Balance
I call myself a Buddhist.
I like Buddhism because it’s a practice more than a religion. It doesn’t require faith in anything inexperienced. The Buddha himself said something to the effect of “don’t take my word for it, see for yourself.”
It’s the polar opposite approach from what I experienced growing up in a traditionally Christian household.
Anyway.
A lot of people think Buddhism is about not wanting things. “If you just don’t want anything you’ll be happy!” But, this is an oversimplification to an extreme. Which is what I want to talk about here.
The Buddha didn’t say you shouldn’t want things. He meant that you should balance your wanting things with being ok with the way things are. It’s a balancing act called “The Middle Way.”
We can imagine the extremes on a spectrum of wanting things, right? On one end, you have a person who wants things so severely that their well-being is intrinsically tied to having that thing. On the other, a person who wants nothing so completely that anything and everything is totally irrelevant and nonconsequential. If you ask me, they both sound terrible.
So The Middle Way is betwixt and between these extremes. It’s about wanting things but being OK if you don’t have them.
Some people also call this “non-attachment.” I’m striving towards a particular objective, but I’m not “attached” to it.
But we humans are uncomfortable with the middle way. We like extremes. We crave polarity. Which makes sense. It’s easier. It’s simple.
We’re all trying to be happy. Successful. Good. And we love it when someone gives us advice that is a clear, and always true path towards those things. The internet, especially Twitter, is full of this kind of advice. Pithy one-liners that sound so true they must be right.
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Unfortunately, life usually doesn’t work that way.
A few years back, Simon Sinek introduced this idea of WHY. He espoused that people “don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” And suddenly every marketing deck in the world had the word WHY on a slide. Everyone bought and believed this idea.
Some years later, the backlash began, and many in the industry realized how wrong this WHY idea was.
But it wasn’t ever totally right or totally wrong. It’s right sometimes. It’s wrong sometimes. The problem is that we believed it was true ALWAYS.
- People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.
- People don’t buy why you do it, they buy what you do.
Both of those statements are equally true in my opinion. They’re polarities. Both are sometimes true — to some degree.
See, sometimes people buy what you do, and other times people buy why you do it. Sometimes it’s some combination of both. The skill involved in marketing strategy is understanding why and when to apply each one. That’s the middle path. It’s in the balancing of the two extremes.
A strategy mentor of mine once gave me the framework of “if the opposite is also true, it’s a good strategy.” If the opposite of your strategic direction could be true and valid, then you’ve made a clear choice. If the opposite is nonsense, then your strategy is so obvious that it’s not helpful.
So I think it’s a helpful practice in marketing and in life to ask yourself, “is the opposite of this also true.” If so, how?
Because there are very few frameworks, or strategies, or approaches that work 100% of the time across the board.
It’s human nature to look for ones that do, but the fact that they don’t is what makes life challenging and interesting.
