Rephrase a problem to solve it. Or not.

I was listening to a podcast talking about steps to financial independence.

“Step #1: Create a plan how to become top 20% in your field.”

I stopped listening after that sentence, so I might be speaking out of my turn here. However, it is pretty much “How to become financially independent” = “Get millionaire generating income”.

I bet #2 “Don’t spend unnecessarily” and #3 was “Invest into the best mutual funds”.

We love simple slogans, which looks like solutions. Whilst underneath they are just rephrasing the same problem in different words, just pretending that it’s the key to all your problems (or just a specific one). Are these fundamentals of all sales and marketing?

And it is everywhere – from D2C marketing, through #thoughLeadership up to enterprise technologies.

We want to hear that there is well-defined framework or system to follow to achieve what we want (which usually is something way above average). And there usually is to a degree. But it only gets us to a certain distance. After that, all the complexity we as humans create jumps in and the best answer to your problems are “Well… it depends” or “We could try this and see if it works”.

If all the slogans and phrases would work, we would be all looking like Instagram models, with passive income large enough to retire in our late 20s. Google wouldn’t need tens of thousands of engineers, and unfortunately for us, ecological problems would be solved by now.