My marketing career in 28 sentences:

1. Quit job at Sam's Club to start an eComm business

2. Borrow $40k from my dad

3. Lose $35k in the first four months

4. Realize you suck at marketing

5. Spend $4k+ on useless marketing courses and masterminds

6. Use your last $300 to buy Breakthrough Advertising (yes, it cost $300 in 2013)

7. Read the book three times in 2 weeks

8. Make $200k in 6 months

9. PayPal shuts down your account and keeps half the money for another six months

10. Quit eCommerce and spend a year reading, thinking, and writing

11. Start freelancing and get fired from your first client

12. Double down on consulting and double your rates

13. Get three retainers and feel on top of the world

14. Blow up your retainers by taking on too much work

15. Get so stressed you get shingles at 26 years old

16. Take a month off to heal

17. Get hired as a full-time content marketer at an agency

18. Spend a year and a half learning the ropes of content marketing

19. Start a content marketing consulting business on the side

20. Get so busy you have to quit your agency job

21. Marketing starts to make sense

22. Close a 6-figure content marketing deal with a big brand

23. Rethink everything you knew about marketing

24. Design a "unified theory" of marketing and put it together into a 20,000-word PDF

25. Get better results for clients and yourself

26. Post about your experiences on Twitter and LinkedIn

27. Build a following of people who are interested in what you're doing

28. Learn to deal with haters and trolls

---

Want a content engine that converts right off the bat and positions your brand for the long term?

Shoot me a DM.

Josue Valles

Founder at The-Flyer-1™

The best creative work doesn't come from staring at a blank page. It comes from staring at two different things and finding the connection between them. It comes through curation, synthesis, and lateral thinking.

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https://curationlabs.substack.com/

Founder

I build curated assets that last.

If you're a founder or C-level exec looking to build your personal brand, I can help you build a curated library of assets that'll help you grow fast without sacrificing quality.

If you're a consultant or agency who wants to incorporate curation into their marketing arsenal, I offer a 12-week workshop where I guide you through my entire process.

Want to learn more?

Send me a DM.

The best book on creativity I've ever read is 48 pages long, was written in 1939 by an ad man who left school in 6th grade, and takes about 30 minutes to read. Here's his entire method:

The book is "A Technique for Producing Ideas" by James Webb Young. 

Young wasn't an academic...he was a copywriter at J. Walter Thompson who created one of the most controversial ads in history (a 1919 deodorant ad so blunt that 200 women cancelled their magazine subscriptions and female copywriters told him he'd insulted every woman in America. Sales went up 112%.)

Here's the method:

Step 1: Gather raw material (both specific and general).

Young says the quality of your ideas is directly tied to the quantity and diversity of what you feed your brain. 

* Specific material is research about the actual problem. 
* General material is everything else: history, psychology, random conversations, unrelated industries. 

The more pieces you have, the more combinations are possible.

Step 2: Mentally chew the material.

Take the facts and turn them over. Look at them from different angles. Try fitting pieces together like a puzzle. Young says most people quit here because it's uncomfortable...you're holding a bunch of disconnected information and nothing clicks yet. That discomfort is the process working, not failing.

Step 3: Drop it completely.

Stop thinking about the problem. Go for a walk. Watch a movie. Sleep. Your subconscious is still connecting the pieces even when your conscious mind has moved on.

Step 4: The idea shows up on its own.

Young says it'll come to you "while shaving, or bathing, or most often when you are half awake in the morning." This only works if you did steps 1-3 honestly. If you skipped the research or rushed the chewing, nothing shows up in the shower.

Step 5: Test it against reality.

Take your idea to other people. Let them poke holes in it. Young says most people are so attached to the flash of insight from step 4 that they skip this entirely, and the idea dies on contact with the real world. Good ideas survive criticism, but great ideas get better from it.

The underlying principle is simple: 

An idea is nothing more than a new combination of existing elements. 

You can't combine things you haven't collected, and you can't connect dots you've never seen.

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The Battle

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