Foreign permission marketing is the idea of delivering anticipated, personal and  relevant messages that people want to get, and as obvious as that sounds in  1996 and 1998 that was a revolutionary statement, that marketing and  advertising were the same thing then, and that people thought that if you had  money, you could interrupt whoever you wanted. And I started an internet  company before the World Wide Web called yoyodyne, and we invented  permission marketing, the idea of only contacting people who wanted to hear  from us, and the simple test is, would they miss you if you were gone, if you  didn't show up? Would people say, Why didn't you show up? And most  advertising doesn't meet that test. Well, we were having trouble explaining to big companies our clients were people like American Express and Carter Wallace.  Why this worked, it would take us months to make a sale. So since I understood how to make books, I made a book about it. What I have discovered was that  quite a journey occurred. First, I got kicked out of the Direct Marketing  Association because they didn't approve of my heresy, and then a few  marketers got the idea, but then you discovered companies like Groupon and  Google being based completely on the idea. So it has created literally billions  and billions of dollars of value. And I'm not responsible for all the email you get  in your inbox, but the email you want to get, I'll take a little bit of credit for that.  Well, the good news is there is a direct marketing Hall of Fame. And after the  Direct Marketing Association kicked me out, a few years later, they called me  back and invited me in. So I had a little plaque up there somewhere. Anyway,  you know this idea that you can build an entity around it? We see it in American  politics now, far more than it ever was before. We see it in companies like Blue  Apron and Dropbox and slack, all of which are built on this idea that we can  communicate to people in ways that they want to be communicated to. It turns  out that's more valuable than stuff that Amazon's value isn't based on its  warehouse. It's based on the fact that 100 million people around the world want  to hear from Amazon. I think that counts as a case study. You know marketing is  fueled by adrenaline. It's fueled by urgency and emergency. We see it at its  worst in political campaigns, but we see it everywhere. We don't have time to do it right, but we always have time to do it over. We overcome our fear by creating  an emergency. But this endless emergency is caused by the fact that we're not  patiently, drip, drip, drip, working our way to a place of relevance. In fact, urgent  patience, not hiding, but patiently building an asset is probably the single most  overlooked thing that marketers fail to do. People only buy from you for two  reasons. They know you exist and they trust you, awareness and trust that's all.  The thing about awareness is they're not making any more of it. The thing about  paying attention is, if I pay you my attention, I don't have it anymore. It's gone  forever. So we're getting more and more focused on keeping our attention to  ourselves, not giving it to whoever shows up. Marketers have a history of just  taking attention and wasting it, but going forward, marketers who treasure that, 

who cherish it, who grow it and nurture it, those marketers do better than the  ones who are just racing around with an emergency. Well, the biggest mistake  marketers make, over and over again, is the hubris of selfishness, the  narcissism of I made this. It was really hard. You should look at me. I own and  you owe me your attention. There's no humility there. There's no generosity  there. There's no connection there. So that is the is the big shift that we need to  make. We need to make the shift away from having a tantrum and acting like a  three year old to patiently earning the attention of the people we seek to serve.  Well, you know, there are people who are far better than I to talk to you about  stuff like this, people like Gary Vee who understand how to do the platform  dance. I have no interest in it at all. I think that it's a trap. I think. It's a way to  avoid the other work, which is the work that makes you being someone, they will seek out that over and over again. The next best seller is a surprise best seller,  the ones that no one expected. That the movie industry spends billions of dollars a year using tried and true platform techniques, and yet, the movies that delight  and make enough money are the surprises that didn't follow any of those steps  that you know it used to be you ran your coming attractions Thursday night on  TV at 8pm because that was blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And there's a method. I don't think you need a method. I think you just need to care you Reporting and  storytelling? Well, some journalists would like us to believe that reporting is  different than storytelling, but of course, it's not. There are 1000 ways to report a story. Is there a true way if four people see a car accident. Does one person  actually see what happened and the other three are wrong, or do all four of us  process it in our own way that American television covers news differently than  Dutch television? Are they both doing reporting? Of course, they are. But what  we know is that human beings process incoming information by telling  themselves a story, a story about what they saw, a story about what change it's  going to require a story about how it fits into their existing worldview. And so  there are people who are believing nonsense, like they shouldn't get their kids  vaccinated, which is dangerous. Are they evil? I don't think they're evil. I just  think they're telling themselves a story that has bad side effects. And these  stories need ground to grow in, fertile ground, and that comes from our culture.  The culture is all around us. Culture destroys everything. Culture beats the truth, culture beats math. Culture beats any offer you can make. So we have to  understand the culture, we have to understand the worldview, we have to  understand the perspective of the person we are talking to. That the fascinating  thing about science is it has a set of rules that permits it to improve. But Ignatz  Semmelweis the brilliant scientist who figured out that if doctors would just wash their hands after they delivered a baby, many children would not die. It took 20  years before other doctors started washing their hands, because the story that  Semmelweis was telling didn't resonate with those doctors, and as a result,  millions of babies died. We see this again and again and again. So our job is 

anyone who wants to make change, because that's what marketers do. Our job  is to tell a story that resonates with the people who are hearing it. I don't think  there's any such thing as authenticity. I think that when we are being our  authentic self. We're wearing diapers and pooping. I mean, that's what babies  do. They're the last time we ever just did whatever we held held we felt like,  right? Ever since then, we've been faking it. We put on an outfit. Why? So when  people see us, they will judge us differently. We comb our hair, we brush our  teeth, we're doing all of these things, not because in that moment, it's our  authentic self, but because it's the self we choose to put forward. So let's  redefine authentic to mean consistent. Our consistent self is one that if you look  at it from the back and look at it from the side, it's the same. Our consistent self  is the way we behave in front of our mom and in front of our customer when  we're consistent, then we can define that as a version of authenticity. Well, I'm  pretty good at not carrying regrets around too much, because they just don't  really work very well. But I'll give you a couple business examples. In 1993 the  story was online services would only work if they made money. And I, at the  time, was working with CompuServe, AOL and prodigy, and this thing came  along called the World Wide Web, and I believed the story that we were in this  static, controlled world, and if it didn't make money, it wasn't real. So I ignored  the World Wide Web for a year and a half. I didn't sign up for all the domains I  could have. I mean, I was halfway done doing it. I didn't build the website I  should have built. I didn't engage in 17 other behaviors because the story my  worldview was, we were done. It was AOL, CompuServe and prodigy. No one  else was welcome. And the World Wide Web, which made no money, which was slower, clunkier and filled with junk, never going to amount to anything. Now did  other people see what was happening differently than I did. Of course they did  right? Jerry and David built Yahoo on the basis of them seeing what I saw and  interpreting the exactly the same data totally differently. I guess the way I  interpret it is I cried when I wrote tribes and I didn't cry when I wrote probation  marketing that tribes is the first book where I got at the heart of the change I am  seeking to make in the world. It doesn't matter to me if AVON or Harley  Davidson sells yet another product. It matters to me that human beings step up,  that they speak their truth, that they look other people in the eye, that they shake off this industrialized regime and instead choose to take advantage of this  moment that we have, and I don't know how long we'll have it. All of us are more powerful than we think we are. All of us have the ability to make things better,  and that's why I wrote tribes. The idea of linchpin is that when we walk away  from the fact that factory A is better than Factory B, and that the way you're  going to win is by having a more efficient factory. And we have to walk away  from that, because someone has more robots than you, and someone is willing  to be cheaper than you, then what do you have, right? Well, what you have is  people. And the question is, do you have compliant people? People who do 

what they're told, show up on time, get more efficient each day. Well, that's not  going to help you very much, because that's what you need in an efficient  factory. Or do you have caring people, passionate people, connected people?  Do you have people who act like they own the place? Do you have people who  can look a customer in the eye and make a difference for that customer, it  seems to me that's all you got left. Because once it's a robot, anyone can buy  the robot, but that person, that person, works with you, not for you, but with you.  And no one else can have them, as long as the two of you are dancing together, that's where success lies. So you don't handle linchpins, you welcome them,  you embrace them, you nurture them. That the organization of the future doesn't need a lot of people. I run the alt MBA, the school I run with two full time people. What you need are people who are willing to make a difference. Who are willing  to stand up and say, I made this, who are restless enough that if you don't keep  it great, they'll leave because someone else wants them. That's the opposite of  what most companies want. Most companies say, I want people to be  downtrodden. I want them to be compliant. I don't want to worry about them  leaving. Well, isn't it better to have someone so great you would miss them if  they were gone, than it is to have mediocre people who you're confident have no place better to go? I think that this is the frontier. We have to go forward. And if  you're a worker, you have to make a new commitment, which is You've been  brainwashed for so many years, you've been tricked, you've been hoodwinked  and you've been put into debt by complying. And if you're just going to comply  more, you're going to get more of that. And there's an alternative, and the  alternative because everyone has a laptop, and that laptop is connected to 1.5  billion other people. You have the same tool as everybody else. How are you  going to use it? You know, it's a curse and a blessing that work as we know it,  which only started 150 years ago, is now going away that there was 150 year  parentheses like, just like the Gutenberg parentheses, which lasted 500 years. I  printed books. I love them not gonna be around much longer as a tool of  change. And that job where you go to a building and you stay there 40 hours,  and then you go home, and then you do that again for 40 years, and then you  retire, that's gone. It's gone. We wish it would come back. Some people do we  want to elect people who promise they will bring it back. It's not going to happen. So given that that's the case, we need to find meaningful work, even if that work  doesn't involve helping a company make a profit. That this is the richest planet  the planet has ever seen, that there are more people who are overweight now  on the planet as a percentage than ever in history, there are more people who  have what they need to survive as a percentage than ever in history, and it's the  safest the world has ever been. Now, what are we going to do? What we better  do is figure out how to make it also meaningful. We better figure out how to do is take these abundant resources and distribute them ever better, because the  inequality, the inequity between people who are lucky enough to show up in a 

monopoly on the right day and the right time and those who aren't. If that gets  worse, it's gonna be a lot harder to build a culture we're proud of. There's a  difference between skill and talent. Skill is something you learn. Talent is  something you're born with. I will grant you that dunking a basketball is a talent. I will never be able to dunk a basketball, but with few exceptions, almost  everything in our life is a skill, showing up on time is a skill, learning how to read  is a skill. Being persuasive is a skill, being brave enough to speak up and speak  the truth is a skill. Caring about customers is a skill. Heart surgery is a skill. So  the lie of talent is letting yourself off the hook by saying, Well, I wasn't born able  to do that because you're not going to get in the NBA. I'm not going to get in the  NBA. So let's leave that off the table for everything else. It's about skill, and skill  is easier to acquire now than ever before. My friend Steve Pressfield coined this  term, the resistance. Resistance. He doesn't put the word the in front of it.  Resistance is what gives us writer's block, which is a made up disease.  Resistance is what makes us hesitate change our clothes six times before we  go on a blind date. Be nervous before we give a speech. It's our amygdala. It's  the voice in the back of our head saying, Don't do that. You're in trouble. Well,  you were in trouble when that alarm went off and there was a saber tooth tiger  or a mastodon around you were in trouble if that alarm went off and the chief  was about to throw you out of the village. But now, when that alarm goes off, it's  a light telling you you're going in the right direction, because that's what it means to be remarkable. To be a linchpin, to stand out, is you're nervous, you're afraid,  because something might not work, and if we use it as a compass, we can't fight it, but we can dance with it. If we use it as a compass, it almost always points in  exactly direction we ought to be going. I'm spending a lot of time thinking about  how deeply the fork in the river is getting dug into the ground, and on this side  are the connected people who go ever deeper, doing the research, looking at  what works, testing, measuring, figuring out what's going to pay off for our  culture. And on this side are emotion driven, knee jerk, fear based reactions of  pick your own truth. And the problem with pick your own truth is that it leads to  conspiracy theories, which lead to ever more pick your own truth, and sooner or  later, you're just living in Gaga land, where there's no real connection to the  things you believe and do and what actually works. And I saw this behavior from big time marketers in 1995 who insisted the world would be one way or another.  I see it often when you talk to boards of directors or people who have somebody that's succeeding or was and isn't going to succeed anymore. But now you also  see it with the public. You see it with people. I just heard this the other day, many low income people, when they seek out a loan, seek out a high interest loan,  because it's a big number. Big numbers must be good, and you just want to go,  oh my goodness, because you know that's silly. I know that's silly, but if you're  surrounded by a culture that doesn't teach you, that doesn't have expectations  that you're going to be able to dig deeper, then you're going to suffer. And I think 

we have to figure out how to bridge these gaps early and often, to help people  realize that the things we take for granted that we can be warm and out of the  weather and have enough to eat and all these other things. They came from a  philosophy of test and measure, a philosophy of paying it forward and building a  

culture. And I'm I feel ever more urgency that we need to do that now. 



Last modified: Thursday, July 24, 2025, 7:49 AM