You don't get points for saying no

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Hey folks, it's your content friend Eric here.

About 5 years into my career, I loved saying no.

I loved flagging all the reasons why a marketing campaign would fail. I loved pointing out that a data report was meaningless because it didn’t have statistical significance. I loved editing things to death. I loved saying that we should slow down and focus on quality rather than quantity. I loved saying we were over capacity and couldn’t take on another project.

Part of this was because I loved feeling smart. Part of this (I learned much later) was due to some undiagnosed anxiety that led to some unhealthy avoidance. Trying and failing wasn’t really an option for me. I preferred to stay comfortable.

This worked fine enough when I worked on bigger teams. I was a productive filter of ideas (from my perspective, at least—who knows how enjoyable I was to work with…).

But once I started working as a solo content marketer at startups and had more ownership, I became an unproductive filter of success.

Here’s what I learned: You don’t get any points for saying no. And you don’t get any points for being right. You only get points when you make shit happen.

I’ve worked hard to force myself into a habit of saying yes more often (and asking better questions before I say no).

What’s the upshot of a big swing here? What’s the worst that could happen if we try? What unproductive thing can we give ourselves permission to stop doing if we take on this new, high-potential thing? If this fails, what positives can we take from it?

Of course, I can’t say yes to everything. I’m a team of one, and I have to protect my capacity. But I’ve learned that nobody has all the answers, and nobody can predict how any of this will go.

The reason I wanted to write this rather public diary entry is that I think there’s a “curse of knowledge” mid-career hump that many content marketers go through.

You’ve kind of seen all there is to see at one or two companies, so it’s tempting for your knowledge to start to solidify instead of staying plastic and open-minded.

Every marketing strategy has reasons not to do it. If you open LinkedIn right now, you will find someone saying why strategy X doesn’t work. And they’ll probably be right to a degree (SEO doesn’t work because… Podcasts don’t work because…). If you internalize more of the ‘cons’ than the ‘pros’, you’ll start saying no to good ideas when you probably shouldn’t.

I’ve seen some really great content marketers go through it when they avoid failure rather than chase success.

I think I’ve achieved a healthy balance now. My boss threw out a big, ambitious project idea at me yesterday, and my instinct was finally to say yes instead of no (even though I did flag that I’d have to drop something else to take it on).

TL;DR: keep an open mind, take the occasional leap of faith, and don’t worry about being the smartest person in the room.

Cheers,

- Eric

PS. Last week’s newsletter beat the record for most replies I’ve ever received. I’m glad that some other folks are falling back in love with writing thanks to AI.

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🎙 New on Content, Briefly: The Budget Mistake Everyone's Making with GEO with Jeremy Moser

uSERP’s Jeremy Moser talks to 30+ new companies a month and keeps seeing the same flawed logic: teams comparing bottom-of-funnel AI search leads against their entire SEO pipeline—and shifting budget based on a comparison that doesn't hold up.

About 36% of uSERP's own leads self-report as coming from AI search, and even that number is murky once you factor in all the other touchpoints along the way.

In this episode, Alex and Jeremy get into:

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