Hiya and happy Friday. I’m experimenting with a new something-something for the newsletter. Going forward, I want to share one thing with you I have learnt on marketing or business during the week.

I’ve always struggled with how all the online entrepreneurs’ businesses looked so perfect and smooth from the outside, when for me it’s been a true journey in trial and error.

With this, I want to keep it more real - and share whatever I’m finding out with you, so you may reap the benefits from it, too.

At the beginning of the week, I attended a graduation ceremony in Munich (yes, Oktoberfest, I know…). It was for PhDs in the humanities and social sciences.

A real joyous occasion - and nerd wonderland. I marveled at all the things you can study and research. They read the title of each doctoral student’s dissertation out loud before they received their papers. One of them even wrote it in Latin. Whoa!

Commonly, such endeavors raise the question of “so, what?”. Who cares if somebody analyzes an already-extinct dialect of the Estonian language and builds a database around that (true story!).

Cynical minds might ask what the point of such specialized knowledge is, when we have other things going on in the world.

The Fallacy of Cost-Benefit-Analyzing Your Life

It’s a type of thinking that you’ll see a lot in the business landscape, as well: cost-benefit-analyses applied to all areas of existence.

In business, this matters. You need to know what you’re doing, how much you’re spending, how much time something costs you, and what the ROI of that is - EVEN when you’re just a one-person company. It’s essential and too many people, my past self included, don’t do that enough.

Regrettably, this type of thinking has begun to infiltrate other areas of our lives: relationships, health, and fitness, just to name a few. We optimize, analyze, and quantify.

In the process of that, we forget that life is more than just a cost-benefit analysis. Not everything we do outside of the sphere of business needs to have such a narrow focus on input and output.

The Takeaway: Do Something “Useless” This Weekend

Beauty and delightful experiences happen, when we kick around.

Being goal-driven and type A is great. In business, it helps tremendously to have your stats and data in check. Set goals, go after them, be efficient, trim the fat. Yes to all that - in the right context.

In life, that’s not always the best idea. Life doesn’t move on a linear trajectory. Life is random. By applying the cost-benefit scheme to it, we strip it of when and where it’s most magical.

When is the last time you did something just because you felt like it? When is the last time you’ve made or did something just for the heck of it?

This weekend, I’m making sure to do something just because. 
No rhyme, no reason. Just because I enjoy it.

Getting things done matters. So does nourishing the unruly part of you. Even if it asks you to study ancient coinage, extinct dialects, and unknown early works by an even more unknown medieval author ;)

Happy Marketing,

Johanna 📣