What Am I Worth To You

I drove home tonight and I do not remember driving home tonight. The car moved. My hands were on the wheel. The radio said things. I was thirty minutes ahead or eight years behind. I arrived in my driveway and the drive had happened to someone who was not entirely me.

This is most of a life.

We tell ourselves we live intentionally. We do not. We live split between what already happened and what we are afraid is coming, and the actual present, the only place we are ever alive, becomes a black box we never open. We come online only for damage control. A near miss. A bill. A doctor’s voice on the phone. We handle it and we go back under.

It is not a bad life. It is the default one.

What does any of this have to do with marketing.

I have been thinking about this for a while.

We are exposed to marketing more times in a day than we can count. A song on the radio is marketing. A billboard outside the gas station is marketing. The font on a sticker on a vending machine is marketing. The way your friend tells you about a film is marketing. Almost everything we look at was placed there to move something inside us. Almost none of it lands. Because most of us are not in the moment to be moved.

We notice marketing only when it tears the autopilot. When something stops us long enough to look up.

There are two ways the autopilot tears.

The first is bad marketing. The cousin’s car wash guy who corners you in the parking lot. You can smell what he wants before he opens his mouth. The ad that follows you across six websites. The influencer who pretends to have just discovered the product yesterday. The brand that calls you “fam.” You feel cheap. You feel like a wallet with legs. You reach for the close button and the moment ends.

This is the gift of the internet. You used to have to sit through it. Now you swipe and it is gone.

The second way the autopilot tears is good marketing. And good marketing does not feel like marketing at all.

It feels like the world handing you back something you already knew but had forgotten you knew. A line on someone’s account. A film. A poster. A sentence in a book at the airport. Something in you that had been sitting in the dark turns on a small lamp. You think. You consider. You almost want to be different than you were a moment ago.

That is the value good marketing delivers. It does not interrupt the autopilot. It dissolves it. Just for a second. Just long enough for you to come back into your own body.

I have been writing for seventy days.

Here, on this site, every Friday. There, on X, almost every day. Replies in other people’s comment sections that I will never read again. Words for a small audience that is mostly not yet listening.

So now I have to ask the question I have been afraid to ask.

What value am I providing.

Not in the soft way. In the way a customer asks before they pay.

Am I teaching anyone the tools of marketing. I am not. I do not know enough yet to teach the tools. Am I informing anyone of the trends. I am not. I do not care about the trends. The trends are noise.

So what am I doing.

The most honest answer I have tonight is this. I help people start. I am the small lamp that turns on for someone who has been sitting in the dark wondering whether to begin. That is what I have. That is what I am offering across this whole table of words.

And I do not know how to weigh it.

I do not have a scale. I do not have a receipt. I cannot look at a reader who read me last Friday and ask how much of the next thing she did came from the reading. I cannot tell if it came from me or from a morning when she woke up ready. There is no way to put it on a balance sheet.

This is the place I am sitting in tonight. I am writing what I think is good marketing and I cannot measure what it is worth to anyone, including me.

This is the next question. Not what to write about. Not how often. The question is how I know whether what I am writing is worth the time I am asking from you.

I will not solve it this week. I might not solve it this year. But I am putting it on the table because the worst thing a writer can do is pretend to know an answer he has not earned.

If you are reading this and you have begun something because of something I wrote, that is one coin in the hat. I do not yet know what the hat is supposed to hold by the end. I do not know if I am supposed to count the coins or weigh them or just keep showing up.

But I am showing up. The autopilot is off. And that is at least a start.