Who Knows if It Will Work? Do It Anyway.

Seth Godin posted yesterday about the allure of systems that promise guaranteed riches. Examples of this kind of thing are online stock trading "systems", internet marketing schemes, or whatever. He opines thusly:

Conspicuously missing from this list are effortless 1-2-3 systems that involve buying an expensive book or series of tapes. Also missing are complicated tax shelters or other 'proven' systems. The harder someone tries to sell you this solution, the more certain you should be that it is a scam. If no skill or effort is required, then why doesn't the promoter just hire a bunch of people at minimum wage and keep the profits?

There are literally a million ways to make a good living online, ten million ways to start and thrive with your own business offline. But all of these require effort, and none of them are likely to make you a million dollars.

Short version of my opinion: If someone offers to sell you the secret system, don't buy it. If you need to invest in a system before you use it, walk away. If you are promised big returns with no risk and little effort, you know the person is lying to you. Every time.

Yet, this is a question I constantly get from clients about marketing? "Will it work?", "How do I know it will work?" and so on.

You don't. You can't. And if anyone tries to sell you a marketing system that's guaranteed to work, do the same -- they're lying. Run. There is always an element in marketing, and the more innovative the system, the less knowable it is.

There area lot of things you can do to mitigate and minimize risk. You can test, you can optimize, you can minimize your investment until you get a feel for that kind of results the program is going to deliver. But at some point you're going to have to take a risk. The point is that although you know that the program may or may not work, you also know that no program is not going to work at all. For sure.

From a surprisingly different angle, this point was also made in one of my favorite blogs, Lifehack, in a post about a new book entitled Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25 and the Search for The American Dream. The book is described as follows: 

With nothing but $25 and a backpack, Adam Shepard set out to prove whether the American Dream still exists. He headed for a city he didn’t know — Charleston, South Carolina — with the goal of having $2,500, a car and a place to live by the end of the year. Shepard chronicled his experiment in Scratch Beginnings. The book holds a few gems for average people working on their own lives — and you don’t have to be completely broke to learn from Shepard’s experiences.

Part of this experience was inside a homeless shelter, where he lived for several weeks at the beginning of the story. He writes about his fellow shelter residents:

Those men fall into two simple categories: the guys with plans for lives beyond the shelter and those who have become utterly complacent with their lives. It’s a simple lesson. The guys with plans couldn’t be sure that their plans would work, but the guys who had stopped looking to the long view were certainly not going to make progress.

Many residents of the homeless shelter Shepard landed in relied on a local day labor operation to provided them with money.

The attraction of just showing up and working and getting cash at the end of the day is, to some people, superior to working a real job. True, some of the laborers are temporarily unemployed, and some are working while they have days off from their permanent jobs, but still others simply come to work a few days a week whenever they need cash. If they don’t fell like working, there’s no need to call the boss faking an ailment or yet another death in the family. They just don’t go.

It’s an easy way to get by when you don’t have a long-term plan. You can cover your basic needs and just sort of continue along without a particular course of action. It took Shepard only a week to understand that his priority had to be getting a permanent job. But making a long-term plan, whether you’re living on the street or making ends meet, is the only way to move forward. Without plans and goals, we’re all stuck exactly where we are today.

The exact same thing is true of marketing. If you try it and it doesn't work, it didn't work. If you don't try it, it won't work, and eventually, neither will you.