The journey we're on

Learning. Refining. Succeeding.

Wednesday, July 12, 2023. 3:33 am—

I’m sitting at the desk in the spare room of my parents’ apartment in Queensland, Australia. The cup of instant coffee—my second—is softly steaming beside my laptop. On the screen are five faces in little squares looking back at me, each with a job title that begins with ‘Chief’. It’s a sunny afternoon where they are, and cold and dark where I am.

We’re all here to discuss one thing:

Is our marketing working?

This meeting is particularly important because it’s the first opportunity I have to show the new CEO that I’m on top of it. That I’m the guy for the job.

I’ve spent days preparing—working with my team to compile, analyze, and organize data from all our marketing programs into a presentation that’s currently showing on the screen.

I sip my coffee and begin—

I move through the opening slides quickly.

Then it’s straight to the meat of the presentation: the marketing funnel, where we show how many opportunities turned into paying customers, and which channels deliver the most customers.

I begin by talking through the most important data: how many leads we generated, which channels they came from, and how many of those leads converted into paying customers.

“—Allan,” says the CEO. “Is this data cohorted?”

I pause for a moment.

“Cohorted?”

“Yes,” she says. “Is this showing the same group of leads moving through the funnel over time—or is it just everything from last year mixed together?”

My stomach drops into my abdomen.

I look back at the slide.

“It’s everything together,” I say.

She nods, presses her lips together, and writes something on her notepad.

Two days later:

I’m in the same room, on another video call.

This time it’s just me and the CEO. We’re talking about the presentation.

“Honestly, Allan,” she says. “I wanted to end that call within the first 8 minutes.”

Recently, I read Steve Martin’s memoir, Born Standing Up, which covers his career as a stand-up comedian in the 1960s and 70s.

Martin’s story is one of perseverance more than anything else. By his own admission, he wasn’t naturally talented or gifted. He had many setbacks along the way—gigs where he performed to empty rooms, late-night TV spots that were meant to help him break through but never did.

Martin notes how his journey to success was more “plodding than heroic”, and how he took “incremental steps studded with a few intuitive leaps.”

“I did standup comedy for eighteen years,” he writes. “Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success.”

I think Martin’s arc as a stand-up comedian is a useful way to look at any career.

Along the way, you’re going to make a whole lot of mistakes and f*ck up more than a few times. There’s probably going to be a few important meetings with important people that don’t go the way you want them to.

It’s going to make you feel like crap.

And you’re going to question if you’re good enough to make it. Or whether you made the right career choice.

I think that’s a good time to step back and acknowledge that most of the journey is made up of the learning and refining years.

And if that’s the case, then no matter how hard it gets, we’re better off trying to enjoy the journey a little more and not taking it all so seriously.

Right?