the PPC Book|Pay Per Click Blog | Long Tail Thoughts in a Short Tail World

While you wouldn’t be able to tell from my recent trips to the links, I was a fairly serious golfer in my younger years. In the summers Mom would drop me off at the course on the way to work at 7am and pick me up on the way home, around 6pm. Every day was the same and let me tell you, I had a great time. There was a community of latch key junior golfers who played 36 holes a day, minimum. In between rounds we gambled on the practice green, as much as 11-12 year olds have to gamble anyway, which is not much.

My game, which was good enough for 2nd rank citywide at one point, was based on 2 things, hit it long and try not to 3-putt. Utterly devoid of caution and course management, I swung as hard as possible every time I stepped up to the ball. Of course, you can’t be a great golfer this way. The guys who won were the guys who played choke down, easy swing, deathly boring golf, shot after shot after shot. I hated that mentality and I hated those guys. It was a philisophical thing for me, as ill advised as it was at the time. I chalk it up to being young. I had fun at the time, but a part of me wished I would have realized sooner that you have to play high percentage golf, at least some of the time, to be successful. Thankfully as I’ve gotten older I realize the value of patience and planning, although I still wouldn’t call myself especially prudent.
So fast forward to this past weekend. My brother gives me a copy of John Daly, My Life In and Out of the Rough. I like John Daly as much as the next guy. How can you not feel for someone who has shown as much humanity as he has. He saves us from a world dominated by boring, efficient, and robotic golf pros. As I’m reading this book, I keep coming back to 2 things.

No.1 - John Daly makes a hell of a lot of excuses for his unbelievable mistakes he has made in his life. It’s always something or someone who has caused a particular event. Like, “She made me mad so I got drunk and smashed up my house”, or “I went back to drinking because the prozac made me feel like shit”.

No.2 - John Daly never gets down on himself too long. Most people who have gone through what he has gone through, especially as self induced as it was, would move to southwestern Guadalajara and wear sunglasses to hide their face. No matter what mistakes he has made, Daly has a way of putting them in the past and moving on. In his case, stepping back into the tee box.

So, my takeaway from this book, and what I think applies to what I do everyday, is not to be too hard on yourself. If you built a campaign that doesn’t perform perfectly, put up a website that isn’t converting like you want, or buy advertising that doesn’t pan out, there are people out there who’ve done 1000x worse. So put your hat back on and get back out there.

As it relates to client management, I tend to take the success or failure of my client campaigns very personally. When my clients do well I am happy, and when they don’t, I try and try to figure it out, and if it doesn’t work I get very frustrated. Most of the time, a campaign not doing well is directly correlated to the quality of the offer or the website, not the campaign that is built, but that doesn’t change the fact I want my clients to do well. At the end of the day, I think I could use a little of the Daly attitude to keep coming back and not beat myself up over the little things. In other words, grip it and rip it.