Life adds up quickly and goes by far too fast. It's rather difficult deciding what directions need to be taken in order to succeed.
I think what most of us fear though is having a fear of not succeeding in our endeavors. Whether our endeavors are love, achievements or lifestyle based.
Personally, for myself, I am a marketer. I research and relate to the consumer (which is all of you) and I do that so that can understand you better in order to correctly sell you a product or service or perhaps an idea.
I get asked quite often from other people that are not in my field about the field of advertising. First off, I am insulted that people are so ignorant that they believe that advertising is the only form of marketing communications that are out there. There are so many other facets to the marketing mix. Remember folks, promotion is only one of the 4 Ps. There's also price, place and product and I think we can all agree that those play a major role and could take a lot of time to come up with.
Don't get me wrong, I like people. In fact, I often like to refer to myself as a man of the people. I work hard, I mentor students, run an organization and am helping with other groups in order to start another one, life is pretty great in general, so I am not simply ******* about how people are stupid. I am ******* mostly about how people keep asking me if what I do and how hard I work is worth it.
What kind of question is that? Of course it is! I get to wake up every morning with always having something to do. Every day I get to look nice and I get to go out to the world and convince people that marketing is good for them. Trust me folks, that's a rather difficult thing to do but can also be easy. Let's remember, no matter how you look at it, marketing is the pure dominates your entire lifestyle.
Let's just say you are like Thoreau. I'm sure many of you on here know who that guy was. Well, as soon as he penned his transcendental poetic memoirs he was doing a form of marketing that marketed his lifestyle. Let's say you present yourself to a friend, the presentation alone is a type of marketing because you are marketing yourself to your friend.
You see folks, people have marketing all wrong, and that is highly shown by the consumer's extra emphasis on advertising. Most people think that marketing is a form of brainwashing. It isn't. Marketing in fact is all about the attempt to create value for consumers. Brainwashing would be against our best interest because marketing is meant to also inform consumers, if all the customers in the world were programmed to like certain things then we would be out of the job. The only brainwashing that is happening is your own minds giving in to a stimuli that just isn't that powerful when you step back and pay attention to everything.
All marketing is about is simply harnessing what all of you communicate to one another an project it onto a medium, whether it is a speaker, poster, promotion or perhaps even a new product. Which brings me back to my first point about succeeding in our endeavors. Our endeavors are all valid but all of them are just you asking this: how am I going to be perceived in the world and to other people and myself? As long as you have someone to impress or a motivation then you are a part of marketing.
In regards to what I do and my values, here they are: I am looking out for the little guy, the consumers that need to be more informed about the products and services and ideas available to them in order to enhance their lives, whether it is physical or emotional. I enjoy it, and I wouldn't do any other thing with my life.