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Seneca once wrote, in On the Shortness of Life, “certain tasks are not so much great as prolific in producing many other tasks.” The essay’s general point is that we have plenty of time in our days—in our lives—but we spend too much of it doing things that simply don’t need to be done.

An old friend of John D. Rockefeller once recalled that—despite being one of the wealthiest people to ever live—Rockefeller would insist that they switch to old golf balls when playing around water hazards.

Knowing what to say in our marketing is one of the most frustrating challenges business owners and marketers like you and I face every day.

Entrepreneurs are full of ideas. It’s what inspired us to start our business, create our products or services, and sell them to the world in the first place. But, over time, we can start to think that the valuable part is the idea, and not the action that follows.

“With a ton of charts and a wondrous plan, he comes, behold, the Research Man. Give him four and twenty scholars, give him twenty thousand dollars, and in two months he’ll bring to view, the facts that you already knew.”

On May 4, 1844, over an experimental line extending the almost 40 miles from D.C. to Baltimore, Samuel Morse sent four words. A similar message sent just days before would have taken hours to arrive. Now, it travelled the distance in an instant.

“You can make people feel guilty enough to do something,” advertising legend Howard Gossage once wrote, “but you can’t make them enjoy it. As a matter of fact, you can make them positively unenjoy it.” Many business owners positively unenjoy doing their own marketing.