#39 - Wisdom Fades Without Being Nurtured

Don't over-index on your experience and perspectives. They're not automagically helpful.

Tl;dr — Wisdom Fades. It is something that has to be nurtured in order to remain wise…effective…helpful.

A couple of months ago, I was at a start-up founder happy hour, which also happened to have a bunch of advisors and VCs in attendance. One of the advisors there, let’s call him Sam, entered a conversation circle that was talking about marketing tactics.

Sam, who worked in investment banking for most of his 40-year+ career, started giving “feedback” to a founder in the group, saying something along the lines of,

“Listen, from my experience, the only tried and true way I’ve seen early marketing work is to literally pick up the phone and call all of your prospects until they finally pick up and have to listen to you. You need to make them listen to you. Don’t take No for an answer. And for fuck’s sake, don’t waste your money on trade shows and “webinars”… since when has that actually worked?

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Sam did this thing that I have always found deeply irritating: over-leveraging his relatively narrow bound of experience, and not showing any modicum of awareness about the limits of his expertise… or the curiosity to expand or sharpen his base of knowledge. He was also just rude and condescending… But, you know, he had a lot of experience… …

It’s not that his advice was 100% wrong; it wasn’t. In some situations, his approach may have been the approach to take, but for most his audience of under-40 B2B founders who’ve grown up in a very different, digital-first world, where growth oftentimes come from hybrid marketing strategies (in-person, digital, webinars, co-marketing efforts, paid media, etc.) his advice was not very additive. The eye rolls said as much.

You see, Wisdom Fades. It is something that has to be nurtured in order to remain, well, wise…effective…helpful.

• You cannot assume that your experience or perspective will always be the “key” to someone else’s situation. You need to lead with curiosity, ask questions, understand their context, share ideas, get feedback, tune your recommendations, and so on

• We should always the time to understand where our areas of expertise are versus where we simply have exposure or some quality experience. Expertise, in my view, means that you are top 5% in the world at a given topic, that you’ve likely seen hundreds (if not thousands) of variations on scenarios within your topic, that you’ve been wrong A LOT, and that you can, through light questioning, quickly uncover patterns to help you ask increasingly potent and enlightenment-inducing questions

• The world is always-evolving. Many people seem to think that the world has changed at a faster pace than almost ever before in the last 20 years, and the speed of information + technological evolution seems to be sustaining that pace. This implies that tactics and strategies that may have worked in 1995 or even 2005…or even 2018…19…20…21… (you see where I’m going?) might not work anymore!

  • This means that even if you have great depth in an area, your base of knowledge is almost always being undermined and diminished by the speed of how the world moves around you

• This all means that the only way to remain relevant and effective is to constantly be learning new things and refining your ideas about how your part of the world works and who will own the future

  • And tactically, when you hear a strategy or tactic that your gut reaction is to disagree with, practice taking a few seconds to flex your brain and consider how something could work… And if you can’t understand why, then ask how it works, under what circumstances it is optimal, and/or when it doesn’t apply

    • Example: Landing pages with quickly-available “Call Sales” buttons are the best way to drive early-stage growth

      • Question 1: Are there situations when this isn’t optimal?

        • Answer: Yes, when you have a product-led growth business that has chosen to keep a minimal sales team in place that is already overwhelmed… And/or the company has chosen to focus not on Enterprise sales growth pathways, but instead on 1-to-1 sales (i.e., getting one person to become a customer, not an entire company)

      • Question 2: When should a company use this tactic?

        • Answer: … Why am I even writing anymore? ChatGPT can answer this question…See below:

          

I think this general idea of your experience not always being relevant was touched on quite well (and succinctly) in a recent 20VC episode with Jeff Katzenberg (former Chairman of The Walt Disney Co., co-founder and CEO of DreamWorks Animation, and now General Partner at VC firm WndrCo). He talked about how “operating experience becomes irrelevant fast” given how quickly markets, technologies, and even human behavior changes.

I’ve embraced this reality, and it leads me to very deliberately seek out many different opinions on topics, and it also leads me to state, explicitly, when I do or do not have unique insight / expertise in a given topic area. The colleagues and founders I work with should hopefully be able to corroborate this :-) (…and if I’m full of shit, please call me out on it).