Translator: Yangha Kim Reviewer: Mhd Adnan Ayasso
Good evening. My name is Samuel Edwards.
I’m a digital marketing strategist and contributing columnist
to Inc magazine, Entrepreneur and Business.com.
As a digital marketing strategist who's worked in the New York City,
a question I generally get asked is this: “Is it anything like Mad Men?”
For those who are the fans of the show, I hate to ruin this for you,
but ad agencies are almost nothing like that.
Especially for someone like myself
who has the advantage of working at home on a daily basis,
more often than not, pants – those are totally optional.
So thank you TEDx
for making that requirement for giving this talk today.
This is the first time all week I’ve put on pants, so thank you
and you’re welcome.
(Laughter)
But all kidding aside, in my line of work,
what I get to work with is data analytics, statistics and ad variations
to help better understand how users are using search engines.
One of the cool things working with them
is that all the data that’s available to you,
most people don’t have access to or get to look at.
Let’s take a look at a fun example here.
Kim Kardashian. We know her name.
How often do you think it’s searched per month on Google?
Do you think it’s A: 50,000 times, B: 750,000 times,
C: 5 million times or D: over ten million times?
The answer is actually D.
On average, Kim Kardashian’s name
is being searched 13.6 million times on Google alone.
That’s crazy to think about, isn’t it?
While this is an example of some fun data that I get at work on a daily basis,
what I want to focus with on this talk is instead,
about 3 major learning opportunities and learning takeaways
that I’ve had in my short career as a young entrepreneur.
And the first is simply this:
You can’t let your ego be your downfall.
When I was starting out in marketing,
and like many young people who entered the work force,
I had this mentality that I was hands down where I went
the smartest person in the room, one of the best marketers in the country,
and I was being paid 10 times less than what I deserved.
It wasn’t until I started working on a campaign
that I had a realization of otherwise.
So I was working on a campaign, and the objective there
was to create specific ads to help decide and figure out
which one’s going to drive the most sales.
So, I’ve done campaigns like this before.
But right before the campaign launched,
my boss recommended that we try some ad variations
that were completely different than the ads I had created.
Now, being my boss, I had no option but to go ahead and do that.
But in my head, I couldn’t help but to think
we were wasting time, energy and resources
on something that I knew that would fail – his ads.
Of course my ads were going to succeed.
So, 2 weeks into the ad campaign and it launches.
The data starts rolling in
and something becomes clear almost immediately.
And that was: I had no idea what the hell I was doing.
Nearly every single one of the ads that I created failed.
The only reason the campaign somewhat succeeded
was from the recommendations that by boss had given me.
And this realization came over me.
It was simply this.
It’s a shocker, get ready.
I don’t know everything and you know what?
You don’t either and that’s okay.
Life’s a continual learning experience.
The problem with having an inflated ego
is that when you think you know everything,
you’ll fail to learn anything.
So, you have to be willing to put aside your ego
and understand the recommendations and tips that are being provided to you
are meant to help you grow as an individual.
So the priority no. 1 has to be listening.
The second thing I’ve learned up to this point is about limitations,
more specifically, self-imposed limitations.
These are the excuses and things we say
for why we’re not going after the things we want or want to do.
We say things like, “I would but I just don’t have the money.”
or, ”I would but I just don’t have the skillset.”
When in actuality, it’s not about the resources you have,
it’s about the resourcefulness of you as an individual.
When I was in college, I was frustrated, extremely frustrated
that I was paying for these classes
where I wasn’t learning anything I particularly cared about.
So, I made the decision to drop out.
When I dropped out of school, I turned to the almighty search engine
and began searching for things that interested me.
I started learning marketing tactics and strategies that way.
That’s actually how I got started with my career.
You have to understand,
that with all the data that’s available to us today,
it’s interesting that with access to all the search engine data,
I find more people are searching for things about entertainment
than things that could help them better themselves as a person.
A good example is this:
Now, cute puppies are searched 201,000 times per month on Google.
I know I’m personally responsible for about 400 of those searches
but that doesn’t explain the other 200,000 plus.
It’s about being able to use those resources that we have
in the most efficient way.
The second thing I’ve learned in regards to self-imposed limitations
is one that I admit I actually use myself.
And that’s the time limitation.
Time limitation is where we use time as the excuse
for why we’re not going after the things we want
and why we’re not able to.
We say, “Oh, I have a job, I have kids, I have a girlfriend, I have school,
there’s just not enough time in the day
to do all the things that I would like to accomplish.”
So for me, I would use the procrastination limitation.
I would say things like, “Oh, I’ll get to it one day.”
or, ”Someday, I’ll get to it.”
And here’s the thing about that.
There are seven days in a week and someday isn’t one of them.
So for me, I had to prioritize what I wanted in the future
over what I had now in order to get where I wanted to be.
So you have to simply ask yourself,
where you’re at, what you’re doing, is this what you want to be doing?
Is this where you want to be?
And if the answer is no, you have to prioritize
and really decide what the important things are
that can get you to where you want to go.
It’s not an easy process, it’s extremely scary
and extremely frustrating.
And there’s zero chance percent there’s going to be a guaranteed success.
But here’s the thing.
If you want something in life, you have to risk it to get the biscuit.
The third thing which I learned up to this point
as a young entrepreneur is this.
It’s about opportunity and it’s simply this:
Opportunity isn't something that’s just going to fall on your lap.
It’ll seldom fall on your lap throughout your lifetime.
So if you’re waiting, I’m sorry to say,
you're going to wait a lot longer.
For me, before I started writing for Inc and Entrepreneur magazine,
I didn’t have these reporters or editors or publications reaching out to me,
begging me to write for them.
No, I loved reading those publications.
So what I did was, I found out
who the editors of the publications were,
and got their contact information.
Then after months and months
of going back and forth with them through email,
giving them free writing content,
hoping they'd let me become a writer for those publications,
I was finally accepted.
So, if you want something, you have to go out and grab it.
It’s not just going to wait for you there.
I hope you realize the major takeaways that I’ve learned so far in my life
can also be applicable to you.
Think about it this way.
It’s not that I am my greatest opposition,
I’m also my greatest ally.
And to leave you with a quote from the poem "Invictus."
“It matters not how strait the gate,
how charged with punishments the scroll,
you are the master of your fate
and you are the captain of your soul.”
Thank you and I hope you find what you’re searching for.
(Applause)
[What do I want]