I use the highlighting and notes feature of my Kindle a lot. Even physical books I tend to write in the margins, dog ear pages, and underline passages. Especially for non-fiction, this process helps make reading a more participatory activity for me, and helps me retain the material better.

After finishing a book, I used to transcribe the notes somewhere like Evernote for future reference, but I frequently found these entries getting overlong, and almost impossible to navigate later. The reason, I’ve found, is because not everything you highlight in the moment is as significant once you get some distance from it.

Now after I finish a book, I set it aside for at least a week before reviewing my notes. Often, many of the highlights which seemed so important as I was reading have lost their value with time. This waiting period helps bring the best ideas and concepts, and ensures  notes stay relevant and digestible in the future.

I suppose you could wait longer for even greater effect, but then I’d worry about actually transcribing the notes at all. A week feels just right.

Penny Arcade, a web comic about games just reached their 20th anniversary. They’ve been posting a new webcomic every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for twenty years. Since then they’ve started a few other projects, but the core site and comic haven’t changed much all over the years.

There’s something magical about seeing such long standing sites on the web that almost defiantly refuse to change. They’re not pivoting. They’re sticking to the plan for the long haul. It’s a delightfully different take on growth and prosperity on the web. And because these sites focus remains unchanged, what we’re really watching is their path to mastery – day by day, year after year, chipping away at the work. It’s only after decades that we notice see how far they’ve come.

When we traveled to France a few weeks back, we were both worried about not knowing enough of the language to get by. Neither of us studied the language much beforehand, and in the end, we downloaded the Google Translate app. After all, we could look up anything we needed along the way.

Learning anything these days is quite similar. You can learn any skill – baking, woodworking, data analysis, accounting. There’s an endless list of learning resources and guides. But because the knowledge is all just waiting for you to look it up, it’s easy to just find the answer when you need it. This helps you get by in a pinch, but of course it doesn’t do much for your mastery of the skill. That only comes with practice.

I had to learn this lesson on our trip when we tried using Google Translate to order a meal. We had the technical answer. Even a guide to pronounce it properly. But the context needed to know if that phrase was appropriate for the region we were in, or if it was an awkward phrasing from a dictionary was lost on us. Moreover, any response from the waiter would completely throw us for a loop on how to respond. We had the knowledge at our fingertips, but without the skill and experience to use it correctly, we weren’t much better off than having no app at all.

Knowing the trivia will help you look the part (and maybe even feel the part). Just don’t confuse having the answer at your fingertips with actually learning it. Mastery only comes with the hard work of practice and doing.

The cooperative brewery down the street from me holds quarterly homebrew competitions, and this quarter was an “Iron Chef” style competition requiring use three of six “secret” ingredients (Basil, Sage, Spruce Tips, Berries, Hot Peppers, Cinnamon).

Since brewers weren’t restricted by style, the variety of the dozen entries was incredible. every beer completely unlike the next. In tasting these, I noticed two things:

• People have wildly different preferences and taste palates. My favorites were hated by others. Others picked out flavor notes I completely missed.
• Judging for this style of competition ends up focusing more on the novelty of the hidden flavors than it does the technical characteristics of the beer or traditional judges of quality (body, hop profile, mouthfeel, etc). The beers that were most talked about were those using the most outrageous flavor combinations.

You can’t forget the end user is not a homogeneous “persona”, despite your best planning. And when you deeply personalize your experience, you’ll always appeal to some users, and drive away others.

Novelty is a double edged sword. It can help build buzz and interest in your work, but you risk alienating your audience by leaning on it too heavily. Novelty can distract, but not make up for poor quality.

DemandGen Report just put out a study that revealed a third of marketers don’t see any difference in the performance of their nurtured vs un-nurtured leads. This seems shocking at first, but if you look at the way most nurture programs get built, it’s no surprise.

Nurture programs are usually built to solve two issues:

1. Lead qualification concerns—either from sales feedback or purely high disqualification rates—and a need for more qualification from marketing before sales handoff
2. A place to put the disqualified leads passed back from sales

There’s nothing inherently wrong with these pain points, but the issue is the approach used to solve them. Nurture is often positioned as a low hanging fruit project, one that simply involves repackaging existing content, serving it up a series of nice looking emails, and watch the qualified leads roll in.

Most of the time this is picking the lowest common denominator that unifies the database, selecting content that generically speaks to it, and hoping for the best. I think most marketers aren’t fooling themselves – they know a more targeted, personalized approach is likely to perform better. But the shotgun approach is defended because it’s the shortest, easiest path to launch.

The thinking is – once there is a basic, broad nurture up and running, the company can learn from it to build more targeted nurture streams later.

So the team puts a ton of time and effort in getting the broad nurture up and running, with a a lot of fanfare and…crickets. Invariably the broad nurture stream fails to perform. No big surprise, but because the company started with a program destined for failure, the likelihood of more investment in the narrower, more targeted nurtures (ironically those most likely to succeed) dries up.

Marketers design nurture programs destined for failure, and then see poor performance from nurtured leads. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy.

There are no shortcuts in nurture – doing it right requires dedicated investment, and at times, dedicated content production, and starting with small, focused audiences with specific content. If our shotgun approach to inbound and outbound marketing is failing to get leads to a qualified level, why should we expect the same approach in nurture would yield any different results?

1. Document while building your project, or making changes. If you treat documentation work as a post-project step, it’ll never get done.
2. A Word of Powerpoint doc is okay to use for one-off pieces of documentation, but consider building a documentation knowledge-base in an internal wiki or similar tech that’s lightweight, searchable, and easy to update. It’ll be more of a pleasure to update, and your end users will appreciate the forethought too.
3. Animated gifs can convey more meaning and save you time – Rather than building an elaborate diagram or a massive wall of text, a simple screen recording set to save in a .gif (that’s pronounced with a hard G, despite what the media tells you) can tell it all.
4. Consider your audience when determining the depth of detail – Too often documentation is treated like technical schematics when the most likely reader is a business user. Make sure you’re not over-complicating the message for the main audience. If both deep and a shallow views are needed, consider creating separate documents entirely.

It’s easy to convince yourself that you need a $1,500 Festool miter saw from Germany to build your next woodworking project. You tell yourself it’s going to make the most precise cuts. It’s going to save time. It’ll make the end product the most polished. And you’re probably right.

It’s easy to get excited and invested in the tools and gadgets of the trade. Yet too often we get so focused on picking the perfect tools that we neglect the  work required to put those tools to good use.

A great tool can help you make the cuts 20 or 30% better, but planning where to put those cuts is the harder, less exciting part of the work that will end up mattering in the end.

It’s surprising to me how few employers do these as part of their interview process.

In my experience, most job interviews (for marketing functions) go like this:

1. Screening (usually phone) interview with a recruiter to ensure core job description needs are satisfied
2. Phone interview with the hiring manager or some stakeholder in the interview process
3. Onsite interview(s) with hiring manager and other stakeholders
4. A final conversation to negotiate offer terms or resolve any last questions

Besides some scenario or role play questions in the in-person interviews, far too few employers use actual take-home tests as part of their hiring process (for marketing hires). And I’m not talking about multiple choice questions. I mean give the candidate a real (or pseudo-real) problem, and have them solve it, on their own, as homework. Give them time to do it. If it’s useable work of value – pay them to do it. Or make a step of the hiring process a work-along day where the candidate is actually working on a project with your team. To be fair, this exists, but it’s the exception.  Weirdly it’s the bigger companies paying the highest salaries that don’t seem to care about this approach.

It’s way too easy to sound like a good candidate, but the only way to know is to see how they work on paper or in action.

As a hiring manager I always create tests for my candidates. Sometimes it’s a simple skill test to confirm they know how to run basic calculations in excel, or it’s more of a story problem to tease out their thought process on a marketing challenge.

As a candidate I look for the test as a sign of a company’s due diligence – I want them to be keen on finding the best candidate for the role, and being willing to commit the resources to do it right. I want to make sure this opportunity is something that is the right challenge for me – not completely outside my wheelhouse, but also not completely beneath me.

The only reason i can muster for why more organizations don’t do this is the time investment required. But if your goal is to find the best talent – isn’t that investment worth it?

It’s easy to lean on technology to organize your to do list. You can dump every item, urgent, or otherwise, into an organized, tagged and perfectly prioritized digital list. You’ll never forget again to take check a report, take out the garbage, or change your contact lenses. But because you can put anything and everything on your digital to do list, it quickly becomes unmanageable. And when you invariably fail to check off the 20 things you optimistically meant to do today, the guilt (and overdue tasks) starts to pile up.

To be fair – digital lists have their place – I think they’re great for keeping track of firm deadlines in the future, and building a pool of “someday” projects to tackle later. But for building your daily to do list, I don’t think anything beats paper. By manually writing your list from scratch each day forces you to consciously consider what really needs to get done today, not just the mountain of automated reminder tasks you set three months ago.

Form factor matters too. I picked up the idea from Ryan Holiday (who apparently got the idea from Tim Ferriss) to keep lists on a single page of a small pocket notebook (or in his case, an index card). It turns out that this size is perfect for keeping your day’s workload realistic. You can’t fit much on a sheet this size – maybe 4-6 big items. It turns out that’s probably all you’ve got time for in a day anyway.

I had to laugh at the juxtaposition of these two articles on my Linkedin feed yesterday:

People, Not Robots: Bringing the Humanity Back to Customer Support

Conversica raises $31 million to grow its conversational AI sales assistant

The former makes a case for instilling a bit more humanity in our customer interactions. The latter celebrates the triumph and potential of AI to take over the mundane tasks and “free humans from the routine work that limits us reaching our full potential.”

I’m torn on this – I think AI has value in support and sales use cases. The operations side of me loves the potential for efficiency, but if I put myself in the shoes of the customer—I’m not sure the benefit of automation swings in my favor.