The 8 Pillars of Perspective
Marketing is all about maximizing your results.
The Marketer’s Perspective implores you to give up your regrets and negative feelings about yourself to make room for your wants.
Not all wants are selfish or materialistic.
There are altruistic wants: “I want every human to have the best life possible.”
That’s a want.
There are spiritual wants: “I want to feel connected to something bigger than myself.”
That’s a want.
While the marketing world, itself, may be obsessed with capitalistic endeavors, we can steal their secrets to help us get more of what we want in life.
Marketers are objective-oriented and often work off what’s called a “marketing brief” that gives their project direction.
If you want to feel better about yourself, that’s your objective.
Make this objective the central thesis of your thoughts and actions.
Let’s say you’re inclined to berate yourself for one thing or another that you didn’t do as well as you wanted.
Ask yourself: does this take me closer to my objective or further?
We often think that beating ourselves up about something will help us to do better in the future, but realistically, that’s rarely the case.
What usually happens is that we corrode our faith in ourselves which makes us believe we can’t have better.
If we believe we can’t have better, we won’t bother trying.
If we don’t bother trying, we’ll definitely never meet our objective.
A marketer often starts down the path towards their objective by first gathering relevant data.
If your objective is to feel better about yourself, you might start to research what kinds of things give people genuine confidence.
Since you’re the target audience in this case, you can also collect data on who you need to be to be proud of yourself. You do this by sitting down with some way of writing notes - either by hand or digitally - and start brainstorming.
Ask yourself: how can I make the most of what’s available to me right now to become the happiest possible version of myself?
Then collect data on how to get there.
You can have multiple objectives at once for different projects.
Consider each want that you’re going to focus on at any given time its own project.
Some wants in your life might include:
I want more confidence.
I want to get a girlfriend.
I want to have better social skills.
I want to increase my intelligence.
Create a separate project folder for each targeted want and begin collecting both information and ideas for how to get there.
Experienced marketers know that all projects happen in stages.
Don’t just set your final goal and leave it at that. Figure out what the important milestones are on your way there.
If you want to get a girlfriend, your milestones might be:
Learn about what women want.
Improve my conversation skills.
Raise my confidence levels.
Clean up my appearance.
Learn how to be a better partner.
All of these things will contribute to achieving your final objective.
Keep in mind that each of these objectives can and should be broken down further as you go along.
Let’s say you have both of these objectives:
Get a girlfriend.
Increase your confidence.
…but you don’t like how you look.
If this is the case, don’t sit around feeling like shit over your appearance.
First, change what you can to feel better about yourself, and then learn how to maximize your results with whatever it is you have to work with.
To embrace the marketer’s perspective is to always be moving forward to the brightest possibilities - the negatives be damned.
If you stop to think of your bitterness, only do so with understanding and compassion for what you’re feeling.
Try the Buddhist’s Perspective in the next lesson to learn how to do the most useful thing possible with all the stuff you can’t change.
Then go back to thinking like a marketer and how you can capture more of your wants.
Once you’ve:
Created an objective.
Researched relevant information.
Set supporting milestones.
Abolished unhelpful thoughts.
…you’re ready to move onto the strategy phase.
Based on your research and your own intuition, what are the best strategies for meeting each of your objectives?
This is a more useful place to allocate your energy than simmering in resentment or replaying the past.
Each time these things arise in your mind, ask yourself how you can put them to work for you. Don’t let them sit around idly being lazy freeloaders living rent-free in your head.
Work them into your strategy only in ways that are productive.
Don’t worry about your strategy being perfect.
No strategy is perfect.
Professionals in the real world are constantly adjusting their strategies both because the external situation changes and because their original strategy wasn’t perfect.
It’s better to move ahead with an imperfect strategy, prepared to go back to the drawing board later, than to sit on it too long agonizing over any potential wrong move.
Don’t let perfect get in the way of good - as the saying goes.
Set your objective, collect your data, clear your head, and do the best that you can.
Next, you want to plan what you’re going to do and when.
Separate your goal into broad phases, then focus on the first phase.
Start breaking it down into even smaller parts.
If you want to feel better about yourself, consider what you can control: your actions.
Make the first broad phase a continuous process of choosing better actions. But, don’t just leave it at that. Keep breaking it down into smaller pieces.
If you’ve made mistakes and hurt people, then you can break it down further into the steps:
Get yourself into a better headspace.
Mentally prepare to genuinely apologize.
Apologize.
Brainstorm the better actions you want to engage in.
Do different actions starting now.
Draw a line in the sand and tell yourself that you’re going to be proud of who you are from this point moving forward.
Once you have the beginnings of a plan down, set times when you’re going to work on certain pieces of it.
If your first task is to get yourself into a better headspace, set a date and time to work through your demons.
The rest of this chapter on the other seven pillars (coming one lesson at a time over the next two weeks) will help you work on such dark places within yourself in a step-by-step way.
Perhaps your first calendar item is simply to spend five minutes reading something that will help you untangle all the things going on in your mind.
Or, you might want to spend fifteen minutes on it two days a week.
I, of course, recommend starting with reading the other seven pillars and writing down your thoughts as you go along.
(I’ll be posting these one at a time this week. If you want to be notified when they drop, don’t forget to subscribe to the newsletter at the bottom of this page or follow our reddit community for updates).
Then, work through the exercises in each lesson to give yourself an easy map to follow.
…but that’s because I’m biased.
You can also start with psychology articles online. A lot of topics can be searched up and will return results written by real mental health professionals.
For this strategy, I recommend not using ChatGPT or other AI assists because those also collect “information” from amateur sources (such as myself).
Instead, look for articles from accredited and/or peer-reviewed sources coming from different authors on the same subject.
You can also try picking up a book that focuses on people in your specific situation.
CBT books are a good option for most people who don’t know where to start. There are a lot of good choices out there from highly competent experts.
If you’re not sure where you want to start, make your first session a brainstorming one where you open a document or a notebook and just start writing whatever ideas come to mind.
At the same time, also do multiple internet searches for ideas.
In the brainstorming phase, no ideas are bad ideas.
Take them all down.
You can weed out the ones you don’t think will be helpful later on.
The point is, though: you need to set a time to start.
Don’t bite off too much all at once. Start small.
Five minutes a day or fifteen minutes twice a week is enough to start generating the new you.
If you leave this for “whenever” or, even worse, “someday,” this better life that comes from starting will not be in your future.
You’ll be better off setting off on your journey and fucking it up along the way than you will if you wait until you’re “ready.”
This is your sign.
Pick five minutes, put it in your calendar, and begin.
Next, is the execution phase.
Set it all in motion.
The execution phase, as mentioned earlier, comes in phases.
Different tasks need to be completed at different times as you make progress.
Don’t forget about your milestones along the way.
Make them small and easily attainable all throughout your voyage.
Make it a game of leveling up…
Here is an example of one such levelling up system you can use:
Level 1: Brainstorm what your wants are.
Level 2: Pick 2-4 wants to pursue as objectives at this time.
Level 3: Brainstorm approaches and strategies.
Level 4: Research strategies.
Level 5: Plan the major phases of your endeavor.
Level 6: Break the first phase down into smaller and smaller parts.
Level 7: Set dates and times to work on the first couple of tasks.
Level 8: Start the first task.
+1 level: Planning each week of tasks (including things like: researching, reading, brainstorming, outlining, journaling, and other homework assignments you give yourself).
+1 level: Executing at least 75% of tasks per week.
+1 additional level: After achieving each major milestone. This is on top of the other levels earned for planning and executing.
+1 level: Going back to the drawing board and revising your strategy.
Once you achieve that major milestone, celebrate with something that is rewarding for you.
Under this system, if you’ve done all the brainstorming, researching, planning, etc for the first phase, are on Week 3 of planning and executing at least 75% of your tasks, and you’ve just gone back to the drawing board to revise your strategy, you would be at Level 15.
This is the leveling system we’ll be using in the Reddit group for this community.
Go to this page to write down each step you’ve done in this system and ask for your new level as you go along - you deserve it!! (And, it’ll make me happy to level you up).
Bonus level for each step of the process that you describe for us so we can cheer you on as a community.
Every time you complete a homework assignment from any course on this website or in this community and post it to the corresponding page linked from that course, you’ll receive an additional level.