What's in Your Marketing Diet?
When you take in marketing nutrition, are you getting healthy information? Or are you going to high-fat local marketing trade association meetings and listening to vendors hawk their own products? Why do this when you can get nourishing, high-fiber content online, by e-mail and from your bookstore?
What prompted this thought was a letter from my doctor: my cholesterol is 159 (less than 200 is good), HDL cholesterol is 53 (over 45 is good), LDL cholesterol is 91 (under 100 is good) and triglycerides are 77 (under 150 is good). "Everything looks great," the doc wrote. To quote Ren and Stimpy: "Happy happy joy joy!"
Now that I'm mature enough to make withdrawals from my IRA, I make a point of eating oatmeal for breakfast, salads for lunch, salmon for dinner (full of Omega-3s), no desserts, no alcohol and no smoking. Sometimes I even go to a gym to exercise. I avoid high-risk activities like mountain biking because I broke my collarbone doing it last year.
I recommend you apply these principles to your marketing intake. Keep your mind sharp by reading nutrient-rich blogs that will help you resist stress from dunderhead partners and enrich the body of your marketing strategy. Read newsletters from other professions to learn new tricks. Try the blogs in my blogroll. Attend a Webinar. Subscribe to the LawMarketing Newsletter. These things will keep your mind healthy.
Go to meetings where you actually learn something. Avoid the local marketing trade association meetings where the advertisers are the speakers. I decided to drop out of one marketing organization because they elected a vendor as their president. With the fox in charge of the hen house, I got out, and you should too. Instead I attend conferences about new and cutting-edge techniques to keep my mind sharp, like those offered by the Business Development Institute.
Actually read a book. Yeah, sure, we're all busy. We're exhausted at the end of the day. But take a can of gasoline, pour it on the TV (do this outside) and set it on fire. Throw your DVDs in to the bonfire. Stop watching the damn thing. Instead read a book that will fire your imagination. For work, I am reading the new book by uber-blogger Robert Scoble called "Naked Conversations -- how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers." He's got a chapter about people like me. For inspiration I'm reading "River of Doubt" about Theodore Roosevelt's fateful journey on an unexplored river in Brazil. This was the last adventure of the energetic ex-president, and it led to his death. I want to know where he went wrong.
I absolutely, positively guarantee that if you enrich your diet of incoming information, you will be better at your job, your will make more money and you'll be much happier all around.
