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We all have a story we tell ourselves about who we are and what we’re capable of. Or what we’re NOT capable of. Mine started with a bad coworker and calcified over a decade into something I never questioned again, until I was faced with a situation that forced me to look at myself with fresh eyes. Today’s episode is about the slow, quiet way we talk ourselves out of skills we’re fully capable of learning, and what it finally took to prove myself wrong. If you’ve ever believed “that’s just not me,” you’re going to want to hear how this one turned out.
Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday, this is episode #716, “The Marketing Myth.” I’m Darrell Darnell, some might say I’m an old dog that’s learned some new tricks, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living.
I used to believe I wasn’t a marketing person.
Not in a humble, self-aware kind of way, either. I mean I really believed it, the same way some people believe they can’t sing or were never good at math. I told myself that story so many times, for so many years, that I stopped questioning whether it was even true. It just became a fact about me. Like having blue eyes. That story said that marketing wasn’t for me.
Looking back, I think I know exactly where that story started.
For nearly 20 years I worked at a bookstore chain, and for a good chunk of that time I was the ecommerce director. It was a great season of my career. Good team, good work, good growth. But it came with a rivalry I never asked for, and rivalry might even be too generous a word for it. Really, it was more like a constant defense of myself and my team against the director of the marketing department.
This guy had a reputation before I ever crossed paths with him. He was known for lying about his coworkers and taking credit for work that wasn’t his own. I’d been warned about him by more than one person, and I still somehow didn’t see it coming when he set his sights on my department. He was sleazy. He was untrustworthy. And without even realizing it, I let him become my definition of marketing.
When I look back at it now, I see how foolish I was. I’d met plenty of people from that world who were nothing like him. His own team, the people who worked under him, were genuinely wonderful. But instead of separating the man from the profession, I let his behavior become the lens through which I judged marketing. I decided marketing wasn’t for me, wasn’t who I was, and I carried that decision with me long after I left the bookstore in 2013.
That belief followed me all the way to Guatemala. I shared a bit of this story in episode 702.
In 2017 I was sitting in the courtyard of a community outreach center talking with a guy named John. At the time we were more acquaintances than friends. We’d met through mutual friends in the podcast industry and were still in that stage of getting to know each other, trading stories to fill the space between community activities. Today he’s one of my closest friends. But back then, we were just two guys making conversation in the shade while kids played around us.
John asked me a simple question. What did I do to market my business?
I told him the truth as I understood it. I said I wasn’t really a marketing guy. I didn’t really do anything to market my business.
I explained that I’d built the whole thing on referrals from clients and colleagues, plus a booth at a podcast conference once or twice a year. And given the growth I was seeing at the time, that felt like a completely reasonable answer. The business was doing well. Why would I mess with something that wasn’t broken?
John never forgot that conversation. He’s brought it up more than once over the years and told me he walked away from it in disbelief. I forgot about it almost immediately. I had no idea I’d just described a house built on a foundation that was already starting to crack, I just didn’t know it yet.
Here’s the thing. What I told John was true, at least for a while. I had built genuine relationships with people in my industry, the kind of people I call influencers of influencers. These were people who could recommend me to someone and that person would sign up without a second thought. I’d hear things like, “Amy said you were the best. That’s all I need to know. Sign me up.” Or, “Cliff mentioned your name and that was enough for me.” I didn’t have to sell anything. I just had to keep being good at the work and let the relationships do the rest.
It worked beautifully. Until it didn’t.
Slowly, quietly, those influencers changed their business models and the audiences they were influencing. The podcast conferences I relied on pivoted toward crowds that didn’t match my ideal client anymore. And one by one, without any single dramatic moment I could point to, my referrals started drying up.
It didn’t happen all at once. It was more like a frog sitting in a pot of water that’s slowly coming to a boil. I didn’t feel the temperature rising because I was too close to it, too comfortable, too sure that what had worked before would keep working. I kept showing up to the same conference booth, telling myself the crowd would come back around. I kept waiting on referrals that used to show up like clockwork and quietly wondering why the phone had gotten so quiet. And then one day I looked up and realized my entire business model was collapsing around me, and it had been happening for longer than I wanted to admit.
John had been right all along. I’d been a fool to think I didn’t need to actively market my business. But knowing that and admitting it out loud are two very different things, and it took years of ignoring his warning before the truth finally became too inconvenient to keep avoiding.
When I finally got there, I discovered I wasn’t short on resources. I was just short on humility.
I had a shelf full of solid marketing books I’d casually skimmed a few years earlier and never actually put into practice, the kind of books you read with good intentions and then set down and forget. And then there was Amy.
Amy was the same person who’d been sending me referrals for years, the “Amy said you were the best” Amy. She was also an expert marketer in her own right. For a long time her brand was called Online Marketing Made Easy, before she pivoted her content in other directions. I knew she knew her stuff, and I knew she had courses built specifically for people like me. People who didn’t think of themselves as marketing people. People who’d rather do almost anything else than write a sales page or plan a marketing calendar.
So I bought one of her courses. And for the first time in years, I actually followed something to the letter instead of skimming it and setting it aside like I had with every book on that shelf.
Within a few weeks I’d built out four of the marketing tools she recommended. A couple weeks after that, I added a few more. And two weeks after that, I started seeing results I hadn’t let myself expect.
Two of my existing clients reached out asking to bump up to a higher service tier, unprompted, just because of what they were seeing in our content. Another potential client, someone I’d recently met with and figured was a long shot, emailed to say the content in our marketing materials set us apart from the competition. He was signing on to launch his podcast with us and adding our top tier production package too.
That was the moment everything shifted for me. I immediately messaged John and the rest of my mastermind group. And of course, I reached out to Amy to say thank you, because none of it would have started without her.
Here’s what I learned.
I didn’t believe I could market my business because I didn’t believe marketing was my natural gifting, my native skill set. Somewhere along the way I bought into the lie that if something doesn’t come easily to you, you must not be good at it, and you never will be. Add to that a coworker’s sleazy behavior years earlier, and I’d built an entire identity around avoiding something that was never actually the problem. The problem was never marketing. The problem was the story I kept telling myself about marketing.
So I have to ask, what lies have you told yourself about yourself?
Maybe yours connects to a skill or a talent, like mine did. Maybe you’ve decided you’re “not a numbers person” or “not creative” or “not a public speaker,” and you’ve allowed that belief to calcify into fact simply because you never tried, or you tried once, stumbled, and quit before you gave it a real shot.
Or maybe it’s something heavier than a skill. Maybe you’ve wrestled with an addiction, or a temper, or a pattern of pulling away from the people who love you, and you’ve bought into the lie that says “that’s just how I am,” or “that’s just how I’m wired,” or “that’s just my destiny.” Maybe you’ve decided the struggle you were handed is the struggle you’re stuck with forever.
Those are lies too. All of them.
I took the momentum that started with one marketing course and I kept going. Today I don’t just market my own business. I offer a whole suite of services to help our clients market theirs, the very thing I once ran from is now something I teach other people to do well. Just this week, one of our long-term clients signed up for exactly that. There’s something almost funny about that if you step back and look at it. The guy who once told his friend in a courtyard in Guatemala that he wasn’t a marketing guy is now the guy other people hire to help them market their business.
Don’t let your weakness stay your weakness just because you’ve decided it’s permanent. It’s a myth that you’re “just not good” at something, the same way it was a myth that I wasn’t a marketing person. It’s never too late to learn a new skill. It’s never too late to interrupt a pattern you’ve carried for years. And it’s never too late to stop letting someone else’s bad behavior, or your own bad assumptions about yourself, write the story of what you’re capable of.
Skills aren’t gifts you’re born with. They’re muscles you build. And muscles don’t grow because you were born strong. They grow because you finally decided to show up and do the work, even when it felt unnatural, even when it felt slow, even when you weren’t sure it would ever feel normal.
So here’s my practical word of advice. Pick one lie you’ve been telling yourself about yourself. Just one. Write it down somewhere you’ll actually see it again. Then go find your version of Amy’s course. Go find your version of John sitting across from you in that courtyard, asking the question you don’t want to answer honestly. Buy the course. Read the book you’ve been skimming for years. Make the call you’ve been putting off. Take the first rep, even if it’s a bad one.
You don’t have to believe you’re good at something to start. You just have to start, and let the starting prove the lie wrong.
I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
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