This Is Marketing: You Cant Be Seen Until You Learn to See

Where’s the angry bear?
When someone doesn’t act as you expected them to, look for their fear.
It’s difficult to dream of anything when you think you’re about to be
eaten by a grizzly. Even (or especially) if it’s all in your mind.
What do you want?
Let me guess. You’d like to be respected, successful, independent,
appropriately busy, and maybe a little famous. You’d like to do work you’re
proud of and do it for people you care about.
What’s not on that list? That you need to own a certain color car. That
you have to sell your items in packages that are six inches wide, not seven
inches. That you want all your customers to have first names with no fewer
than six letters in them.
The details don’t matter so much. Just as your customers want a shift in
their emotional states, to move from fear to belonging, so do you.
That leaves a huge amount of room. Many degrees of freedom.
It helps to follow certain truths of commerce. If you want to be
independent, you probably need to own assets, or a reputation. If you want
to be financially well off, you probably need to deliver enough value to the
right people that they will happily pay you for it. If you want to be proud of

---

your work, you probably need to avoid racing to the bottom and denigrating
the culture along the way.
Within that framework, though, there’s plenty of room. Room for you to
dig in deep and decide what change you want to make, and how (and who)
you seek to serve.
This might be a good time to go back to the edges exercise, to go through
it again and find some new axes, new revelations, new promises. Find the
people worth serving, and then find a change worth making.
Always be testing
It’s tempting to make a boring product or service for everyone.
Boring because boring is beyond criticism. It meets spec. It causes no
tension.
Everyone, because if everyone is happy then no one is unhappy.
The problem is that the marketplace of people who are happy with
boring is static. They aren’t looking for better.
New and boring don’t easily coexist, and so the people who are happy
with boring aren’t looking for you. They’re actively avoiding you, in fact.
The ever-faster cycles that require us to always be testing, to resist
creating boredom, are driven by the fact that the only people we can serve
are curious, dissatisfied, or bored. Everyone else can opt out and refuse to
pay attention.
The good news is that two extraordinary things have happened, massive
shifts in the way everything is sold to everyone:
1. It’s cheaper and faster than ever to create a prototype or a limited
run. That’s true for nonprofits, as well as for manufacturers or
service businesses.
2. It’s cheaper and faster than ever to find the early adopters, to
engage with people who want to hear from you.
This means it’s on each of us to make an assertion. Outline a promise.
Choose your extremes, find the people you seek to change, and show up
with your offer.

---

Call it a test if you want to.
But it’s real life.
The real life of engaging with what’s possible, and of working with
people who want to make a change.
Always be seeking, connecting, solving, asserting, believing, seeing, and
yes, testing.
The other way to read this is: always be wrong.
Well, not always. Sometimes you’ll be right. But most of the time, you’ll
be wrong. That’s okay.