I read somewhere that a good way to find a new business idea is to step away from your field and study something else for a while. Then you come back and look at the original subject with what you learned.
I didn't set out to do this. It happened anyway. I read about marketing for years. Then I spent a good stretch reading philosophy, psychology, and sports performance. When I came back to marketing, I kept noticing one thing.
So many of the small and new business owners I meet just don't want to do their marketing. They know they should. They have the phone, the photos, the customers with good stories. They still don't want to do it. I keep coming back to the idea that it's a mindset problem.
What I've been reading
I'm mostly drawn to writers who keep repeating the basics. The ones who say, again and again, that mastering your own mind is the key. I don't need anything too far in the weeds. I want the ideas I can use on a regular Tuesday.
I like Ryan Holiday on the Stoics. I don't think I'd want to get a beer with him, but I like the way he thinks about them a good bit. I like reading about different philosophies in general and seeing how they apply to everyday life, and the Stoics are the ones I keep going back to.
I like Steve Magness and Brad Stulberg. They come at this from sports performance, and they keep landing on the fundamentals. Do the basic things. Do them over and over. Get the first 99% handled before you worry about optimizing the last 1%. Oliver Burkeman writes in that same spirit, and I read all of them on Substack and Instagram.
I love the overlap between sports performance and marketing: risk, work, the basics, repetition. I'm careful with it, too. If I push the comparison too far, marketing starts to sound like more hard work, and most of the owners I know already have plenty of that.
Grit is on my to-be-read list. I like the idea of it already, which is probably a bad reason to bring up a book I haven't read.
A few ideas keep following me back to marketing.
Kidlin's Law
I wrote about this last week. If you write a problem down clearly and specifically, you've solved half of it.
I tried it on myself and got my business down to one sentence: how do I serve small businesses with their digital marketing by focusing on foundational principles that still apply in a high-tech world? I'm still editing that sentence. It already helped.
The spotlight effect
This is the principle that the spotlight is on us a lot less than we think it is.
I think about this one every time someone tells me they're nervous to post a video, or worried people will think it's weird. Most people aren't watching that closely. I like this one a lot.
What's in my control
The Stoics sort things into what's in your control and what isn't.
Whether I post is in my control. What I say is in my control. Who sees it, and what they think, isn't. Every time I've been frustrated with marketing, I've been grading myself on that second list.
Habits
This one probably belongs to modern psychology more than philosophy, but I still really like hearing what James Clear has to say about it. "Don't miss twice" shows up in almost everything I teach.
I've tested habits on myself. I've journaled every night for over a year. My Duolingo streak is around 1,300 days. Writing this blog every week is the next one.
Where this might go
So what does mindset have to do with marketing? I think it has a lot to do with it.
The part I care about comes before any customer sees a post. It's getting the business owner to sit down and do the dang marketing. That's where so many people get stuck, and most of what's out there is about what to post once you're already doing it.
I wonder if there's a market for teaching that. Mindset in marketing. I don't know yet.
If I did teach it, the 30-Day Challenge seems like the obvious place to start. The challenge already asks people to show up for 30 days, and showing up is the hard part. Maybe the mindset pieces get worked into what's already there.
Or maybe the 30-Day Challenge becomes a mindset challenge. The 30 days would focus on what keeps people from posting: getting clear on the problem, worrying less about who's watching, paying attention to what they can control, and building the habit.
If that happened, I'd break the foundations out on their own. Why you post, who you're talking to, what your message is, and where you show up. Those 4 still come first. They might just need their own space.
I don't know which way this goes. I don't have to know yet. Writing it down is my own Kidlin's Law exercise, and this post is the first draft of the problem.