The market couldn’t care less.
For a long time, I believed one very naive thing: if I’m genuinely good at something, people will notice.
I mean, come on.
I can explain attribution. I can dig into a database. I can figure out why different systems show different versions of the truth. I can build a model that half the team won’t understand on the first pass.
And I honestly thought: wow, that’s valuable.
Nope.
Nobody wakes up thinking: “Where can I find a smart analyst today?”
The CMO is missing the plan. The agency is showing pretty numbers. The CRM is a mess. The founder is asking why there’s less money in the bank. Marketing, sales, and product are looking at three different funnels. All that stuff.
And what did I do?
I walked in and showed them how complicated the world was.
Incrementality. Attribution. Management funnels. Single source of truth.
All correct. All useful.
And still, people avoided me after that.
Because what they needed was much simpler: where are we losing money, which numbers can we trust, what should we do on Monday, and why should we bring this problem to me?
I was being dumb and getting offended.
I confused expertise with being special.
Like, if I’m smart enough, the market should stop and applaud.
The market does not applaud.
It does not care how smart I am.
Its question is much simpler: can you remove this specific headache for me? Now? Without making it painful?
Unpleasant lesson. Useful one.
I was hiding behind complexity and calling it depth. As if a good expert has to sound complicated.
Now I invest in being understood.
The market doesn’t care about intelligence.
It cares whether I can turn my intelligence into money for someone else.
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