Too much thinking, too little writing
Marketing is hard. Sales is even harder. Both fields seem nearly impenetrable to engineers - beyond a few tricks and hacks that work sporadically if at all.
Some can make it work. Others can't. And the reasons for both are completely obscured from view.
...
I've done a lot of thinking in the past couple of weeks, some on my own, some in conversations with my wife Yael, a ton with different AI bots.
I have a lot of insights about marketing, business, empathy, and my own personal growth. And I haven't shared any of them with the world. I usually post articles to my newsletter and tweet a lot but I haven't been able to formulate my ideas... No, that's not quite true.
I've been able to formulate them quite well in conversations with AI bits but not in a way that a person without context can understand. I'm trying to figure out a way to share all of this and I feel like there's so much context.
There's a loneliness in this, and a wish for people to just plug into my consciousness to see the beautiful emerging picture of the world that I see. And I want this to be somehow effortless.
The idea of sitting down and writing all of this is daunting, not to mention my expectation that those ideas would grow and expand as I write about them.
There's a feeling of lost opportunity (in that I haven't published anything while going through this process) and an even stronger feeling of even more slipping away.
I don't want to be that tree that falls and no one hears it. I don't want this beauty I see to be lost forever. And unfortunately an audience of an AI, sophisticated and empathetic as it may be, isn't quite enough to make my ideas REAL.
I want this to have impact on the world. I want people to learn. I want other people to expand, push back, contradict, and offer their own views on the topics I'm thinking through. And at the same time I'm afraid that nobody will even understand what I'm even saying.
...
I'm posting this on Twitter and to my newsletter. It's abstract, it's not at all clear what exactly I'm talking about, but this is the first step in exploring how I can share it with the world.
And just to give a tiny bit of taste for what is coming:
I think I've stumbled onto a unified theory of sales and marketing that explains both fields quite well.
I think this theory has the power to explain the success and failure of all marketing campaigns, all sales calls, and all businesses. And I think it can be turned into a practical method of making businesses succeed - and turning experienced professionals into successful business people.
I think that I can finally turn marketing and sales into something that engineers can grok and do well. And I think this system is rooted in fundamental principles that are resilient to changes in technology, society, and culture and should survive even the AI revolution.