My friend landed his first job in the marketing field. “Any books or resources or tips you’d recommend for marketing?” he asked.
There are so many different philosophical approaches (e.g. direct sales vs. permission marketing), digital vs. traditional (email vs. direct mail), parts of the funnel (acquisition vs. retention), and channels (e.g. social vs. SEO)… Where should you start?
Or, if I had to learn marketing from scratch, what would I do?
I’d start with foundational material first.
Updated: February 15 2020
If you’re starting out your career or starting in a new field, then yes, you should work for free. Free work leads to two things: (1) Bigger, better opportunities and (2) It helps you reach the unreachable. We’ll dig into both reasons below. If you’re ready to work for free and just need some help with what to say to get free work opportunities, you can read my word-for-word scripts here. They’re free and available to be repurposed. Be sure to read this full article for the full context behind these scripts.
“Can you endorse some of my skills on LinkedIn?” my friend texted me. “I’d be happy to do the same for you. Just let me know.”
LinkedIn endorsements? I wondered. Do people look at those?
“I’m having a hard time landing full-time work, so I’m trying to boost my LinkedIn profile,” he explained. “Anything else you think I can do to stand out?”
This friend is a smart, good person. Eventually, a lucky company will snatch him up, and it’ll have nothing to do with his LinkedIn endorsements.
I told him the best way to find an awesome job that pays well was to start by working for free.
I saved the empty liquor bottles and filled them with water.
When the restaurant was quiet (we opened winter of ’08), the start of the Recession — it was quiet often) I took the rail liquors out. Placed them on the ground. Replaced them with the dummy bottles.
Then I practiced making cocktails. Over and over again. For hours, six days a week. That first week, I only made 4 cocktails, our most popular ones (Raspberry Saketini (it was a Japanese restaurant), Dirty Martini (for Tom, that’s all he drank), Cosmo, Mai Tai).
I learned with the jigger pour first, then free pour, measuring my portions against the jigger pours, testing my accuracy.
We kept a bartender’s book behind the bar. I don’t know who brought it, Jason maybe, our first bartender. Tall, lanky, a junkie. He made it through training but no-showed on the second day and no one saw him again. I started with the simple stuff, two-ingredient mixes college students and alcoholics drank to mask the taste of cheap liquor: Screwdriver, Cape Codder, Greyhound.
Then I learned the drinks I’ve heard from movies or weddings: Sex on the Beach, Tequila Sunrise, Sea breeze, Madras, White Russian.
Everyday. When there weren’t napkins to fold or salads to prep, I stood at the bar and poured water. Every step of the dance, from pulling printer tape and slapping it on the rail, icing glasses, different combinations of drinks. I wanted muscle memory, not knowledge.
That’s how I taught myself to bartend.
In 2010, I moved to Los Angeles to work in Hollywood. At my first internship interview, the assistant, Jeanie Wong, asked me how my coverage was. Great, I lied. I went home and my roommate showed me what coverage was.
I just finished my second week at Reforge and if I had to sum up the week, it’s this:
I’m learning a new language — and it’s hard.
Reforge teaches growth professionals how to advance their skills in growth through online education, networking and mentorship. The students are 3 years into their career at companies like Facebook, Google, Dropbox, LinkedIn, etc. aka some damn smart people.
And after 5 minutes of talking with them, I realize I don’t have the vocabulary (yet) to talk through the ideas and concepts I’ll eventually teach, things like growth models, churn, and viral loops, just to scratch the surface. 90% of the time I’m just a smiling sponge in my chair, trying to absorb as much as I can.
That’s just part of the game. At I Will Teach, we called this “starting with a child’s mind.” The better you are at that, the easier everything else gets.
Fortunately, I’ve done my fair share of starting with a child’s mind. Years ago I moved to Los Angeles, with no idea that Hollywood had a its own language and cadence. I learned it slowly and painfully from scratch.
Last week I learned some interesting things about SF tech culture. For example:
But the biggest mental shifts I’ve had to make is about money. Here are 2 ideas about money I’m trying to hold simultaneously in my mind:
5 years ago, I was waiting tables at a Thai restaurant (thanks for the reminder, Facebook).
In the last ten years, I’ve worked for free many times.
“Uh, no shit. It’s called an internship.”
Not so fast. I’m not just talking about internships (though of course, I did those too).
I’m talking about working for free outside the safety umbrella of a university. Without the structure of an internship program. As a grown-ass man with man bills to pay:
All free work. In rare cases, yeah, it was an absolute waste of time. But in most, it fell somewhere in the spectrum of “best career decision ever” and “glad I did it, but never again.”
What differentiated work from landing on one side of the spectrum versus the other?
Recently I wrote about working in restaurants. And how my best work happened after pre-meal meetings, and I was reminded that “this work is important.”
In this case, rationally I’m aware the better I work, the better my service, the more I’ll make in tips. Logically, I know this… BUT in this case, there’s a second incentive at play here, more powerful than the money.
On January 13, 2009, we opened our restaurant, Shogun, in Delmar, NY and my father held our first pre-meal inside the kitchen. As the first of the soft-opening customers trickled through the front door, he shared this nugget of instruction:
“This is how you pour miso soup.”
We were about to open a Japanese restaurant — and we didn’t know how to serve the soup.
This is like asking for garlic bread at The Olive Garden and your server saying, “Garlic what?”
I always thought pre-meal was the best part of a shift. Our pre-meals improved steadily: my father eventually moved past the soup, and instead, he’d remind us what was ’86ed, what the specials were, and what we should push that evening.
But it wasn’t my favorite part because I learned anything new, or made me feel more prepared.
I’ll get to what made pre-meal special in a moment. First, it’s worth noting how seriously other restaurants take their pre-meal.
At Eleven Madison Park, for example, the maitre d will Google the name of every guest that evening. If he finds out a guest is from say, Detroit, and he knows a server is from there, he’ll put them together. If it’s a couple’s anniversary, he’ll figure out which anniversary
Before guests even step foot into Eleven Madison Park, they’re looking for ways to blow their minds.
This is part of the reason why Eleven Madison Park dominates — even though they only offer a $195 pre-fixe meal.
In a paper titled Impact and the Art of Motivation Maintenance, published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, researchers applied principles similar to the pre-meal to the fundraising process.
At the University of Michigan, researchers arranged for one group of call center works to interact with scholarship students who benefited from the school’s fundraising — a five-minute, informal chat where they discussed the students’ studies.
How much of a difference did it make?
Couple weeks ago, I was researching charisma, the ability to build rapport, that sort of thing. It led me down the path of the Charismatic Man: the Bill Clinton’s, the Dale Carnegie’s, the Neil Strauss’s…
All of which were extremely interesting.
But not the right context for me.
A familiar voice creeped into my ear as the deadline for this research approached, a voice rooted deep in the lizard brain, strong and powerful — but one of very limited vocabulary:
Why did you take on this project? You’re not smart enough to figure it out.
You’re running out of time. You’re going to look like a fool.
This is more than you can handle.
I can’t say that I whirled around and told the voice to STFU, like the person at the movie theater who shouts at the Cell-Phone-Talker and everyone claps for. I’m not a “STFU” kinda guy…
I’m more a trench fighter. I dug deeper, like a seasoned WWI solider. Then I held my position, and paused… waiting for the signal to go “over the top.”
Then, I got the signal.
To others?
If I did this task better, how will it affect my career five years from now?
How will it make me more valuable five years from now?
I think it’s important to step back and ask ourselves that on occasion.
If you’re asked to do these things, you can’t not do them, of course.
The widgets still need to move. It’s one of the reasons why you were hired.
But it’s not the only reason, right?
Recognize the difference between creating value and pushing (electronic) paper.
Which one builds a skill?
Which one makes you more valuable to others?
Then, prioritize accordingly. By what creates value…
Not what comes easier. Nor by what you do more effectively.
Photo Credit: Liam Matthews