continuing, at the risk that you might be sacrificing quality as a result?
It’s funny to me that marketers, as the keepers of perhaps the largest volume of customer data—from PII, purchase history, activity data, and more—are some of the most inconsistent practitioners of data security.
Sure – we make big, public efforts by shoring up our privacy policies for the latest regulations, adding SSL to our web pages, and using tools that suggest they practice safe security standards. These are good steps, and things are getting better.
But then we share unsecured spreadsheets loaded with PII over email internally, or worse, with third parties. Or we bend our policies, just this once, because there’s a unmissable opportunity, a strategic partnership, or an end-of-year push.
For marketers to be seen as trusted stewards of customers and the data we have on them – we’ve got to do more than pay lip service to security. It’s not just about establishing visible guardrails—it’s about determining what the map looks like—where we will and won’t go. Security has to be about more than talk and quick wins. We’ve got to do the hard stuff too.
Many of us live in our email client and chat tools all day, and think nothing of it. After all – we’ve got to stay informed and appear connected. But spending all day waiting for input is a bit like obsessively tracking your stock portfolio’s rise and fall. Unless you’re a day trader, this isn’t likely going to help you make good financial decisions. In fact, up-to-the-second updates are rarely what we need to make good decisions, and the same is true with your digital communication channels.
I’ve found the key in improving your relationship with email and chat is the realization that the majority of what arrives in your inbox is noise – your job is to separate the signal from it. But the only way to do this efficiently is to maintain some distance from your inbox. Simply reacting to messages as they come in means you will treat everything with similar weight.
You start treating noise as if it were signal.
Here are a few tactics I’ve picked up to help avoid this:
Of course, there’s many other benefits to modifying your habits like this. For one – you’re much more likely to write considered, thoughtful responses to messages, even upsetting ones, and less likely to send hot headed, instant reactions. That benefit alone is worth giving your inbox some breathing room.
The always insightful Derek Sivers wrote a great post on saying “No” recently.
I think deep down, we know that adding to the plate is usually worse. But saying “Yes” is easier than saying “no”. And doing what’s easier is often more likely to happen than doing what’s better.
So can we make subtraction—saying “no”—easier? I think there’s two ways.
The first is calling out the fact that addition isn’t better – that it won’t solve our problems. That’s what Derek has already done for us.
But the other half is to practice “no”. After all, practice is what we do to improve in areas we’re weak. We practice. Try saying “no” every day. Not a knee jerk “no” to some random request. A considered, measured “no” that looks at what’s on the plate, and deciding what can be removed.
This tends to get used as a substitute for strategy. Find the low hanging fruit, capitalize on it, and move on to the next tactic.
The problem is, as Rand Fishkin highlights in his excellent deck “Why Your SaaS Marketing Sucks”, traffic for sites addicted to growth hacks looks a lot like this:
Growth hacks can be part of your growth strategy, but they’re not a substitute for one.
