Importance of your 'Marketing Mindset'

Why? Mindset is the ultimate leverage — it's where everything begins. If you get it wrong, you're always fighting an invisible enemy. If you get it right, you're parked on a downhill slope where everything you do is easier.

Let's start by defining mindset. Mindset is the frame through which you see the world. Your beliefs, values, fears, and desires combine to determine your overall mindset, limiting or expanding the possibilities available to you.

Your mindset determines the size of your 'solution space' — where you'll look for ideas and strategies to improve. The larger your solution space, the more available options for whatever you're trying to accomplish.

Game theory tells us that we can adopt two broad types of mindsets — finite and infinite.

The choice you make is critically important because it affects everything that follows downstream. There's good news and bad news...

The good news is that the better mindset choice is obvious, and it's available to you the moment you decide to make it. The bad news is we're constantly encouraged to make the wrong choice! Let's start by looking at the two mindsets side by side...

A finite mindset applies to games with known players, fixed rules, and an agreed-upon objective. These games have a beginning and an end, and there are winners and losers. Finite mindsets emphasize competition and comparison to others.

Individual and team sports, competitive games like chess, and other forms of time-bound competition benefit from a finite mindset. When you go out on the baseball field, your goal is to win by scoring more runs than the other team.

An infinite mindset applies to games with known and unknown players, where rules are interchangeable, and the goal is to perpetuate the game. Infinite games emphasize cooperation vs. competition...

Infinite players focus on improving themselves, not 'beating' other players around them...

Many of the 'games' we play in life, like marriage, friendships, and business, are infinite games. Players come and go, rules change in context and over time, and the goal of these games is to keep playing.

Explaining why he wrote The Infinite Game, Simon Sinek identified several areas of life that are undermined by a finite, win/lose mindset. We don't 'win' relationships, like marriage, for example, and "there's definitely no such thing as winning business," he said. Finite games are based on a win/lose model.

Infinite games create the possibility for everyone involved to win. The problem is that business has adopted the finite mindset language — 'beating the competition', 'capturing market share', 'win at all costs' — but business is not a finite game.

When we apply the wrong mindset to the game we're playing, we undermine our hard work... "When you play with a finite mindset in an infinite game, you damage trust, you damage cooperation, and you damage innovation," according to Simon Sinek.

Let's apply this distinction between finite and infinite mindsets to our little corner of the world.

How do we adapt and apply an infinite mindset to marketing?

First, we only compete with ourselves. Self-improvement — getting better day after day relative to where we are — in the most important metric.

"Finite players play to beat the players around them ... infinite players play to be better than themselves." — Simon Sinek

Self-improvement doesn't necessarily mean personal development (but it certainly could). It also means improving our skills, delivering better experiences for our customers, creating better products, continuously solving tougher problems, spending more of our time at our best, etc.

An infinite mindset gives us more control because we're focusing on what we can do right here, right now.

What, specifically, could you improve today that would be most meaningful to you and your customers?

Start there. Second, whenever possible, choose cooperation instead of competition. Business is not a zero-sum game — often, the people who buy from us also buy from our so-called competitors.

It's easy to be demoralized when we have an idea and realize that dozens of others have had the same idea (and are selling it successfully). However, lots of sellers mean lots of buyers!

Don't be scared when you see lots of people in a market that interests you — get excited instead. The presence of lots of sellers generally means there's money to be made, and you're on the right track.

Bring your unique personality and your particular way of seizing opportunities and solving problems to the market and carve out a specific pocket of people you can be a hero too.

Cooperation applies to our customers too. Get them involved.

What do they want?

What could you create for a pocket of people that would make their lives demonstrably better?

How could you enlist their help?

What could you co-create together that creates value for everyone involved?

Third, optimize for long-term value, not short-term gain.

When developing your business strategy and designing your business systems, emphasize decisions that produce long-term, happy, repeat customers (a theme we'll highlight later).

When you're playing an infinite game with an infinite mindset, you realize you have all the time you need to get it right. That doesn't mean it'll be perfect today — but it can be better today than it was yesterday.

And better again the day after that.

How will your business be better next week? Next month? Next year?

What decisions can you make today that will contribute to those improvements?

What decisions can you avoid that might undermine those improvements?

For example, maybe that 'persuasion hack' you read about yesterday will boost leads or sales this week. Or that fill-in-the-blank, story-based email template will convert a few more leads to customers...

But, at what cost? What are the long-term consequences to you and your business when you're relying on hacks and templates?

Play the long game — learn skills, principles, frameworks — and leave the hacks and templates to the finite players. It's easy to buy into the idea that everything gets easier once you've 'made it' in business. But that's not reality.

You never 'make it' in business — instead, you're always upgrading your challenges. Just ask Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, or Warren Buffett. Each arguably has 'made it' 1,000x over, yet they're continuing to take on new challenges.

There is no finish line in the game they're playing because business is an infinite game. The goal is to keep playing and keep improving, and the first step is to adopt the appropriate mindset.

Down the Rabbit Hole...