The Protégé Effect
The psychological phenomenon of teaching others to help you better learn that information
Do you know how you learn best?
This is something that has taken me YEARS to figure out for myself.
Learn by reading?
Learn by watching?
Learn by doing?
A little bit of everything?
Then I realized it’s not just about “absorbing” it once through one of the above ways, sticking it in my pocket, and saying “I’ve learned this now, I’m all set!”
It was the true internalization of it and knowing how it could be applied to any situation moving forward.
And that’s where I came to this realization - I do my best learning when I’m forced to write or teach others. Forced to simplify the complex. Forced to think two steps ahead about the impact of what would happen if I did X or Y.
Why this, why now
Because I’ve seen what happens when we marketers keep doing things the same way they’ve always been done.
Because everything is constantly changing and adaptation is critical to future success.
Because I know the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
We need to constantly challenge what we’ve learned
Learning isn’t a one-time transaction.
What you once learned doesn’t mean it will forever be a universal truth.
But this is how most marketing is viewed and treated.
The predictable revenue model
The lead gen ebook waterfall
Some specific channel always being the best for you
Another specific channel that will “never work” for you
So that’s where I’ve found these three stages of learning to be critical as my career has progressed as a marketer:
For a long time, I stopped after the first stage. I took what was shared with me at face value and accepted it as a truth.
After a decade in B2B marketing, I finally felt I was ready to start contributing to the larger conversation and join in at the second stage. Answering questions other marketers would ask based on what I knew.
But it wasn’t until just a few years ago that the third stage really clicked for me.
While working at Refine Labs, we had internal playbooks for the team around how we should be running paid search, paid social, conducting various analyses, and more.
At most organizations, you're given those and told, "Follow this playbook and don't deviate from it - it's our playbook for a reason!"
But we held a different philosophy at Refine Labs, telling the team, "If no one recommends changes to any of our playbooks over the course of a quarter, we're doing something wrong."
Almost always, there's a better way or a dynamic has shifted that requires adaptation.
And I’ve found that the marketers and organizations who operate at this third stage are the ones who continue to find success.
When you understand this, you’ll understand everything that follows
I know this note is a bit more on the philosophical side. But I felt it’s important to share this for the series that will follow as it’s the foundation for all of the thoughts, insights, experiments, tactics, and strategies that I’ll get into every Saturday.
One LinkedIn post I bookmarked this week
"Big house, long hallways, got 10 bathrooms — I can s*** all day."
- Lil Wayne, providing a poetic masterclass on contextualizing your features
Lex Winship for the win with this post.
✅ Great hook
✅ Interesting angle
✅ Successfully translating a marketing concept through something relatable/nostalgic and entertaining
✅ Supporting video getting into more of the details
Her takeaway?
…take things one step further by painting a SPECIFIC and COMPELLING picture of what these features really mean, in practice.
💩 CONTEXTUALIZE THEM 💩 in a way that clearly communicates that you
1) Know who you're talking to, and
2) Know what they care about
One podcast episode I enjoyed this week
I’ll admit it - I’ve been going down a Brian Chesky rabbit hole lately. Not in a creepy/stalker kind of way, but an “I keep pulling out my notes app to jot down something he said that I want to come back and think more about” kind of way.
Apologies in advance for the long quote, but this short monologue he went on was one that stopped me dead in my tracks as my daughter and I were going for a stroll on a local nature trail:
"Everything is started with intuition, with insights and understanding. And then the problem is: as you get more successful, you get more data. And as you get more data, you get more reliant on the data. And as you get more reliant on the data, you get more derivative, you get more iterative. And data is good. It's what we might call necessary, but not sufficient.
But why, if something made you successful, would you abandon it? If you follow your intuition, if you follow your heart, if you had ideas - why would you cease to have them the bigger you get?
You don't just have to found a company, you have to continue to refound it, to rebuild it, continue to have new ideas.
Think of a company like a body. Most companies, it's like they're cut off at the head, they're disconnected from their heart, and they're kind of cut off and they're focused on the more analytical side of their brain. I think what most companies need is more creativity and maybe a little more heart and soul.
They're very risk-averse. They round the edges off it. They cease to take risk not realizing the biggest risk is we don't change in a world that we know will change, but no one wants to be the one to make a change, to take a risk.
The organization starts focusing on itself rather than why it exists to serve other people. So all these things start happening and you start appointing more and more analytical people and then pretty soon you wake up and the only people on your board are analytical people.
And they only value what can be measured and the only things you are measuring are on a short-term horizon.
So the quality of your product, the brand, how happy people are, the vision, whether you're moving in the right direction, are you about to be disruptive with the latest technology. These things are all hard to measure.
There's an old saying by a Nobel Prize winner named Linus Pauling that says 'Not everything that counts can be counted.' So we tend to have a bias towards short-term financial measurements.
It doesn't mean they're unimportant, but if you only optimize for them, then you're going to be imperiled and it's a pretty damn good guarantee that you're going to be irrelevant in the future."
I’m always looking for good podcast recommendations as well, so if you ever have one you think I’d enjoy, send it my way!
In that same spirit, here’s a playlist I’ll be adding to every week with some of my favorites:
See you next Saturday,
Sam
P.S. This is the first official “send”, so let me know what you think! What did you enjoy? What was “meh”? What else would you like to see here! Always appreciate any feedback!