🖌️ “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” - Scott Adams

Hello Reader,

It gives me no pride to say this, but when I look at the many hundreds (maybe thousands) of marketers that I know, there are three common characteristics all marketers share:

1. they're smart
2. they're creative and
3. they're losers.

💡 The Irony of Expertise

Expertise is not developed from natural talent. Expertise is only earned through struggle.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the expert community. My digital marketing agency Stellar Platforms focused on experts - on authors, coaches and speakers.

Some of these experts were fantastic. They were New York Times best-selling authors, Hall of Fame public speakers, and internationally syndicated radio hosts. I had some really successful clients, and they all felt like losers, to themselves.

They weren’t necessarily losers in business growth. That’s why they hired another expert, to help them grow their business. But all of them were losers in some aspect relating to the nature of their expertise.

How does one become an expert?

Expertise is earned by failing repeatedly. The physicist Neils Bohr said "An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field."

We become experts at something because we struggle with it.

This is the nature of imposter syndrome. People who acquire expertise have tried repeatedly to accommodate their major failing.

When other people see all of the work and insight that has gone into their expertise, they are astounded. But the expert often feels like a fraud, deep down. They know that they struggle with something so much, they have to repeatedly accommodate it in new and better ways, all the time.

Which brings us to marketers.

How does one acquire expertise in marketing? By losing repeatedly.

Every marketer I know is either currently in, or recovering from, a lack of business success.

It is the willingness to continually try to remedy that lack of business success that allows a smart, creative person to gain expertise in marketing.

Not just anybody can be a marketer. It’s not enough to be smart and creative. You have to be a loser too.

Lose A Life to Level Up

When you play a hard level, Super Mario might fall into the lava, and you have to try again. Losing only ends the game if you stop.

I started blogging in 2010. I read The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris, and decided that I wanted to make money online. I spent years and years trying to make it work, and for the first five years, I was a total loser.

Blogging was my time-expensive hobby. Nobody pays good money for you to be a blogger on your own website. Eventually, I made so many losing websites, I was able to make the infrastructure pretty well. Quantity begat quality. My willingness to lose repeatedly made me a body of work that taught me a new craft.

Once others started paying me to make them a website, it was great. I was able to use my smarts, and my creative skills, and absolve myself from the need to make a website financially successful. I could just focus on the craft, and being a loser gave me that.

I made all the mistakes it is possible to make in a very narrow field. I condensed my lessons into a book published 5 months before ChatGPT was released to the public (I wrote Marketing Yourself entirely by hand, and published it in August of 2022). I became an expert in marketing, and the only reason I was able to do that is because I am also a loser.

Sometimes I win, but I lose more often.

You’re probably the same, within your field of expertise. People see you win, but they don’t see you lose. Because you can see all those failures, it gives you imposter syndrome.

I’m writing this message to let you know that being a loser isn’t a bad thing. Being a loser is the only short path to expertise.

When you play around with AI tools, you might feel like a loser.

That's normal. And necessary.

In December of 2022, I thought AI was going to help me do my work faster. My bread-and-butter service at the time was: taking an author's book, and slice-and-dicing it into newsletters, social media posts, and multimedia to fill a content calendar.

For the first few months of using AI, I got garbage. I spent more time editing bad output than if I just did everything by hand. So I left AI alone, and I tried to continue doing marketing the hard way.

But then I realised: a good carpenter doesn't blame the tools.

The problem wasn't GPT 3.5. The problem was me.

I had to improve as an AI operator.

So, I set out to make all the mistakes it is possible to make in a very narrow field, and I developed expertise.

Where my expertise overlaps with AI - in website design, and content marketing, and lead generation, and outbound prospecting - I'm getting some fantastic results.

I still do some things by hand (like writing this newsletter!) but with AI agents assisting me, my hands are multiplied.

I would never have gained these skills if I wasn't willing to be a loser.

I hope you are willing to be a loser, too.

It's a fast way to learn.

📰 EPIC AI Conference - Thursday, 21 May

As part of TechWeekNZ, I will be hosting an all-day AI conference over at EPIC Innovation in Christchurch.

14 speakers. 4 separate events. $30 for the day, or $10 each.

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- Caelan Huntress ​[email protected]​

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