What I’d tell my younger marketing self (if I could)
I thought I knew what I was signing up for. I didn’t.
I thought I knew what I was signing up for. I didn’t.
If I could go back and talk to my younger marketing self… the one excited to land their first “real” job in marketing I wouldn’t give advice.
I’d just sit them down and say:
“You have no idea how weird this gets.”
Because no one tells you how fast it changes. How fragmented it gets. How often you’ll question if you’re even good at this. I thought marketing would be building cool campaigns, maybe learning a few tools, making some noise.
But here’s what it actually is:
Getting pulled into sales calls to justify why leads are “bad”
Debugging UTMs that stopped tracking last week
Rebuilding messaging because no one knows how to describe the product
Spending more time explaining your strategy than executing it
Watching AI start to do 30% of your job faster than you can finish lunch
Marketing today is chaos and that’s okay. But the higher up you go, the messier it gets.
What nobody told me
No one told me that the job of a marketing leader isn’t just about being creative or smart or scrappy.
It’s about holding the tension between knowing a hundred things and still not knowing what will work.
It’s balancing the pressure to prove ROI right now…
with the need to build something long-term that might not show results for 6 months.
It’s trying to be strategic while half your day gets eaten by broken dashboards, missing data, and questions like “can we just make this one a PDF?”
And the hardest part?
It's not the work.
It's that damn voice in your head that says:
“You should know more by now.”
“You should have figured this out already.”
“Everyone else is two steps ahead.”
I’ve felt that voice loudest this past year. The rise of AI just turned the volume up. Everyone’s “experimenting.” Everyone’s building tools. And if you’re not doing 50 things at once, it starts to feel like you’re behind.
But that said I am trying. And here’s what I’m learning…as tough as it is.
You can’t outrun the pace of change. You can only get better at choosing what not to chase.
A few brutal, quiet truths I wish someone said out loud sooner
1. Specialization makes you hirable. Generalization makes you promotable.
No one teaches you when to switch. You figure it out when you realize your strength is now your ceiling.
2. Most of your work won’t get noticed.
And that has to be okay. Some of your best thinking will live in a Notion doc no one opens. Make peace with it.
3. You’ll spend more time fixing handoffs than building funnels.
The #1 reason marketing fails isn't bad ideas - it’s organizational dysfunction.
4. Knowing the right answer doesn't matter if the room isn’t ready to hear it.
You’ll have to repeat yourself. Fight for clarity. Translate strategy into five different dialects - sales, finance, product, C-suite, and your own team.
5. AI isn’t the threat. Your burnout is.
The scariest thing isn’t the tools. It’s the unrealistic pressure you put on yourself to keep up with them all.
The shift that helped me breathe again
I started thinking about how people used to learn.
Holy shit I am aging myself. But for some reading this - remember card catalogs? We’d pull index drawers in the library, search by subject, then wander the aisles to find the book. Now you type a sentence into a box and get the answer in seconds.
We didn’t fight that change. We adapted.
But over time we forget that it took time. We didn’t just switch to Google overnight. We learned how to trust it. How to search. How to ask better questions.
Marketing’s going through the same evolution.
Search looks different. Attribution looks different.
The buyer journey? Not linear. Not trackable. Not clean.
And no amount of dashboards will make it simple again.
But you can train yourself to see patterns. To ask sharper questions. To trust your gut more than your spreadsheet sometimes.
You can choose to go deep instead of wide.
To be intentional instead of reactive.
To say “no” to things that might work because you're committed to what will.
So here’s what I’d tell younger me, if I got the chance
You won’t know it all. You’re not supposed to.
The best marketers aren’t the loudest. They’re the clearest.
Some seasons will be about survival, not growth.
Tools change. Human behavior doesn’t. Focus there.
Learn to zoom out. It’s the only way you stay sane.
The job is more emotional than anyone admits. So take care of yourself.
I’m not writing this from a the typical “Thought Leader” who knows it all.I’m writing it in the middle of the mess while still figuring it out like you probably are.
It’s a reminder that the pace is insane. The job is confusing. And the fact that you're still in it means you're probably doing better than you think.
Stay in the game.
Two podcast episodes that helped me feel grounded again
1. The Subtle Art of Not Yelling: “Don’t market more. matter more” — w/ Jay Acunzo
This one hits deep. It's about rebuilding from burnout and the subtle pressure to constantly reinvent yourself instead of rediscovering what makes you actually useful.
2. “The Business of Expertise with David C. Baker” — The Futur with Chris Do
One of the most underrated episodes on positioning yourself, understanding your value, and avoiding the trap of being everything to everyone. You’ll leave rethinking your entire resume and role.
A few things to remember in interviews
1. Don’t try to say what they want to hear. Say what you actually believe.
You’ll end up in the wrong job if you shape-shift into someone else’s idea of “strategic.” The best fit happens when your actual POV comes through.
2. Be the translator, not just the executor.
Hiring managers want someone who can think across marketing and sales. If you can explain how a campaign drove real pipeline — and how you’d make it more efficient next time — you're already in the top 5%.
Thanks for being here. Truly… I appreciate it.
Forward this to a marketer who needs to hear it.
Or reply and tell me: what would you tell your younger self?
- Evan
As someone who's new to marketing, thank you for the advice
what are the odds i come across this post while trying to declutter my mind (aka procrastinating) because i'm new in my marketing job and i feel so pressured to do well. thank you.