Comment by bryang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bryang | Hacker News Reader

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One of the things I'm pretty jealous of is that in my career path (as admittedly vague it is... I'm 25 and my education & experience is in marketing, but being a CMO certainly isn't my life's ambition) is that I couldn't really start young and produce a tangible good that's worth anything to jump start a career since Marketing is really all about numbers. Anything without results is just speculation. (Nice job cross posting across the internet, btw)

I'm not a programmer, so I can't build an app... I'm certainly not an artist and can't paint or sing... Although I like carpentry and ok at it, I don't want to be a carpenter... So for me, being successful and earning a decent wage is either from climbing the corporate ladder or building my own company. Both are possible, but talent is really not much of a factor.

Anyways, the point I'm getting at is that it's impressive and inspiring to see talented people (like yourself) with artistic skill-sets and ambitions put the hard work in to get their inherent skillsets noticed and make a career for themselves.

Talent doesn't get you everywhere - and neither will hard work - but together they can do great things.

I don't, nor have I ever, considered myself particularly talented. At best, I would say I have the drive to force myself to practice. To say things came easily to me is an outright lie.

Hard work, persistence, and luck. Stir and serve chilled.

I'm not so sure about that.

As a product manager I wish I had spent more time on either learning to program or preferably designing interfaces for product ideas that I had. I did some of this stuff but not as much as I now realise I could have.

As a CMO the best evidence of your skills is in marketing a product of any kind. It could be a blog or product that you've created yourself, or pro bono work for someone else.

None of this is to downplay the chops of this artist - it really is amazing.

I guess I could clarify that what I'm talking about is the time it takes for skills to become apparent and credible. I'm not saying Noah's first works were Old Master level[1] or that they even are now, but clearly you can look at them and say "Kids got talent and has made tangible improvements."

Sure, I can start a blog talking about social media marketing, but basically it's starting from absolute zero - whereas Noah even early at his earliest started from a place a bit higher. For me to start a blog and say unique things about marketing that haven't been said before and then get that noticed... I consider myself to be smart, but I don't know if I'm on that level.

And sure, like you and I both said, I can build a product (I'm trying as we speak like everyone else is on HN) to develop my marketing skills, but then lets face it... if it's actually worth doing, my job isn't going to be primarily about marketing; it will be about leading a team, building a great product, and yes a bit of marketing.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Master

>For me to start a blog and say unique things about marketing that haven't been said before and then get that noticed... I consider myself to be smart, but I don't know if I'm on that level.

As you know, marketing is all about the packaging, and how you sell the sizzle, not the steak. So even if you think it's all been said before, it doesn't have to stop you from saying it in your own way, with your own unique insights, distribution methods, etc.

I think better than the social media marketing blog or building and selling a product would be to find someone else's product you can help grow.

Like Noah you can find an old master to train under too.

A lot of self-taught coders do this by building websites for friends and family when they get started, why not do the same with marketing?

But overall agreed - not easy to demonstrate marketing chops until you're in the hot seat. :)

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