205. The new career curve ↪️
If it feels like you don't know what you're doing, then you're doing something right
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Links that are worth your time:
For anyone (or any brand) looking to up their Instagram game: The Instagram content planning course from ilovecreatives
Worthwhile interview with Zoom’s CMO on the future of the workplace
This graphic on the creative process, via Sari Azout’s newsletter
Hi there 👋
Super Bowl Sunday has always been one of my favorite days of the year (and yes, I would 100% vote for a Super Bowl Monday bank holiday if ever there was one). And in recent years, I’ve come to not only analyze the football but also the commercials. Did you know there is an official ranking of the best Super Bowl commercials each year?
👉 USA Today Ad Meter: Super Bowl rankings
Can you guess the winner from this year? (I won’t spoil it.)
Wishing you a great week ahead,
Kevan
P.S. Here is one of my all-time favorites:
The new career curve
If it feels like you don’t know what you’re doing, then you’re doing something right.
Disclaimer: I am not fishing for compliments with this post. 🍭 Although it’s definitely going to sound like I am!
The longer I’ve been doing this marketing thing, the more I’ve come to realize just how much I don’t know.
Most of the time, this motivates me to do better and humbles me to stay kind and curious. But there are also days where my self-doubt reigns supreme, where I wake up, log onto my computer, and wonder if today is the day when I’m found out, when my teammates realize I’m in over my head.
I guess what I’m trying to say is: It’s okay if you have those moments of self-doubt, too.
For me, the self-doubt can be triggered by any number of things:
I don’t carry myself as a stereotypical marketer: confident, outgoing, bold.
I don’t speak the jargon or the lingo. (I had to look up “net dollar retention” the other day.)
I compare myself to others.
I measure myself constantly against an ever-moving target.
(“Success is like a mountain in front of you that keeps growing.” ~ George Saunders)
But rather than be paralyzed by self-doubt, I aim to spin it into growth. If I had all the answers, then there wouldn’t be anything else to learn. If I looked and acted like every other marketer, then I wouldn’t have a unique set of skills to offer.
I know just enough to know that there’s a whole lot I don’t know. And that’s okay.
In fact, that’s how it should be.
This “un-knowing” has been more and more true as time has gone on. I think there are a few reasons why. The first is maturity — the more maturity I gain with marketing, the more I recognize that I don’t know it all:
The same is true with the number of people I meet.
There are some really smart people out there! And the more efforts I make to expand my circle — through reading, through networking, through interviewing — the more I learn about what I don’t know.
Marketing in particular has a couple qualities that exacerbate these feelings. For one, there is a lot of magic in marketing. Magic can be tough to quantify and therefore tough to credit. From the book Alchemy:
No one in public life believes in magic, or trusts those who purvey it. If you propose any solution where the gain in perceived value outweighs the attendant expenditure in money, time, effort or resources, people either don’t believe you, or worse, they think you are somehow cheating them. This is why marketing doesn’t get any credit in business – when it generates magic, it is more socially acceptable to attribute the resulting success to logistics or cost-control.
And second, my marketing education has been as informal as they come. I went to school for journalism, so any marketing skills I’ve gained have been picked up on the fly. At first, when I thought I understood what marketing was, my confidence was fairly high:
But the more I learn about the actual peak of marketing possibilities, the more I realize how much I don’t know:
The upside?
Confidence does curve back up, eventually.
With more maturity, with meeting more people, with a better understanding of your craft, you do gain more confidence in yourself. You’re able to put your work in context (which can be both encouraging and motivating), and you’re able to start making progress toward learning all the stuff you don’t know.
As I’m sure you’ve heard, in life there are plenty of “known knowns.” There are way more “unknown unknowns.” If we can work toward knowing as many “unknown unknowns” as possible, then we’re doing something right …
… even if it’s a little humbling along the way.
About this newsletter …
Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. If you enjoy what’s in this newsletter, you can share some love by hitting the heart button at the top or bottom.💙
About Kevan
I’m a marketing exec who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Polly (we’re hiring!). I previously built brands at Buffer and Vox.
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