Category: Contentions
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Contentions: Viewer discretion is advised
Beware people and products that position themselves to create a problem; to exacerbate a discomfort and dissatisfaction in your present life. For example, that job you were entirely satisfied with doesn’t look as appealing as the creator who claims to make passive income and is recording a video from a beach in Hawaii. Usually, someone…
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Contentions: “People don’t actually know that…”
… Your team works with a vast, fascinating, set of data. … Your team performed a migration in a way that nobody ever did before, and that was an awesome feat. … Your team is responsible for designing or developing some of the most exciting projects in the industry. Being the industry’s best kept secret…
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Contentions: Stop wasting your money, nobody wants your content marketing
The term, “content marketing,” is both one of the most well-understood use cases for writing in business—a good source of jobs directly related to writing—and still often one of the most poorly defined, mis-applied, and problematic initiatives for businesses. Former Animalz CEO Devin Bramhall describes this in her public resignation announcement at LinkedIn: “I became…
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Knocking on doors
How people find out about you matters a lot. Your current physician probably didn’t cold call you. You find good products and services through recommendations, media, and searches. Anyone who is cold calling you is implicitly telling you, “Not enough people trust me to do business with me yet.” That’s why cold calling is difficult.…
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Seek truth
If you’re an expert, your job isn’t to convince people to buy or do something. Your job is to see patterns, acquire information, and provide it to people in a concise and clear way. Seek truth through facts, expert opinions, surveys, anecdotes, and data. This doesn’t have to be complicated or cost even a single…
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Marketing as the sector of the future
Excerpted from Average is Over by Tyler Cowen: “Despite all the talk about STEM fields, I see marketing as the seminal sector for our future economy…. “It sounds a little silly, but making high earners feel better in just about every part of their lives will be a major source of job growth in the…
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So, you want to start an engineering blog?
If your company really could start an engineering blog on its own, it would have one already. (A blog with three posts and one of them being “Hello World!” saddens me and does not count.) An engineer on the team would’ve made it part of their job, or the company would’ve hired an editor, or…
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Don’t think to write, write to think
This is one of the lessons that every writer comes to appreciate: writing is thinking. Writing is not the artifact of thinking, it’s the actual thinking process. There’s no shortage of great quotes on this topic, the implications are less clear: Writing is the planning process and the final product: You don’t design a final…
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I’m hiring technical ghostwriters!
Business has been booming, and I’m looking to work with some more people! If you’re literate with technology (e.g., you know what GitHub is!), and enjoy ghostwriting and helping other people unblock their creativity, and are curious to learn from business and technology leaders, this could be a good job for you: Ghostwriter (Technical) Part-time/freelance,…
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The myth of “with zero marketing”
Marketing constantly, and practically inevitably, suffers from attribution problems at all scales. Occasionally, someone I’m considering doing business would tell me more about their business’s momentum, and snarkily add, “Oh, and we did all of this without marketing!” The savvier ones pretend that they’re embarrassed about it. (They’re not. It’s a brag.) The main problem…