The Disciplined Marketer (Part 2)

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If you haven’t read Part One of this little two part series, this won’t make a ton of sense. Read it here.

So, yes, this is a marketing blog but bear with me…

Here’s the deal with trading stocks profitably:

1. You have to play by the RULES or you lose.
2. You do get to make up the RULES.
3. However, you don’t get to make them up as you go along.

What I mean here is that there are a million ways to make money trading. Even if you confine yourself to one asset class (ie. stocks) or even a segment (tech stocks), there are endless strategies or ’styles’ that will work.

Really.

There are also lots of things that won’t work, of course. But figuring out which is which doesn’t take a long time. Maybe a few months of being deeply in the game.

After I’d graduated into the top ranks at Broadway, like the other top guys I started ’sponsoring’ new traders. That is, I gave ‘em a chunk of cash - usually $50k - to trade with, sat ‘em nearby, and taught them to trade for a piece of the eventual profits. Some didn’t make it. Several of them are still going (very) strong.

Here’s how I taught: First, I’d let them flounder for a couple months to learn the basics, make their initial mistakes and get a feel for the game. Then, when it was time to get serious, I’d make them create a list of their own personal rules, more than 3 less than 10.

Everyone’s rules were different, reflecting the personal style that they’d developed over the previous several weeks. They’d write down their rules on the inside cover of a comp book, and bring them to me for approval.

I’d look over the list. To a successful trader it’s immediately obvious whether a particular set of rules, if followed, will lead to profits.

Some rules are just a recipe for disaster (”I’ll just keep doubling down ’till it bounces!”)

Others are not likely to get you very far (”I’ll sell every loser after a quarter point, and every winner after a half”).

Mostly, though, it’s really easy to create a good, solid list that’ll work well.

The hard part is not figuring out the game. The hard part is playing by the rules.

This isn’t the place to go into a long story about WHY it’s so hard to follow your rules, but a couple of thoughts:

1. Humans are very lazy animals. Not sure how we rank against other animals, but I bet it’s low.
2. We’re absolutely run by our short-term emotions.
3. When not succumbed to sloth, fear and greed are big motivators.
4. We don’t have much discipline at all, on the whole.
5. But, we are creatures of habit (which is useful).

All that, plus I think the stock market was probably created by the devil himself to perfectly match our human weaknesses with exactly what’s required to succeed.

Thing is, as I mentioned, business is a lot like trading.

Every day there’s something new. A new strategy, a new channel. A different product or another advertising media. A new piece of software or hardware that catches your eye.

There’s a new guru, a new book, or another conference. A new add-in for Outlook, a new cell phone. Twitter.

To a savvy business veteran, it’s quite simple to see what’s most likely to work and what’s a waste of time.

Because we’re fundamentally lazy, though, we mostly don’t want to buckle down and do the hard work required to succeed at ANY of the viable strategies available to us. Instead, we let ourselves believe that if we only had the right new piece of information or the perfect time-saving device it would all be different. So we look.

And we let ourselves be consumed by the each bright and shiny object.

To let ourselves off the hook even further, we choose the believe that the successful have something we don’t - connections, a pedigree, overwhelming charisma, money.

If not that, we assume, it’s luck. They didn’t earn it, they got lucky.

And we believe there’s something wrong with a world that would have that lame company succeed while delivering obviously inferior products or services to our own.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, the reality is that you gotta earn it.

And earning it takes perseverance, consistency, commitment, practice, effort. It takes sticking tenaciously to the fundamentals. All things we hate.

I’ll leave this over-long post with two questions for you:

1. When our very human-nature urges us to do the opposite of what we know works, how do you persevere?
2. When it comes to marketing our businesses, at what should we persevere? What are the fundamentals of marketing?
   

Leave your thoughts in the comments.

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