Kelford Labs Daily: The way to know the future

“All creative thinking about the future starts with experiments, feeling our way through a changing landscape.”

— Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted

Note: I’m on vacation Thursday and Friday this week, so there will be no new posts until Monday.

The most liberating thing about marketing is also the most frustrating thing:

You cannot know for sure whether your marketing position will work until you work it—until you put it into the market and see if it works.

Of course, there are tests you can do to ensure it can work, but certainty is a product of experimentation.

This holds entrepreneurs back—some want to know for sure they’re on the right path before they take their first step.

But if we could be certain about the future—if we had the supernatural ability to predict future events—we’d almost certainly be doing something more interesting than marketing.

But we can’t. So we must.

Which means you’ve got to try it. You’ve got to put your marketing into the market.

But just talking about it, or just re-reading it, over and over again—editing, adjusting, fussing—won’t help if it never sees the light of day.

All we’ll do is waste our time when we could have been learning, adapting, improving.

So if you want to know if your marketing will work, work your marketing.

Because unless you can predict the future (and, if you can, please do something cooler with that superpower than marketing) there is no other way.

Read More:
Will your marketing work?
The Bob Test