How Doing Nothing Makes Billions and Why Doing Nothing Is Still Hard Work
~ "Why are you doing nothing?!"
: "I am doing something: I'M THINKING!"
Too bad. That doesn't count, because thinking is:
INVISIBLE WORK.
Every so often clients ping me asking "whether we actually did anything.": then I failed again. Then I failed again at making the invisible visible.
We are a marketing agency and we pilot spaceships with thousands of buttons for our clients.
In reality we often click only a few buttons: after we have thought long and hard about which ones are the right buttons.
Same deal as stock investors:
"Hold the position, don't sell": that is also an activity that can take 8 hours a day: with zero externally visible effect. Holding a valuable position can be infinitely valuable: holding it can also be lethal, e.g. when there is reason to believe the value of that position could shift tomorrow.
"NOT DOING IT."
Not doing it can, in this case, be a ton of work.
You can research 24 hours a day whether selling billions in stock today is a good idea, or whether you should keep holding.
Nobody then asks whether that counts as work.
That is definitely useful work that can create and destroy gigantic value.
Marketing works the same way, with one drawback:
- The long 100-point list of drawbacks of investing in marketing versus investing in stocks.
Obvious drawback in marketing:
- More systems: As a marketer you have to keep more systems under control. After a decision, a stock investor only has to press one button to create value: a modern marketer has to control an entire spaceship full of buttons, and steer it to the right place at exactly the right time.
Clients do not care how many buttons you press. Clients care about the result.
The result is: Revenue. Profit. Stack. Money. Cash. Coin.
A lot of money gets invested in marketing.
So with marketing investments, just like with stocks, I have to check every day whether I can let them keep running, or not.
So I take a quick look: and dive into stacks of numbers and settings across every marketing system involved and get a read on the current situation in 2 hours.
Hypothesis: For good marketing decisions, I usually have to weigh more factors than a stock investor does for a stock investment.
Especially when things are not going well, I have to think about every decision 10 times harder than when things are going well.
So for me it is more work to build a small setup for a small startup than to optimize the setup of a company that has been running more or less stably for years: I have to make more decisions, with less data, and every decision hits the company's overall result harder. And when something fails, I have to try the next thing immediately: an insanely complex process, which is why founders are told to learn sales themselves: not all of them can or want to, so they hand off marketing and want "as much as possible to get done."
What they actually want is growth in market share, revenue and profit.
What they think has to happen for that: "Do as many things as possible in marketing."
That is nonsense: It is actually about doing the right things in marketing.
If you do a lot of wrong things, or do a lot of right things the wrong way, your marketing fails.
Then your entire company dies because you hate marketing and sales.
In that case your company dies for good reason, because as founders and CEOs it is your job to sell your dream.
Take your dream and turn it into a buyable product.
That is the best way to make your dream real in your customers' hands.
That is progress.
That is the growth of civilization.
Farmer by farmer.
Trader by trader.
Worker by worker.
Builder by builder.
Workers of the invisible, heroes of the matrix:
Marketers!
Turning your dream into a simply buyable and consumable product is the enlightenment of capitalist meditation, the mechanism that makes every dream of every free person real.
The free market economy!
With free markets!
For free people.
But back to DOING NOTHING!
Not doing something can actually be a massive amount of work.
Pro investors who have billions "parked" in valuable positions can think about that a lot every day.
Pro marketers who have company-critical budgets invested in valuable marketing positions can think about that even more every day.
So yes, invisible work exists.
At our shop, plenty of it, and there are even grades of invisibility.
Bonus hypothesis: Because "thinking" is the most invisible work, so little thinking gets done today.
Everyone only wants "visible" work.
It delivers instant status and instant cash.
So we are not only workers of the invisible:
we are also the ones who make the done visible:
makers of the invisible, made visible.
No wonder marketing has such a foggy reputation: it is so invisible and yet so everywhere that gigantic piles of myths and cluelessness have stacked up into a legendary junk-drawer body of "knowledge" around marketing.
Make Marketing simple again:
We have goods and we signal readiness to sell in the market: We are traders and town criers, and we stand in the market and shout the hottest stories down the alleys!
"Two buttons for the price of one today! Ladies and gentlemen! Step right up! Click now!"
But let me straighten out the button comparison one more time:
Investors: 1 decision -> execution: 1 button
Marketing: 1 decision -> execution: 1000 buttons
Investor clients:
"Fine if they think long and hard about that button, it's a lot of money and our future depends on it."
Marketing agency clients:
"Just mash as many buttons as possible, as fast as possible! Mash as many buttons as you can! We're not paying you to sit around! Stop thinking so long! Just do it! This is a lot of money! This is our life!"
With investors it is about the right investment decisions.
Then you press 1 button.
The right investment decisions are life-critical, so we think hard about them.
With marketing it is about the right marketing decisions.
Then you press 1000 buttons.
The right marketing decisions are life-critical, so we have no time to think about them.
Wrong.
Marketing is 1000 times harder than investing: both in decision-making and in execution.
That is why in marketing we have to think harder about the right decision than financial investors do.
More marketing impact? More thinking.
"It is not about pressing as many buttons as possible as often as possible.
It is about pressing the right buttons with the right settings."
And what do the marketing masters at McGrinsey say to that?
You have to do both! Think deeper than the Grand Canyon and work faster than a factory full of eight-armed superheroes.
And because that is so unbelievably impossible, modern marketing creatures are the crown of evolution in human knowledge work. Yes, I have to say it here: Marketers are the best.
Modern marketing creatures are masters of attention architecture and memetic machine-building.
We tell the story.
The whole world lives.
We tell its story.
The whole world is full of people.
We tell their story.
The true stories, of the true days, of the true people who actually live.
The stories of our time.
The best stories, told best.
The best stories, produced with masterful memetic maximum efficiency, staged with culture-tech brilliance in the most modern media and implanted into high-resonance target brains.
We tell the true story of the world:
Every day.
McGrinsey.
