Mind Readings: Stay In Your Lane

It's complaints week. In this uh episode, let's talk about a complaint I receive a lot. Uh from time to time as I create content, I will get feedback from people, uh, usually on political topics, um, advising me in fairly coarse language to uh stay in your lane. This is almost universally bad advice for everybody, not just for me, not just for content creators, but uh for everybody. For two reasons.

One, the obvious reason and and a good piece of advice is uh don't take criticism from people for whom with whom you would not seek advice, right? If you wouldn't go to this person to ask their advice, ignore criticism from them as well. But the bigger picture is this idea of stay in your lane of do the thing that I expect you to do, right? So if someone is watching videos or content from me, their expectation is probably stuff around marketing or data, etc. And probably not stuff around politics.

However, if you step back and look at the bigger picture, like for example, my undergraduate degree is in political science. Uh I have a degree in political science with a uh focus on stateless transnational terrorism. That was a mouthful back in the 90s. Turns out that was actually a uh would have been a good field to go into because four years after I got my degree was 9-11. But needless to say, politics is in my lane.

I have a literally have a degree in it. Um, but it's not what I'm known for. And that's okay. As content creators, and as just frankly, human beings, you should feel free, particularly on channels you own. Maybe not so free on, like you know, the company channel where uh you're representing more than just yourself, but certainly on your own personal accounts, you should feel free to express the whole of your being, not just one aspect.

Maybe you do have a political perspective, maybe you do have a religious perspective, a cultural perspective, uh, a gender-based perspective, whatever that is. Staying in your lane implies putting away all those other things that are part of you, that are part of who you are. And that's really bad advice for two reasons. One, it's creatively stifling. Um, one of my more useful skills is the ability to take ideas from one domain to another.

If I can take an idea from this domain, which is may not be related to say marketing, and move it into marketing, I can bring more value into marketing because it's something new, it's something fresh. For example, I bring a lot of ideas from biostatistics into marketing because things like survivability in biostatistics easily translate into things like um campaign effectiveness in marketing, right? It's you're still measuring the survival of something, except that in the marketing side, the stakes are a whole lot lower. Um, I bring a lot of the quantitative ideas from uh finance into marketing. Things like uh moving average convergence divergence indicator.

That's a stock market technique, but it works really well with certain types of marketing data. Uh actually works better with marketing data than it does with stock data a lot of the time. If I stayed in my lane, if I took these these people's advice, I wouldn't know to do that. I wouldn't think to do that, I wouldn't think that was an appropriate way to add value. When I talk about things like bodily autonomy, like everyone, regardless of gender, should have bodily autonomy.

Other people should not be coercing you to do things with your body that you don't want to do. Understanding the motivations of people, which is a lot of psychology, guess what? That translates into marketing. Now, you may or may not want to hear about bodily autonomy, and that's fair if you don't want to hear me or any creator talking about a topic, unsubscribe or to skip that episode, or and so on and so forth. That's totally fine.

It's just as it's a creator's right to create whatever they want, you know, obviously within whatever boundaries they have with their employer, if that's applicable, it's your right as a member of the audience to say, you know what? Not my thing today. I'm not I'm not interested in this one. Just sort of pass on it. And I think that's part of where people have gotten lost.

People have gotten lost in realizing their own power to say, hmm, you know what? Just gotta turn this off. I'm gonna do something else in my time. And that's a skill that's going to be really, really important in the neck in the coming years and decades as technologies continue to improve, as our ability as marketers, as our ability as creators to deliver more and more immersive content to people improves. We as the audience have to have the willpower, the self-awareness, um, and the self-respect.

Just push the off button, say, you know what? Next, click. Rather than violently react to content that we're not being come, we're not compelled to consume, not paid to consume, and it may not benefit us. There are plenty of episodes of podcasts that I tune into that yeah, I have skipped like, yep, that's not interested in this one. This there's content of every kind.

Every now and again, this there's one like, yep, that's not that's not for me. As creators, one of the things we can do to help our audiences is mark stuff, label it. Um, when I did the piece on abortion rights, uh I said, hey, this is a political piece. Big letters, this is a political piece. So that if that wasn't your thing, you knew up front, this is not my thing, click next.

And so I I have I have relatively little sympathy for uh folks who see the warning and then get upset that it was a piece of content that upset them, even though it came with a warning. So that's today's mind reading. Stay in your lane's bad advice. It's bad advice. It's condescending advice too, but it's bad advice because outside of your lane is where all the good stuff is that you can bring into your lane, make your lane wider, and make you a better creator, a better marketer, a better human being.

And people dispensing that advice, for the most part, that advice is pretty safe to ignore. Unless it's somebody you really respect and have thoroughly trusted to say, tell me when I'm going off course. Put that advice in the spam bin, you know. Just let it go. Anyway, that's today's mind reading.

Thanks for tuning in. I'll talk to you soon. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.