Who Told You That?

Curiosity challenges assumptions. Persistence tests them. Growth starts when someone questions what everyone else has already decided is true.

There are two ways to react when someone tells you that you can't do something. You can believe them. Or you can think: “Oh, really?” 🤨

Taylor Swift was still a kid when a guitar teacher told her that her hands were too small to play a 12-string guitar. So, she learned to play a 12-string guitar. If you've followed Taylor's career, that response probably doesn't surprise you. Challenge has followed her through nearly every chapter of it. And rather than quietly accepting someone else's definition of what she's capable of, she has repeatedly kept going, changed, learned, rebuilt, and let the result make the argument.

I understand that instinct. Frankly, I've had it my entire life. Tell me something is difficult and I'm interested.

Tell me I can't do it? NOW I'M INVESTED.

There's an almost involuntary “oh, really?” 🤨 that happens in my head. Now I don't just want to do it. I want to figure it out. I want to understand it. I want to get good at it. And yes, there is absolutely a part of me that wants to succeed so completely that eventually I can point at the result and say: “You were saying?” 🙃

Call it stubbornness. Competitiveness. Persistence. I'VE PROBABLY EARNED ALL THREE.

But underneath it is something I think matters much more: CURIOSITY. Because before I accept someone's conclusion about what I can do, what a team can accomplish, where a business can grow, or what supposedly won't work, I want to know something. “Who told you that?” And more importantly: “Why did you believe them?”

Businesses Have 12-String Guitars, Too

I hear versions of it constantly in marketing.

“Paid media doesn't work for us.”

“Our customers aren't on social.”

“SEO takes too long.”

“People don't read anymore.”

“Video doesn't work in our industry.”

“We can't compete with what they're spending.”

“We tried that.”

MAYBE. But “WHO TOLD YOU THAT?”

Was it your customer? Was it the data? Was it a controlled test? Or did someone say it confidently enough that eventually everyone stopped asking questions? Because “we tried it” and “we proved it” are two very different statements. Maybe your paid media didn't work because paid media isn't the right channel. Or maybe the creative sucked. Maybe the offer wasn't compelling. Maybe you targeted the wrong audience. Maybe the landing page created friction. Maybe sales took four days to call the leads. Maybe attribution was broken. Maybe you ran one version of one idea for six weeks and declared the entire channel a failure.

That's not exactly a scientific breakthrough.

Curiosity doesn't require us to reject the obvious answer. It requires us to earn the conclusion.

“We Know Our Customer.”

That's another one. I've heard some version of it throughout my career.

“We know our customer.”

Great. When was the last time you actually asked them? Customers change. Markets change. Competitors change. Technology changes. The way people search changes. The way they research changes. The places they spend their time change. Their expectations change. And sometimes the business changes while everyone inside it is still making decisions based on the customer they understood five years ago. Experience is valuable. Institutional knowledge is valuable. Pattern recognition is valuable.

But experience can also become one of the most convincing ways to stop being curious.

You know what worked before, so you assume it will work again. You know who your customer has always been, so you stop looking for who they might be becoming. You know which channels have performed, so you keep feeding them while ignoring the ones you haven't figured out yet.

Eventually, experience stops informing the strategy. It starts protecting it. And that's when “we know” becomes dangerous.

The Most Expensive Words in Marketing Might Be “We Already Tried That.”

Whenever I hear those words, I want details. What did you try? When? For how long? With what budget? Against which audience? Using what creative? What was the offer? Where did you send the traffic? What happened after someone converted? What did you measure? What did you learn? And perhaps most importantly: What did you change before you tried again? Because if the answer is nothing, you didn't really test anything. You repeated something. There's a difference.

Challenging assumptions in marketing means treating beliefs about customers, channels, creative, offers, and performance as hypotheses until data or testing provides evidence.

Good marketing is built on hypotheses. We believe this audience has this problem. We believe this message will get their attention. We believe this offer gives them a reason to act. We believe this channel is an effective place to reach them. Then we put those beliefs into the market and give customers an opportunity to tell us whether we're right.

Sometimes they do. Sometimes they absolutely do not. Both answers are useful. That's the part businesses sometimes miss.

A failed test isn't necessarily wasted money. A test that teaches you nothing is.

If the creative fails but teaches you which message doesn't resonate, you've learned something. If the landing page fails but exposes where people abandon the experience, you've learned something. If one audience dramatically outperforms another, you've learned something. If customers consistently ask a question your website never answers, you've learned something.

The point isn't to be right every time. The point is to become less wrong every time.

That's growth. Not certainty. Not ego. Not defending the original strategy because someone's name is attached to it. Learning.

Persistence Doesn't Mean Doing the Same Thing Louder

This is where I think the Taylor Swift story gets even more interesting.

She wasn't going to prove anyone wrong by standing there insisting she could play a 12-string guitar. She had to learn how to play it. That's an important distinction.

There is a version of persistence that is really just stubbornness wearing better clothes.

You keep doing the same thing. Keep spending. Keep publishing. Keep running the same creative. Keep targeting the same audience. Keep making the same argument. And when it doesn't work, you decide you just haven't done enough of it yet.

That's not persistence. That's repetition with a PR problem.

Real persistence has curiosity built into it. Try. Pay attention. Learn. Adjust. Try again.

Sometimes the answer really is no. Sometimes the channel isn't right. Sometimes the audience isn't there. Sometimes the offer isn't strong enough. Sometimes the economics simply don't work. Curiosity doesn't mean refusing to accept those answers. It means knowing WHY they're the answers.

There's a massive difference between quitting because somebody told you something wouldn't work and changing direction because you gathered enough evidence to know it won't. One is assumption. The other is strategy.

Curiosity Is a Growth Strategy

Somewhere along the way, curiosity became something we associate with creativity. I think that's far too limiting.

Curiosity is one of the most important growth disciplines a business can have.

Curiosity encourages marketers to investigate why something worked or failed instead of accepting the first explanation. That leads to better testing, stronger insights, and more informed growth decisions.

Because curious marketers don't just ask: “Did it work?” They ask: Why did it work? Why did that audience respond differently? Why did people click but not convert? Why did conversion increase after we changed the headline? Why are customers using a phrase we never use ourselves? Why is a competitor gaining visibility somewhere we've ignored? Why are qualified leads disappearing between marketing and sales? Why are we spending more but growing less? And my personal favorite: What if we're wrong?

That question can make people uncomfortable. Especially when the strategy was theirs. Especially when they've been doing this for twenty years. Especially when the answer might mean changing something that's been successful before. But I'd rather discover that I'm wrong than spend another year confidently defending something that isn't working.

Curiosity challenges assumptions.

And growth often starts when someone is willing to question what everyone else has already decided is true. But here's where it gets interesting. Marketing decisions don't happen in a vacuum. Someone has to decide which idea gets tested. Someone decides which assumption gets challenged and which one gets accepted. Someone decides whether the disappointing result means try something different or that doesn't work.

Someone decides whether the person in the room asking, “But how do we know that?” is being difficult or asking exactly the question everyone else should have asked. Eventually, every conversation about curiosity in business becomes a conversation about the people making the decisions. And that's where the 12-string guitar starts looking a little different.

SOMETIMES YOU'RE TAYLOR. Someone has already decided what you're capable of, and you get to decide whether you're willing to accept their conclusion. SOMETIMES YOU'RE THE MARKETER. Someone has already decided what won't work, and your job is to get curious enough to test whether they're right. And SOMETIMES YOU'RE HOLDING THE GUITAR. You're the person with the experience. The authority. The title. The person whose opinion can become someone else's accepted truth. That's where curiosity stops being just a growth strategy and starts becoming a leadership responsibility. Because the same thing that kills growth in marketing can do far more damage when we apply it to people.

An assumption. Repeated confidently. Accepted without investigation. Eventually treated as fact.

I've experienced what happens when that comes from the top.

When Curiosity Disappears From Leadership

I've worked for an executive I genuinely hoped I could learn from. And I did. Just not in the way I expected. I went into that relationship believing I had an opportunity to work under someone whose leadership I could study. Someone further along in their career. Someone operating at a level I aspired to reach. I hoped there would be things I could take from the way he led and carry with me as I continued to grow.

And there were. Just not the lessons I expected. I learned what leadership looks like when curiosity disappears.

When conflict happened, the instinct wasn't to investigate. It was to make the conflict go away. Not necessarily resolution of the actual problem. Resolution of the discomfort. The loudest opinion carried weight. If enough people agreed, that carried even more. Investigating why there were different perspectives, understanding what happened from every side, asking what context might be missing…that required confrontation. And confrontation was something this leader desperately wanted to avoid. So, the easiest answer often won. Placate the loudest side. Make the immediate issue disappear. Move on. Except the issue didn't disappear. Making the noise stop isn't the same thing as solving the problem. The other perspective still existed. The consequences still existed. The people affected by the decision still existed. The fallout simply became someone else's responsibility to manage.

And that's the dangerous thing about losing your curiosity when you become a leader.
Your assumptions don't stay inside your own head.
OTHER PEOPLE HAVE TO LIVE WITH THEM.

The higher your title, the further those assumptions can travel. A leader can hear the majority opinion and mistake it for the whole story. They can hear the loudest person and mistake confidence for accuracy. They can make a decision that restores peace in the room and never bother looking at the damage it creates after everyone leaves it. And they can become so convinced that their experience gives them the answer that they stop asking the questions that might prove them wrong.

That's not leadership. That's certainty with authority behind it.

Strong leadership requires enough confidence to make a decision. But it also requires enough humility to investigate before you do.

Curiosity helps leaders investigate different perspectives before making decisions, reducing the risk of treating the loudest opinion, majority opinion, or personal experience as the complete story.

Who haven't I heard from? What happened before the part everyone is talking about? Why are two people experiencing the same situation so differently? What evidence supports what I'm being told? Am I hearing the whole story or simply the version with the most people repeating it? Am I solving the actual problem? Or am I solving my own discomfort with having a problem in front of me? And maybe the hardest question of all: “What if I'm wrong?”

When You're the One Holding the 12-String Guitar

Here's where this story comes full circle for me. I've always responded well to someone doubting me. Tell me I can't do something and there's a decent chance you've just made me exponentially more determined to do it. But I've learned something important as I've become responsible for leading other people. Not everyone should have to turn someone else's lack of belief into fuel. Especially when that person is their leader.

A leader's words carry weight. Your assumptions carry weight. Your conclusions about someone's capabilities carry weight. You may say something casually and forget about it ten minutes later. The person on the other side of the conversation may remember it for ten years. That's why curiosity matters even more when you're in charge.

Sometimes you're Taylor; someone else is questioning your capability. Sometimes you're the marketer; you're questioning what everyone has accepted as fact. And sometimes you're the guitar teacher; your experience and authority mean you're the one telling someone else what's possible.

That's where strong leadership requires something more difficult than confidence. It requires the humility to remain curious. To recognize that experience should help you ask better questions. It shouldn't give you permission to stop asking them.

Who Told You That?

There will always be someone willing to tell you what can't be done. What doesn't work. What your customers won't buy. What your company can't become. What someone on your team isn't capable of. Sometimes they'll even be right. But don't give someone else's certainty authority it hasn't earned.

Ask the question. Look at the evidence. Run the test. Listen to the other perspective. Challenge what you've inherited. Challenge what everyone agrees on. And every once in a while, challenge yourself.

Because curiosity challenges assumptions. Persistence tests them.
And growth starts when someone is willing to question what everyone else has already decided is true.

In marketing, that can change a campaign. In business, it can change a trajectory. In leadership, it can change what happens to the people who trusted you to lead them. So the next time someone tells you what won't work, what's impossible, who's right, who's wrong, or how something has to be done, ask: “Who told you that?”

And when you're the one doing the telling?
BE CURIOUS ENOUGH TO ASK YOURSELF THE SAME THING.