The Untested Belief
I've believed the same thing about marketing for my entire career: start with the story. Start with the human. Everything else is noise.
I've said it in meetings. To my team. To anyone who'll listen. It's the thing I'm most sure about in my career... that the work should be human-first, not formula-first. That no one wants to read your SEO listicle. That the best content makes someone feel something, not just click something.
But ... I've never really tested it.
Truth is, all too often I default to the safe playbook — the one I've spent years saying I don't believe in.
I tell myself it's laziness. Sometimes it is. But mostly I think I'm protecting something. Because if I go all-in on story-first content and it doesn't move the needle... then the belief was wrong. Then the instinct I've built my whole identity around was just taste pretending to be strategy.
And I don't know what I am without that.
The safe path isn't actually safe though. It's just quiet. It's the hum of doing the same thing every week and calling it a career. It's a longer to-do list and a direct deposit. It's waking up at 50 and realizing you had the conviction and the authority and the chance, and you spent it on content calendars.
I don't know what testing this belief looks like yet. Maybe it's one quarter of story-first content, measured honestly. Maybe it's a series of contractor profiles that have nothing to do with our product. Maybe it's writing something like this and hitting publish instead of saving it to drafts.
We'll see.