Category: Commentary

Praxis is hiring a marketing lead. (Check out the role and apply here.)

It’s so hard to find good marketing people with experience.  Entry-level marketing talent isn’t hard to find.  There are a lot of hungry young people with the raw material to do some basic content, social media, SEO, etc. work.  But if you want someone with a track record of marketing success, it gets hard.

Why?

A bunch of reasons I suspect.  One is that marketing is surprisingly hard to quantify, even in an age of data tracking for everything.  If a company grows, anyone working in marketing there will take credit for the growth.  But I know a lot of products so good they’d grow with a monkey at the helm.  I know others where sales teams do all the work, and marketing just sort of puts shine on it.  The reverse is also possible, that good marketers are putting their bright ideas and tight execution behind crappy products or bad markets or a team that can’t close and onboard leads, so you don’t know.

Truly elite marketers probably started companies of their own.  Others gravitate towards to hottest, best products.  Others help a company or two grow then go the consulting route.  Unfortunately, the best business model in consulting is to hit larger companies with more money, but servicing those morphs the marketer into a buzzword buffet that loses touch with earlier, hungrier businesses and markets.

I’m slightly more inclined to go for someone with a kick-ass track record of grit, grind, passion, organization, intelligence, and creativity in some other role who can learn marketing than someone who’s got more marketing experience but not enough proof they have the more raw character qualities.

The other challenge is that it’s hard to define what I actually want in the role.  A visionary, creative type?  Sounds great, but not as great as an organized, executor.  Then again, the executor can’t lack insight and imagination and empathy with our market.  Then again, creative types are often not driven enough by prove-able growth as they are their grand vision.

Marketing is early sales, but it’s different too.  Lots of great sales people are not good marketers.  But good marketers have to be good salespeople.

I sometimes wonder if leading marketing is more like founding a company than anything else.  You can’t just transfer it to any old business.  You can only do it well if you’re sold out in love with the product, vision, and market.  It’s not a totally liquid form of career capital.  Maybe good marketing is more of an emergent property that comes out of a person with deep passion for the product and some inherent ability they may not have even known about before.

Who knows.  If you think you do, you can apply!

My good friend and colleague TK Coleman is launching an 8 stop tour of bad arguments for college this week, taking on a different argument each week.  Follow it here.

I’m glad it’s TK and not me.  I don’t have the patience to engage arguments for college anymore, because all of them but one fall apart instantly.

The only argument for paying tuition and completing college is the old, “You need a degree to get a decent job.”

That one’s worth engaging, and it’s easy.  A few bullets:

• Around 65% of grads have no job or one that doesn’t require a degree, so it’s not working.
• A degree is a signal to employers of some base level of ability. You can build a better signal. We do it all the time at Praxis.
• Jobs that say “degree required” don’t mean it. We’ve helped hundreds get just those kind of jobs without one.

There’s one good reason to get a degree and one only: if you know for certain you want a job that legally requires a degree.  Government protections and monopolies are the only justification.

“How can you be so dismissive of all the other arguments for attending college?”

Because there aren’t any.

Let’s look at a few contenders:

• “It’s about learning and being exposed to ideas”
• “It’s about making friends and networking”
• “It’s a unique social experience”

Of course, each of these is hard to justify if you spend any time on a campus.  If you think world-class learning, socialization, and networking are happening, you might lack imagination…or eyes.  But forget that.  Let’s completely accept the premise that four years in college absolutely produces these things and these things are absolutely valuable.  If true, no one should pay tuition.

Why would you?  Every single item but the rubber-stamped paper can be had without paying tuition.  You can sit in classes, attend parties, even do homework without registering or paying a dime.  If all those vague, fuzzy things are the real value of college, then tuition is unnecessary.

The fact that no one does this reveals that consumers of college do not see those “intangibles” as valuable at all.  If some professory type wants to argue that they should value these things that’s just fine.  It’s also an argument against paying tuition.  If you want the bundle of stuff other than the paper, move to a college town and get it for free.

https://discoverpraxis.com/bad-college-arguments/

It’s cheaper and easier than ever to express your voice.  Information is so cheap to create, distribute, and consume that for the first time in history everyone can (theoretically) broadcast instantly to the whole world.

Hot takes are common.  You don’t need to write out and submit to an editor your review of a movie.  You can Tweet it right from the theater before the credits roll.  Resistance to political oppression or unhappiness with proclaimed leaders are faster and easier too.

This is a good thing.  Voice and exit are two powerful tools to improve the institutions under which we live.  The fewer barriers to each, the better.

The fact that voice has become 1000x easier, while exit has become only maybe 2x easier in the last half century is interesting.  It means, I think, that things are better overall, but the relative ease of voice over exit seems to have tilted culture heavily towards a “say something about it” vs a “do something about it” mentality.  In fact, I’d argue most modern ideas of what it means to “do something about it” are really just versions of voice.  To me, the really powerful “do something about it” is exit.  Or, as Frank Chodorov put it, “not doing something about it.”

Consider a pop-culture example.  Star Wars The Last Jedi wasn’t a good movie.  Most people didn’t like it.  When a product isn’t very good, you just don’t buy it, right?  Not in an age of voice > exit.  It seems the main response by people unsatisfied with the film was to watch it, then spend countless hours telling the fans and creators that you hated it, and furthermore, that they never should have made it and they should be using their creative energies in a way you like more.  Voice, voice, voice.  So much voice, exit seems the forgotten option.

Sometimes it’s better to forget protests and Tweet wars.  Just exit the stuff you don’t like.  Vote with dollars, not voices.  It’s more empowering, positive, enjoyable, and effective.

It’s common in the world of bits to talk about delightful products that just make you happy when you use them.

It’s a little less common in the old school world of atoms. I got to thinking about this today when I used a tie-wrap to fix a broken dishwasher rack. Tie-wraps and electrical tape are two boring, practical tools. But they are absolutely delightful to use every time. That’s quite a feat.

Sticky notes are pretty delightful. The Pilot G2 07 pen is too. Starting a car engine with a key is a delightful experience, but driving itself is only sometimes.

There aren’t many more off the top of my head. Maybe paper shredders. These examples are all designed for utility, and the delightfulness factor is a happy byproduct. I wonder what people would come up with if there was an entire R&D lab that did nothing but try to invent physical products that create delightful experiences. Maybe fidget spinners and stress balls, which are cathartic but don’t quite have the same type of delight. Is it because they aren’t utilitarian enough? Is delight enhanced when it just so happens to coincide with a productive function?

Maybe the constraints of utility are the best path to joy.

Ask for what you want.

Don’t ask by implication.

I had a recent experience that’s pretty common.  Someone asked for something, I told them the conditions under which it could be delivered (which were, as most conditions, just my made-up best guesstimate of what made sense).  They replied, “Oh, that’s disappointing.  I thought it would be different.”

I almost flipped my shit.  It rubbed me the wrong way on the wrong day.

What’s the point of replying to my proposal with your emotional state?  What’s the point of telling me it’s not what you expected or wanted?  Why not just tell me what you do want?  Why not make a counter-proposal?  Why not just say, “That’s a little more onerous than I’m ready to accept.  Would you consider this instead?”

Don’t make other people interpret and navigate your emotional state and intuit solutions.  Say what you want.  Offer your own solutions.

The office is near a very large, very old graveyard.  It’s a lovely place for my daily walk, odd as that may sound.  I like graveyards, especially here in the South, and especially since reading Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book.

Today, I didn’t listen to any podcasts or audiobooks or music.  I just walked in silence.  The cemetery air was a little heavier than usual, and I got to thinking about mortality.  It only took me a few minutes of initial discomfort to come to terms with my own mortality.  It took me a little more time and discomfort to come to terms with the mortality of my wife and peers.  Then an awful thought popped into my head.  My children will die someday.  I can’t begin to explain how dreadfully this hit me.

It wasn’t only the thought of my kids dying young.  That is a special kind of horrible that needs little elaboration.  It’s just so deeply wrong and gut-wrenching.  But even the thought of my kids dying peacefully at a ripe old age after a full life made me feel weird and a little desperate.  Imagining the world without them seemed so empty and tragic.  I felt a special kind of helplessness thinking about it.

I don’t know why this is.  Maybe I can stomach my own death because some part of me lives on through my kids, but when they pass that’s it?  Maybe if I have grandchildren, it won’t seem quite as sad knowing my kids won’t live forever, because another generation carrying a part of me remains?  This is plausible, but it would have to be some kind of subconscious hard-wiring.  I’ve never consciously felt the need for some kind of lasting legacy.

Maybe it’s because so much of my current identity has to do with ensuring the health, survival, and thriving of my kids.  The thought of their mortal life ending even in the far future may be too dissonant for my current self to be comfortable with.

I don’t know, but I know it’s something I’m not prepared to think about.  It’s too overwhelming.  Coming to grips with my own mortality and reminding myself to make peace with it daily is enough of a task for now.  Sorrow is a heavy thing, even hypothetically.