Learning to Do Anything Well is Not Easy

1) This Shit Is Hard

Like many folks who build stuff, my disdain for marketing as a business discipline had grown ironclad. I thought soft skills meant it was a soft job — 9 to 5 without pagers ringing, apocalyptic deadlines or material consequences for poor workmanship. A marketer was never around when I had to get a server back up or the prod db was borked; this gig must be easy.

I learned swiftly that this view was as legitimate as assuming web development is easy after installing a Squarespace theme.

There’s a difference between being able to do something, and being able to do something well, and that’s what Rob Spectre, AKA Brooklyn Hacker, learned when he left his job as a developer to take a marketing position. We often look at jobs and get the impression that they’re easy, when it’s often the people who are good at their jobs who make their jobs look easy. Social media positions is in this category. You spend your day tweeting and going on Facebook? That must be so easy! Sure, tweeting is easy. But doing it well, is not. How would you, for example, make the Whole Foods account interesting and engaging? And this is what Spectre learned. Become good at a job before you accuse anyone of having it easy.

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