How to Be a Gritty Marketer: Leverage Failure in the Search for Mastery

Career Development — Tue., Jan. 30, 2024

Marketing is often described as both an art and a science—which creates an ongoing tension because attribution is hard. My husband goes to the Gartner IT conference every year. Most recently, he brought me back a book on creative thinking by speaker Sarah Elizabeth Lewis.

As I read The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, I felt as if the current marketing and sales enablement quandary I've been writing about in this series for MarketingProfs was unfolding before me. I started this series pondering the question "Sales Enablement: Good or Bad" as an oblique reference to the "Nicolas Cage: Good or Bad" episode from Community.

Bad Equals Good? More than ever, I feel like the bad in this equation may be just as useful as the good in learning how to improve. The Rise is beautiful and you should add it to your winter reading list. (Not least because as you read about Ben Saunders's expedition to the North Pole, you can more easily empathize while bundling up against the cold outside.) In the meantime, I'll gift you with an explanation of why bad sales enablement can also be good: "It is the creative process—what drives invention, discovery, and culture—that reminds us of how to nimbly convert so-called failure into an irreplaceable advantage." (Sarah Lewis, The Rise)

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