What Learning Online Couldn’t Teach Me
It’s not hard to find resources online for learning about marketing. Try one quick Google search of “marketing training,” and you’ll be flooded with options. You’ll see everything from online certifications to a random guy blogging “6 ways to improve your marketing skills.”
You’ll get lots of great information, sure, but there’s one serious catch: You only hear the success stories.
Why?
People are scared to talk about failure.
But what I’ve learned over the years is that failure is our best teacher. And you only learn those lessons in conversation with real people who are willing to tell you the real story.
I spent the first five years of my career reading everything I could consume. I started with Google Reader, Techcrunch, and Hubspot, and through the people I discovered there, I expanded to Twitter.
During that time, I did meet with people, but I wasn’t as good at learning in person as I am today. I didn’t listen, and I spoke far too much in those conversations considering I had almost no experience.
I read about the highest growth strategies from top companies and conformed them to the companies where I worked. I was very literal in my interpretation of what they said.
When they said:
“We have an exact attribution formula” – I trusted them and tried to build my own (and failed)
“We set up our referral program by doing this” – I tried it
“We drive all of our leads through content” – I trusted them
“We talk to X customers a week” – I trusted them, and I did it
“We have XYZ process that we follow to prioritize” – I built it, and it worked
“We take 10% of our budget to test with” – I did that
Maybe I was a copycat, but I was young, and it worked. I learned a ton, and I put a lot of balls in play. I didn’t just copy and paste – I made them fit.
To a point, it all worked. But only to a point.
Later in my career, I started meeting people at these companies and learning how they actually worked. It turned out they didn’t have a perfect formula for attribution, they didn’t have a perfect-looking growth trajectory, they weren’t out talking to customers all the time, etc. Things were not as black and white as I had read on their blogs and in their books.
What they were posting online was not reality. It wasn’t the whole story.
I would talk to them, and tell them what I was doing, and ask them how they did things, and they would say: “Wait, you’re really doing it that way?” To which I’d respond: “Yes, I read that’s how you were doing it, so I built the process that way. That's not how you do it?” And, inevitably, they would say: “No, we try to do it that way, but it doesn’t always work out.”
In short, things weren’t always perfect. These companies struggled, and the process wasn’t flawless. It was very good, and they were successful, but it wasn’t always the “100% wins all the time” like it seemed when you read the books or blogs.
And in the process of all that reading, while I learned a lot, I also burned myself out drinking the Kool-Aid. It wasn’t until I sat down and listened to real people telling their real stories that I realized the mistakes and failures are valuable, too. Maybe the most valuable.
Get out and meet people. You’ll hear the good and the bad. You’ll learn to view yourself with a little healthy perspective. You’ll understand that your failures are merely opportunities for growth.
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