Make It Count
Planted 02021-01-20
Call it whatever you want. Marketing is what controls and expands your reach, your impact, your outcomes, your effects, your changes, and your results.
Marketing is creation. Content creation, media creation, lead creation. Call it whatever you want.
Marketing is perceived results. Marketing is perceived changes. Marketing is perceived effects. Marketing is perceived outcomes. Marketing is perceived impact. Marketing is perception.
Everything you know, everything you do, everything you say, and everything you buy is influenced by your perception. You have to craft your work alongside Perception Optimization.
Marketing is perception from those you seek to change.
If it’s in your head, it doesn’t count.
Make something, or it doesn’t count.
If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?
Your work can make vibrations, but if no one hears anything, nothing changes.
Do you expect the world to lie in wait for you to do something great and then rush out and welcome it? Everyone is far too busy with their own work. Opportunities don’t visit caves.
Make something and present it well.
Your work has to be perceived in just the right way so that people will set aside what they’re doing, look at what you’ve done, really look at it, and come back and say, ”Hey, check this out.”
Your work needs to change how the people who share it are perceived.
Does their life get better if they tell other people about it?
If sharing your work doesn’t make people look good when they share it, it won’t get shared. People only care about what you can do for them.
If the world could benefit from your work—and it would—let it. If your work isn’t shared, it’s lost, and the change you seek to make doesn’t happen.
Don’t let your work fall in the forest where no one hears it.
Make a ruckus.
Marketing may not matter to you, but the perception of your work might put off the people you seek to serve. If they don’t take note of your work, you won’t get credit.
The hard part for many of us is that we can’t read the label from inside the jar. We don’t know where we need to go or the change we need to make. Even if we do it for a living, we sometimes need others to help us when it comes to ourselves.
But that doesn’t mean everyone’s opinion matters. And it doesn’t mean we should have an irrational and unproductive obsession with what other people think of us.
Remember, everyone is far too busy with their own work.
Find the others and hold each other accountable.
Set intentions and goals among shared interests and regularly require holding each other accountable.
It’s easy to feel like no one believes in you; most journeys start lonely, paired only by a blazing internal belief. External validation comes after your work is perceived in just the right ways.
Figure things out in public.
You have to believe in the value of your work.
The best real direct measure of your work is change in human behavior. What do they do with it?
Nothing? Not enough?
Your work is a vehicle for change. If no change happens, get back to working on how it’s perceived.
People only ever want one thing—solutions to problems. Solutions that make them look good and help them achieve their goals.
Your boss wants a problem solver, not a problem bringer.
Everyone has problems they want to solve, and they want the magic bullet.
It’s a hard pill to swallow, but people don’t care as much about preventives; they want the cure to the problem currently at the front of their mind.
Find the results the people you seek to serve want most and communicate it to them.
Don‘t know who that is? It’s the smallest amount of people needed to convert their attention into enough sales to support your work.
Any argument of what a company is for dies without money.
How much you get paid is directly tied to your ability to convert attention to a sale.
People want to be sold. People are willing and able to pay you to help them move forward with their problems.
Help people move forward with their problems.
Communicate the problem and solution clearly—your offering. And then sell it with reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity.
People don’t buy the best product. They buy the best story. Nobody wants what you make; they want what it will do for them and how it will make them feel.
Anything you sell is a road to achieve those emotions—those outcomes.
Focus on emotions, not tactics.
- Honesty
- Safety
- Integrity
- Health
- Credibility
- Belonging
- Greed
- Adventure
- Respect
- Power
- Sex
- Security
- Desire to belong
- Good looks
- Learning new things
- Avoiding new things
- Peace of mind
- Revenge
- Control
- Curiosity
- Simplicity
- Friendship
- Romance
- Community
- Sympathy
- Delight
- Luxury
- Guilt
- Tension
- Freedom of movement
- Freedom of expression
- Nostalgia
- Familiarity
- Affection
- Participation
- Reassurance
- Hope
- Creativity
- Obedience
- Reliability
- Strength
- Physical activity
You can’t create these emotions, but you can channel and direct them towards your solution.
Channel emotions toward your solution.
For maximum potential, apply a solution to urgent, intense desires with the inability to became satiated and whose afflicted numbers are large enough to pay you well.
Communicate that desire and reinforce it succinctly with everything you do.
Use what your solution does as proof to others that you can satisfy their desires.
Those you seek to serve must identify with your work before they can buy from you. It must be their headline, their problem, and their state of mind at that particular moment.
Articulate the problem and solution well and you’ll have a vision that leaves people with a clear identity and purpose.
Reject more people than you attract.
You have responsibilities towards those you seek to change.
A responsibility to refuse to acknowledge anything besides that which benefits them.
A responsibility to introduce alternatives and understand what their objective in buying your product or service is.
A responsibility to help them recognize options that could produce a better result than the purchase they intended to make.
Understand what you can do to help solve others’ problems, maximize options, and find ways to do it.
You don’t need permission.
Find out what the market wants and show up with proof of work.
Notice things people don’t want to do, won’t do, or can’t do—that’s where value is. People is relative to those you seek to serve. Create things that make people more confident, make a better living, and help them fix a specific problem.
Products and media are permissionless leverage.
Permissionless projects mean permissionless progress.
Change isn’t made by asking permission. Change is made by asking forgiveness later.
You can contribute. And we need you to help people move forward. We need you to connect, to lead, and do work that matters for people who care. Make things better by making better things.
You don’t need anyone’s permission.
Now go. Make a ruckus. Make it count.