Marketing as minefield
Imagine you’re overlooking a field. That field is the world of ideas where little tufts of grass represent individual topics. An untrained eye sees it as a beautiful meadow. However, an expert sees mines buried underneath—logical fallacies, misused jargon, or contextual traps to avoid. The more you become educated or skilled in your profession, the more you learn where the mines are. Claude can do many things, but it can’t help you walk through a minefield.
Seminary taught me where theological mines are, through history, philosophy, language. I may not know how to defuse all of them, but I at least know where they are. A small example: You’ve heard “your body is a temple,” which is usually taken to mean that you need to be physically healthy. Except Paul’s “your” is plural. Older Bibles used to translate it from Greek to English as “ye” in the first part of the verse, but now contemporary Bibles just read “your.” And since we in the west have such an individualized worldview, we interpret that verse to be about me, mangling the point of the passage. A Southerner would translate that verse more correctly as “Don’t y’all know that y’all’s body is a temple…” the way my former colleague John Dyer’s Y’all Version translates it. I have forgotten how to decline Greek pronouns across various cases, but I know to watch my step.
Business school did the same, teaching me where the many mines are in modern finance. I have forgotten how to build a DCF model from scratch, but I at least know that the model depends on the argument I’m making for the discount rate in the weighted average cost of capital due to the time value of money. Warren Buffett’s partner Charlie Munger liked to say that every time you hear “EBITDA,” you should replace it with “bullshit earnings.” It took an MBA to understand why a flattering EBITDA might be a mine hidden in a forecast.
The same applies with marketing. There are many tiny details that a professional knows that the lay person does not. Claude can make things sound very easy, but—when it’s not hallucinating—it may not help you cross the field in one piece. The difference is in knowing what questions to ask.
Claude may build a website, but is the messaging clear? Are the images served as .webp instead of one-megabyte .pngs that blow up your bandwidth bill? If it collects user information, is it GDPR compliant, and is there actually a database behind it? Are the graphics vectorized, or will they pixelate? Is it built on a consistent, scalable component system? Does it connect cleanly to your CRM, your analytics, your integrations? You get the idea.
I’m learning my own field is smaller than I thought. Another small example: I had a leak between the connection from my exterior faucet by my front porch to my hose. I described it to Claude, sent photos, and it diagnosed the problem and even linked me the right connector on Amazon. I purchased it, thinking I’m now Tim “The Toolman” Taylor. The next day a stranger texted asking if I really meant that part because it’s a very unusual size. I told him Claude told me. I sent pictures of my faucet. This stranger—who was apparently a professional thread connector thing guy—texted back, “I know exactly what you need.” He was right. It fit like a glove and my leak is gone. I am not, as it turns out, Tim “The Toolman” Taylor, and I’m okay with that now. A professional who spends his days on pipe fittings can instantly see what I couldn’t. In his field I was an amateur admiring the grass.
My team and I are using Claude in all kinds of amazing ways, opening up new capabilities that weren’t available a year ago. It’s truly remarkable. Yet I have this small, growing voice in the back of my head asking where my expertise really lies. Charlie Munger used to call it your “circle of competence.” I’m finding that circle getting smaller and smaller as the field grows larger and larger because tools make every field a beautiful meadow. I’m slowly learning that the real skill is not knowing the answer but knowing the questions—or the experts—to ask, since there may be before me many mines about which I have no idea.
