April 09, 2008

The Disciplined Marketer

As some of you may know, my first ‘real’ career was as a securities trader on Wall Street.

At age 25, before the dot-com bubble began, I could feel that something big was afoot. I’d read about the ‘soaring’ Cisco stock price in the SF Chronicle… and Yahoo, which had just gone through IPO. I hadn’t been ‘online’ yet (apart from BBS’s when i was a kid - remember those?), and didn’t yet have an email address. But I remember feeling that a renaissance was beginning and that I wanted to be a part of it.

Unfortunately for me, I had no MBA. I didn’t even graduate from college. I’d been more interested in traveling the world with my beautiful new girlfriend.

But I needed a way to get involved in what I was reading about each day. Soon, my dad discovered what would soon become known as ‘day trading’. Over the next couple months, I did my research and packed my bags. I moved to New York and got a seat at Broadway Trading.

At that time, Broadway was tiny. I was probably the 20th trader there. But this was Wall Street (actually Broad Street, around the corner) and I knew that this was the center of the action. Guys were making money - sometimes $1000 a day or more. It seemed incredible.

The way it works is that you watch from the sidelines for awhile. Then you get an account and trade small lots, 100 shares at a time.  Usually, a beginniner would spend a good two to four weeks watching.

During my watching time, a young Russian kid named Serge made $4000 in one day. On the same day, Yahoo! traded up to $12. I thought these lofty numbers had to be the froth at the end of a crazy run. I was late to the party, I figured.

It turned out, of course, to be just the beginning…

Through the Pain

Over the next 10 months, I went through the most personally grueling battle I’d ever experienced.

Eventually, though, I achieved a level of success far beyond what I ever imagined possible, and certainly in the top small fraction of 1% of all traders in the world.

I’m writing about this today because over the last several months, I’ve realized that what I learned as a top-performer on Wall Street is the same kind of thing that’s required to succeed in business.

The Missing Ingredient

In fact, I’ve come to believe that what’s at the root of top-performer’s success in ANY area is something that we - businesspeople, marketers - need to be looking at and studying and working on.

And I believe there’s a vacuum of information and attention here. We hear motivational speakers at our conferences, and we may walk away inspired. But those experiences rarely change our behavior, let alone our results.

What is the difference between top-performers and the rest?

The answer, I think, is the same whether you’re talking about Olympic athletes or Navy Seals or top traders or successful businesses.

In business, we all have competition.  But they’re not throwing grenades at us, and they’re not actually kicking us in the face from the next lane over. So it’s easier, I think, to relax.

But the top performers are still going to eat the breakfast, lunch, and dinner of the folks who aren’t playing at their best.

The Secret Sauce

But, what is is that separates the best from the rest?

Well, I’m sure I don’t have the whole answer. For me, the fundamental different between being a losing trader and achieving wild success was one thing: discipline.

After ten months of pain, one day everything was different. I’ll write more about that in the next installment here, but for now I’ll just say that - for me - between success and failure was one week. And in the week I didn’t learn anything new or take any mood altering drugs or find God.

What happened was that I just started ACTUALLY DOING what I already knew I had to do (but previously hadn’t been able to).

The Disciplined Marketer

While I probably should be making this blog about marketing automation software and best practices, I’m going to try something different.

I’m going to use this space to talk about peak performance specifically as it applies to running our businesses. The reason is that I think most of us already know what to do. Our problem isn’t about what to say, who to say it to, how to do market research, how to use social networking. Our challenge is to execute.

That’s not to say there’s nothing to learn. They’re always a vast and ever expanding universe of new knowledge to deal with. But it’s my contention that getting the knowledge isn’t the hard part. If we’re already entrepreneurs or sales people or marketers with any small level of success, we already know how to figure out what to do.

Our challenge, more often, is to STOP learning and to get into disciplined action.

In the coming weeks and months, I’ve got more Wall Street stories to tell. But better, I’ve got a very interesting lineup of folks that are going to share their thoughts about what it takes to perform at the highest level. That’ll probably end up being a podcast series that you’ll be able to get here.

We’ll also explore the huge body of knowledge on the subjects of self-discipline, high-performance, and getting things done.

Of course, I’ll always relate back to how we business-folk can actually put this stuff to use in our own daily lives.

I invite you to participate and begin to kick more butt everyday.

Posted in Entrepreneurship   Marketing Ideas