Jeff Shearer

I was recently in Leavenworth, a mountain tourist town themed after a Bavarian village, and known for its annual Christmas tree lighting festival. But the moment we rolled into town, we realized that seemingly everyone else in the state was there too.

Every shop, restaurant, and street space was packed with throngs of people. Parking was impossible. And yet we still had a great time, partly because of how vibrant and full the town felt.

It’s a good reminder that not all experiences and products are about beating the crowd. Sometimes, the crowd is the product.

I often hear people talk about the amount of work they can get on a cross country flight. Maybe it’s the sensory isolation, or the crappy wifi. But me, I’m too tall for most airline seats, so I rarely can get much productive work done on the flight.

But the time before the flight is just magical for me. It’s still got some of the isolation of the flight itself, but the compressed timeframe that I have free to do work seems to be the trick. It forces focus and prioritization.

So it’s the reason I still get to airport two hours early. Racing against the clock is a remarkable motivator.

The increasing value of most martech vendors is the underlying data they create or augment. The activity log of Marketo is a perfect example. So much value and insight is locked up in one place – it’s what fuels much of the automation magic, but it can be used for reporting too, with a bit of work.

The problem is, while most vendors recognize the value of this data, they misjudge what their users what to do with it. As a result, too many martech vendors are focused on building their own answer to reports and dashboards, and not enough effort is placed on democratizing the raw data that they’re most valued for.

We’ve come a long way towards open systems, APIs, and a culture of integration rather than isolation in martech. But one of the last bastions holding us back is this redundancy in reporting solutions across our stack.

The reality, even if some marketing teams haven’t yet developed the muscle for it, is a single data story across all their channels and technology. It’s why the concept of the customer data platform, the “CDP”, has received so much traction in recent years. But it’s still nebulous idea for most marketers, no thanks to the fact that nearly every martech vendor is calling themselves a CDP, even if they have little to offer in the arena.

The goal is each of the useful data streams for our various systems: The email logs of our marketing automation tools, the product telemetry of our SaaS product, the contracts and sales data of our CRM, all in one cohesive home, and a reporting tool flexible enough to tell that complex data story across a unified persona.

In other words – we don’t need more siloed dashboards in our tech. We need more open, accessible data systems, and we need more expertise in data preparation and business intelligence in our marketing teams.

I just finished re-reading Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, a book I first read in the altMBA program I participated in last year. Though the book is framed as a resource for writers and artists, the lessons can be applied to any pursuit in life.

Pressfield starts by introducing the “Resistance”, a catchall for the internal forces that hold us back from doing our work. It manifests as fear, as procrastination. We rationalize with it to avoid what really needs to be done, and it beats us every day if we aren’t watching out for it.

The author then presents the solution: “going pro” – not in the sense of professional accreditation or anything literal. But rather treating our work with persistence & care. Of choosing not to be the amateur who works when it suits them, or waiting for creativity to strike.

As Somerset Maugham puts it, “I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”

In other words, the professional has rules for themself.

Of the many resources on procrastination and creative blockers, The War of Art is, to borrow the Esquire quote off the front cover “A vital gem…a kick in the ass.” It’s a quick read, and well worth your time.

I’ve now launched three different Marketo environments from scratch, and in this process I’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t.

Perhaps the biggest lesson of all, however, resides around complexity. It’s quite easy, especially if you have prior experience with the tools, to plan a sophisticated rollout and to try and immediately start operating in the new environment at 100mph.

But it’s dangerous to assume that you need all the complex bells and whistles at launch. You need time to see what works and what doesn’t in your new environment. And you may just find that complicated alert routing system, or the template system set up for extreme scale, just don’t make sense here.

Remember that it’s far easier to build new systems and complexity ontop of existing ones than to strip away what’s already there. You want to start from a steady, stable base, not a house of cards.

I try to keep track of the media I consume over the year – books, games, shows, movies. Here’s what my November looked like:

Books

Keep Going – Austin Kleon

Not as memorable as Steal Like an Artist, which I got a turned onto during the altMBA program, but a quick, inspirational read.

The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator – Timothy C. Winegard

Fascinating at times, monotonous at others. Interesting to look at human history, and especially major wars & conflicts from the context of the spread of disease. The book argues Malaria is far more responsible for the course of human history than most history books give it credit for.

The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers – Maxwell King

Watching Mister Rogers Neighborhood is one of my earliest memories, so it was interesting to read about the life of the man who created it.

Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

Terrifying.

TV

The Mandalorian

I came for Bounty Hunters, but stayed for Baby Yoda.

Games

Dinosaur Island – Pandasaurus Games

Played this months ago with a friend and remembered it as a game that looks far more complicated than it plays. Finally picked up a copy. You need a huge table to play, especially with four people, but is a great, varied experience with a lot of depth, but very approachable mechanics.

The Outer Worlds – Obsidian

A new, spacefaring IP from the creators of Fallout New Vegas. Impressively deep in terms of player choice – but plenty of bugs, and a combat system that just isn’t fun. Still absolutely worth playing for the story.

Dead Cells – Motion Twin

Never thought I’d be getting into the roguelike genre, but after playing a ton of Supergiant Games’ Hades, I think I’ve learned something about myself. Still working my way through this one, as the boss fights can be quite tough, and you’re somewhat at the mercy of the random drops you get each run. But I dig it.

I was reminded of a great post recently about the value of daily practice. And earlier this year, this blog was perfect evidence of how a daily routine can keep itself running.

Some days, I’d be happy with the post I published to the world. Other days, it felt a little rough. Like it could have done with just a bit more polish. So I’d tell myself – I’ll give this another day of polish and see where it lands. But then one day turned into three, and soon enough, I had a post that had lost a lot of the shape of the original idea, and frankly didn’t feel relevant enough to publish any longer.

I’ve learned the longer an article stays in a draft form, the less likely I am to ever publish it. Today, I have at least five drafts in various states of completion, but it’s been so long since I originally conceived them that they hardly feel worth salvaging at this point.

This is the problem with a non-daily writing habit. If you spend too much time away from the work, it loses some of the magic it once held – like a banana that’s spent a little too long on the shelf.

Ideas should be capitalized on while they’re still ripe.

For most of the time I was regularly posting, I had developed a routine: 1. Write a first draft of a new article. 2. Revise and publish a previous day’s draft. Basically, this allowed for one revision cycle, which helped me catch most of the glaring issues, while still keeping the momentum up. But as I discovered, some amount of a working backlog is needed beyond that. Sometimes I need more than a day to step away from an article before it’s ready for a final pass. I think the sweet spot for a backlog size is around three articles. Enough to float an off-day or two without losing track.

As I look back on this process – I realize I’ve been out of the daily posting habit for awhile, and now feels like a good time to dive back in again.

Besides regularly contribution on this blog, one of the most productive exercises I’ve adopted in recent years has been a daily journal. Nearly every morning I sit down and write a few pages in a handwritten journal. There’s no strict format, but my entries typically are a log what happened of note in the previous day, decisions I’ve been wrestling with, and ideas for the future.

I find writing in that journal as soon as I wake up is a key way to set the day up for success. It’s oddly liberating to put to paper what’s been rattling around in my head. And as a side effect, it has improved my clarity of thinking. Then, when I write here, or prepare a presentation, or work on some project, the value is evident. Because I spend time being introspective and highly reflective about my own thoughts, it’s trained me to do so elsewhere in life.

There’s even value to be had in re-reading past entries – and recognizing the patterns I fall into. Austin Kleon talks about this in his latest book Keep Going:

I keep a daily diary for many reasons, but the main one is that it helps me pay attention to my life. By sitting down every morning and writing about my life, I pay attention to it, and over time, I have a record of what I’ve paid attention to. Many diarists don’t bother rereading their diaries, but I’ve found that rereading doubles the power of a diary because I’m then able to discover my own patterns, identify what I really care about, and know myself better.

If you’ve never given daily journaling a try, or had a few false start in the past, it may be worth giving it a shot with the right routine. For me, that’s first thing in the morning, but for you, it may be right before bed. It doesn’t matter, so long as you stick to that schedule.

I spend a lot of time in complex systems and data, so I know where the pitfalls and shortcuts lie. I’m so close to this work, and I do these tasks so often that they’re automatic. As a result, I often lose sight of just how remarkable some of this knowledge is, especially to the other people I work with.

But meanwhile, whenever I forget a critical step, or poorly explain something, or feel like the work I’m doing just isn’t quite adequate – It’s a painful reminder of failure. And yet, more often than not, I’m judging myself far harder than needed. I’m overestimating my my deficiencies.

So It’s a helpful to remind yourself anytime you’re feeling stuck or inadequate: chances are, most of your concerns are far overblown, and meanwhile, there’s plenty of great work you are doing that you’re simply failing to take notice of.

I took a Lyft on my way to the airport recently that had a tablet mounted to the back of the seat with a bunch of ad-supported games. Trivia, mostly.

And I love trivia, so I had to check it out.

But I quickly realized the questions were all stupidly easy. A few samplings from the photo trivia:

What’s the name of this famous building? – The White House

Who is this famous scientist? Benjamin Franklin

My point isn’t to call out this company for crappy trivia. More an observation that trivia loses its fun when the challenge level doesn’t line up. We like trivia when it is just at the edge, or slightly beyond the edge of our abilities. When we have to think, and summon up some piece of insight from a dusty corner of our minds.

Meanwhile, Trivia that’s too easy is dull, and trivia that is far outside our knowledge is demoralizing.

I think most satisfying work follows the same trajectory. We often think we want the easy assignments and straightforward projects. Yet we’re surprised when we find little satisfaction to show for the work. And when we’re completely out of our depth, we feel like we’re drowning.

All along, what we really crave is the work that sits right in that sweet spot – not the “comfort zone” – but just a little bit beyond it.