Patience really is a virtue

The important things take time and attention

I’m going to start by mentioning Ben Settle again.

He really is one of my favourite guys to learn direct response marketing from. And he has a big bias towards email which I share.

Ben has a book about villains which is a fun, short read. He talks about the traits that all supervillains have and how you can use them as part of your life.

In the book, each trait forms a chapter. Perhaps surprisingly, one of them is patience. I say surprisingly because patience isn’t something we often associate with villains.

However, this is not a report on Ben’s book and I’ll encourage you to pick up a copy if you want to learn more…

When I read the book a while ago, the patience chapter really resonated with me. It tied in with some things I had been thinking about myself.

So I’m going to speak a little about learning French, dieting, and then tie it back into marketing.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve already failed at learning a language. I lived in Portugal for more than five years and never got fully fluent. Far from it.

And so when I moved to Marseille last year I knew from the offset I was going to have to take a different approach.

On reflection, I came to realise that my problem was that I just wanted the result. And I was looking for a way to get there as fast as possible. After that, it would be done, ticked off the list, and I could relax.

You can probably see where this is going.

Day to day learning of a language can be tough. When the results didn’t come as fast as I wanted them my motivation would drop. I’d get bummed out and my practice would take a hit too. A downward spiral.

So I started looking around at different areas of my life. I thought about other common examples of change that people tried to make.

The best one I could come up with was dieting.

To me dieting always seemed like a stupid idea.

I’m not saying I’ve never had to work on my own health or never been more overweight than I wanted.

But, intuitively, I just knew that dieting didn’t work. There was plenty of evidence against it too. I’d seen people fail.

And the flaw seemed to be similar to what I was doing wrong with learning a language.

People who are healthy and in good shape don’t see it as something they just tick off once and then not focus on it again. Instead, they are people who eat well and are active everyday.

It’s just a part of their daily life and who they are.

And this is what I had done in terms of my own health. I make most of my own meals from simple ingredients and I exercise everyday.

(One huge contradicting caveat is I like to smoke cigarettes, but I think I’ll talk about that another time)

Just this morning I went for a big walk over the hills of Bompard and then back down to the sea. I did some bodyweight exercises outside in the sun. I walked home along the Med and stopped for a swim.

It’s a completely typical morning for me.

On a side note, this is something that made and continues to make Marseille so attractive to me.

I live about a ten minute walk from the sea. I don’t have a car and day to day I don’t need one. I walk everywhere. The only reason I might get a car is so I can go on weekend trips into the countryside. Or to Italy.

But I digress.

Back to languages and learning French.

When it came to language learning I was too focused on getting a result

I needed to make it more like I treat health. Something that was just a part of my daily life.

So that’s what I’ve done.

I decided that I was going to learn languages forever. If I master French I’ll do Italian next. Or Spanish. It doesn’t matter.

What does matter is the subtle but distinct change in mindset.

My focus is no longer on some outcome to try and race towards. Instead the focus is on what inputs I can do everyday. Translate a novel, consume French media, chit chat with neighbours and people in shops.

There’s another great benefit of this approach too:

It quickly tells you if you really want to do something or not.

If I can’t see myself learning French everyday for years on end then I don’t actually want it.

Which brings me back to marketing.

Practically no business thinks that marketing is just something you do for a few months and then lock in a result forever. They understand that marketing is a constant part of the day to day running of a successful business.

But, when it comes to email, it seems like many brands are not at all living this channel day to day.

I’ve signed up to so many email lists.

The majority have some kind of welcome sequence ready. And it’s usually pretty unimaginative.

But even worse is what happens after the initial sequence.

Most brands default to periodic emails (weekly, biweekly etc) that do nothing more than include a couple of products inside a graphic with some boring copy and a link to buy.

It looks like it’s been set to forget.

Like a dieter that gave up and went back to junk food. Instead of making good health a part of who they are and what they do forever.

Which is the only way to be serious about something.