We recently got a chance to try Black Tap, a restaurant known for their ridiculous, over-the-top milkshakes. There is a huge variety of options, and they’re all expensive.

But once you get your order, you see what all the fuss is about. First off, they’re huge. Besides the ice cream, there’s about a pound of whipped cream on top. The sides of the glass itself are also coated in decoration and more sweets. Usually they have some other absurd item stacked on top. Mine had two churros and a choco taco. Another had an entire piece of funfetti cake.

The milkshakes are unwieldy to eat. They taste fine, though they’re more sugar than anyone needs in a month I’m sure. But that’s not the point. The brilliance behind them is their absurdity. Black Tap has figured out if you make a product some ridiculously unique, people cannot help but share it. They’re a product entirely designed to be Instagrammed.

Black Tap is a reminder that you can never be too unique, and chances are what you’re doing is probably still too tame.

Most of us spend too much time trying to figure out if we’re doing things the “right” way. The right process, the right person, the right etiquette. This obsession with following the prescripted path is fine in small doses, but can eventually hinder our ability to make any forward momentum at all.

At some point, you’ve just got to step into new territory feet first, with your best guess at the time. No amount of hypothesizing will be enough to reach 100% certainty anyway.

Often what’s needed is just getting started and figuring things out as you go. You’ll probably find half of what was worrying you before isn’t even a factor anymore.

If you want momentum, you’ve got to take it for yourself.

I grew up in Southern California, so we spent a lot of time in Disneyland for birthdays, when visitors were in from out of town, or just because we had a free weekend. I’ve been there more times than I can count, yet every time Disneyland creates a sense of immersion that is hard to find in any other man-made experience.

We recently visited the park while on a trip down to visit family, and we got a chance to visit the new Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge section of the park, arguably the most immersive experience yet.

As you step into the new area, crossing over from Frontierland, the landscape and sounds subtly change, like a song crossfading into another. Suddenly you’re standing in a rocky landscape with seemingly alien plant life, strange wildlife sounds, and the distant noise of a starship engine spooling up. The deeper you get into the park, the volume of this effect is only amplified further.

The gift shops and fellow park visitors certainly remind you of your reality from time to time, but Disney does damn near everything else to convince you otherwise.

This level of immersion is hard to pull off by anyone, yet somehow Disney manages to do it here, so much so that it tends to make the rest of Disneyland feel a little half baked by comparison. Of course, this is mostly explained by time and technology improving the tools of the Imagineers over the years.

On our way out that evening we stumbled across this map of the original Disneyland as it existed on opening day in 1955.

Though the tools have evolved and improved, It’s hard to not appreciate the dedication to immersion that has been a part of this park since Day 1.

As someone who has worked in marketing ops most of my career, I’m used to being seen as the person who knows how the systems and data work. One of my favorite parts of the work is in educating others and helping them understand what’s going on behind the tech and tools.

Yet too often I notice marketers stay too much in their lane when it comes to diving into the data. They view it as another team’s responsibility. Valuable, certainly, but something to request rather than seek out themselves. This is a shame, because perhaps the most marketable skill for a marketer in 2019 is a data-driven approach, and most marketers besides the “techy ones” treat this as an afterthought.

There’s still a bit too much emphasis on subjective opinions and conjecture rather than truly data-guided decisionmaking. And that’s something any marketer can shift to. It’s just a matter of them taking the time to dig a little deeper, and get a little more curious.

If you’re a marketer in a non-ops function, spend more time with your ops counterparts to learn the ropes and become more self sufficient. It’s easier than you might imagine, and your team will appreciate having another informed person to bounce ideas off of.

And if you’re an ops person – consider that part of your responsibility should not be just in maintaining the systems and the data, but democratizing that information as well. Building education and processes for others to take advantage of what you’ve built more easily. It shouldn’t be seen as a threat to your role or responsibility – but as a necessary step to building a more informed, thoughtful marketing team.

I recently read a great article on the evolution of the bicycle – why it appeared when it did, and why it took so long to reach it’s current design iteration.

The correct design was not obvious – Initially people were focused on building a better carriage, or a better horse, and that the idea and value of a bicycle-like design was not clear or even desired. The iterations that appeared on the market were so different from each other, and so far from the final design, that it’s difficult to appreciate why it took so long for the correct solution to be arrived at.

The timing also had to be right with regards to technology, materials, and manufacturing. Early bicycles lacked the modern chain-driven system as the technology, the means of production and quality materials just didn’t exist yet.

I think there’s two lessons here for life:

1. We set plans as if we know exactly what the future will look like, and the exact correct solution to solve the problem, yet interestingly the plan changes as we’re exposed to new information and situations. We should embrace not that the plan might deviate, but that it must.
2. It’s worth taking time to recognize dependencies – where a project is blocked because another initiative that has yet to take place. Then, consider the order of operations and rough priority of work. Otherwise, you’ll run around trying to make projects on the tasks around you, only to find they’re each blocked by one another.

When you ask some people to do something, you don’t really need to track them down afterwards. You just trust the work is going to get done.

But then there’s others who you know you’ve got to check in with. You’ve learned from experience that they may not follow through as you expect, or at all.

We learn to sort people into these two groups from past experiences. If you let someone down once, it’s going to seem more likely to them that you’ll let down in the future. Follow through, even on the small stuff, has to be consistent, otherwise you risk being lumped in with the people who can’t be relied on, because…you can’t be relied on.

The maxim “How you do anything is how you do everything” feels apropos here. To be the kind of person you’d want to work with – the kind of person that can be trusted to get the job done, you have to earn it, by actually getting the job done, each and every time. It feels redundant to say, but the way to be seen as reliable is by being consistently reliable.

Saul Bass was a master of distilling the big story down into a few key pieces, especially in a world where most movie poster designs took the “potpurri approach” of trying to include something for everyone.

Beyond the obvious connections this has to branding, I immediately thought of analytics and data visualization benefiting from Bass’ “symbolize and summarize” approach.

We’ve got endless data we can use to tell a story visually, and the business intelligence and data viz tools to do so quickly and efficiently. But too often our dashboards end up turning into endless scrolls of pretty charts and tables, all which try to tell a story, but none which tell it very well.

The trick in analytics and any sort of reporting is to pick the metrics and charts that really matter, and leave out the rest (or at least, leave them for the appendix). Anyone can build 100 charts telling 100 stories. But it takes thought and conviction to pick the 1 chart that tells the story best. The one that makes the other 99 of secondary importance.

Just because you can measure it doesn’t mean you should. Instead, focus your time on figuring out the K in KPI.

I read somewhere that procrastination is just a defense mechanism for us to deal with our fear of the unknown. Unknown here could mean two things: potential failure, or an unclear idea of where we need to start or finish.

The first one is solved by repeatedly exposing ourselves to opportunities to fail. We can take the teeth out of failure by putting ourselves into scenarios where failure is likely. Not necessarily huge, catastrophic failures. But still failure of some kind. A good comic learns what material works by learning what material doesn’t work. A person afraid of public speaking improves by practicing public speaking, even when they’re miserable at it.

The second type of “unknown” – not knowing where to start or finish, has everything to do with planning and organization. Most of the time we are delaying on a big project or task because we don’t have a clear idea of what success looks like. Or we don’t know the best place to start. We’ve got to devote a serious chunk of time to just scoping out the project before we get started. Because every moment we spend properly planning the work is insurance against starting and working in the wrong direction. We’re paying with our time now instead of time spent backtracking later.

There’s a great lesson about resumes in The Office, during that episode where Darryl is trying to get the regional manager’s job. On his resume, he says:

“Coordinated and implemented receipt, storage, and delivery of over 2.5 billion units of inventory”.

2.5 billion? 2.5 billion units of what? This isn’t far from how many people’s resumes look, loaded with arbitrary numbers that would be impossible to validate, or are simply irrelevant to the job being applied for.

Including data can be powerful to demonstrate the impact you had in your resume, but only if the numbers are relevant to the circumstances, and if not verifiable, at least believable. Leave out any data loaded with internal jargon or requiring deep context not provided in the resume. And especially skip the meaningless, vanity metrics. Just because a number is large doesn’t make it impressive.

I like hiking for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the willpower training it provides. To cope with especially long or difficult distances, you come up with all sorts of tricks to keep yourself going. Not “Can I make it to the top of this mountain?”, but instead “Can I make it to this next switchback?”.

Interestingly, these games are all about finishing the work. Getting to the end. Reaching the top. They’ve rarely got much to do with speed, and everything to do with endurance.

Yet for most of the stuff in our lives, we get hung up on speed, and less on endurance. Are we progressing faster than the other guy in our careers? Can we get that project done by noon? There’s nothing wrong with a little speed at points, but most of the time, our success hinges far more on our ability to stay in the game for the long haul.

It rarely does much good to focus only on speed in the short term, unless you’re in the 100m dash. Better to build the endurance muscle and stay in the race until the end. Maybe we don’t win every time that way, but being first is overrated anyway.