Admit The Mess And Climb The Curve Faster

Precision is created through iteration. I had a friend asked me recently about some advice and details of the advertising side of my business, and for full transparency, I come from the science, engineering and personal development worlds. I had basically no experience with advertising and marketing besides advertising my book that I published several years back.

Which was my first foray into the world, and I made pretty much only mistakes during that process. The reality comes from a Hemingway quote that I love, which is the first draft of everything is shit. and not only are the first or the first dozen drafts of nearly everything I do shit, they are characterized by disorganization.

You can find this in nearly every learning curve you go through, because a learning curve implies that you go from not knowing something to knowing something. And the process where you learn and therefore are going through the first drafts or iterations of that thing, in my opinion, is the process of going from disorganization to organization.

And disorganization may mean that you don’t have exactly the right way of measuring something that you’re trying out, or it may mean that you quite literally don’t have a good way of organizing your thoughts or files. Or projects, et cetera, However it manifests. It always manifests. How could it not?

If you don’t know what you are doing? Even if someone gives you a roadmap, you aren’t gonna know how to take every step until you walk it. A guide helps, but he can’t walk the path for you. so in this example, my friend was asking me for the efficacy of paid versus organic content in my business.

And don’t get me wrong, I have numbers, but since I am still going through many of the learning curves associated with this area of my business that I’m not a master of. They aren’t clean and pretty. They are a mixture of real numbers and personal assumptions over gray areas and anecdotes, et cetera.

The reality of advertising in my business right now is that some of it is disorganized. Not all of it, but some of it, I would love to tell you that it’s not, but that would be a lie.

And of course I could lie in order to save face and seem more professional. But the reality is that would be an emotionally reactive response due to a feeling of embarrassment or insecurity or anxiety on my end. And it would both hurt him and me, him, because he would be receiving false or limited information without knowing that it’s limited and me, because I would be succumbing to the anxiety associated with the disorganization of a new learning curve.

What I have learned about this sensation of disorganization is that the faster you can identify it, call it out, expose it, and move through it, the faster you get through the learning curve and the faster you create organization

If you cannot handle the emotions that disorganization causes for you, it will likely be impossible for you to actually get to the top of that learning curve. You will be stuck spinning your wheels because I am willing to expose the disorganization in this part of my business, even publicly online. I allow for other people who actually know what they’re doing, to know what’s happening, pinpoint issues, and help me through those obstacles faster.

The downside of this obviously is of course, that I have to be honest and show that I’m not perfect, But in showing that I am not perfect and iterating and learning fast, I will have the precise answers that this friend was asking me about faster than if I tried to hide my imperfections and anxieties and obstacles. Coming back to my point, which is that precision is created through iteration

if emotional obstacles due to disorganization cause you to iterate slower, you will get to precision slower