Preserve these to persist — Kelford Labs Weekly

First, thank you for all the feedback on last week’s newsletter. It really seemed to be inspiring for a number of readers, and I deeply appreciate you letting me know.

When we need to move fast, we need to be flexible.

Because we can never be sure ahead of time which way we’ll need to move.

Which means, we won’t be perfectly adapted to any situation in particular. But we’ll be thoroughly prepared for any that arise.

When it comes to marketing, there are three things we need to prepare for, in particular, to preserve our ability to keep going in unpredictable circumstances.

As I like to say, marketing rarely fails. It usually just stops.

And the three reasons it tends to stop are:

1) We ran out of money

2) We ran out of energy

3) We ran out of patience

Here’s how to preserve them:

Money

“It’s why experienced writers don’t go into their first draft expecting perfection. They understand it’s going to be messy, and often not that good. Contrary to old-school toughness wisdom, a touch of realistic doubt keeps us on track and makes it more likely that we will persist.”

— Steve Magness, Do Hard Things

How people manage their money generally is none of my business, but how they manage their marketing money is my only business.

And the strongest, first piece of advice I’ll ever give is to assume your first attempt will fail.

I’m serious: This is the biggest, most common mistake marketers make, which takes away their ability to pivot and respond:

They assume their first attempt will work.

They assume spending money earns you results by default. But it doesn’t.

It’s possible to spend lots of money, all your money, on marketing and it still not work.

So that’s why I say you’ve got to preserve budget: So you can preserve time to try again.

That’s where the flexibility comes in. You always have the ability to change course because you preserved the money you’ll need to do it.

Energy

“For most consequential endeavors, long-term progress is less about heroic effort and more about smart pacing; less about intensity on any given day and more about discipline over the course of months, and in some cases even years.”

— Brad Stulberg, The Practice of Groundedness

Marketing takes effort.

There’s no magic button we can press or amount of money we can spend that guarantees anything. The only thing that works is trying things that are likely to work and doing more of what is working and less of what isn’t.

Which means we need lots of energy, for a long time, to make it work.

Which requires a slow and steady pace.

We can’t brute force the solution to our marketing problem in one day, one week, or one ad.

We’ve got to work at it, every single day, making steady and sustainable progress because we’ve got the energy to keep going.

That’s how preserving energy preserves flexibility: By keeping a steady pace, we won’t run out of the energy we need to move or change.

Marketing isn’t something we do once a week or once in a while. It’s something we’re always doing. 

The only question is whether we’re doing it well or not, based on the energy we have to invest in it.

Which comes from the pace we set.

Patience

“Part of playing the long game is understanding that you can’t always immediately jump into the ring. Moving slow may feel like wasting time. But every moment you spend understanding the nature of the game, and how it works, makes you stronger once you do get in.”

— Dorie Clark, The Long Game

Marketing takes time.

Every overnight success is the result of years of invisible labour.

So we need patience, perhaps more than all, to stick with it long enough for it to work the way we want it to.

Which means we can’t get distracted by every new tactic, every new trend, every new course, download, or video.

If we spin ourselves in circles, trying a new thing every other day or week, we won’t end up anywhere but dizzy and disillusioned.

And we’ll run out of patience before any individual effort has time to pay off.

But to have the freedom to be patient, we need to preserve our money and our energy.

We need to remember that flexibility is the key, not betting everything on a single tactic at a single time.

Instead, we explore our options.

We prepare for the likely scenarios.

And we preserve our money, our energy, and our patience so we can invest where we’re seeing success.

When we work this way, we’ll never be perfectly adapted, we’ll never be the T. rex of our time.

But we’ll make sure we create more than a legacy of brilliant but brief success.

We keep going instead.

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