The Simple Secrets Of Marketing and Copywriting Professionalism

My idea of marketing and copywriting professionalism is simple: You are where you said you’d be, when you said you’d be there, having done what you said you’d do.
In school, you can get out of being graded harshly when you fail if you have a good excuse. That’s a fatal fall-back position to bring into the business world, though.
You miss a deadline, and it can cost vast sums of very real money. And ruin your reputation in very real ways.
Some marketers are chronically late because they relish the power. It’s a passive-aggressive thing… and if you suspect someone is chronically wasting your time for the small thrill of holding you hostage to their sick need for control… leave now.
Other late people are just victims of their own delusion. They remember the one time they got across town in twenty minutes, and ignore the four hundred times it took longer.
There’s a reluctance to summon the energy required for the trip, and a reluctance to begin gearing up for whatever new kind of thinking the meeting will drag out of you. So you put it off as long as possible… and often longer.
If you’re a chronically late marketer or copywriter, you need to change your behavior now. And you cannot accomplish this by simply being emphatic with yourself about it.
Even you won’t listen to your own baloney promises.
No, you need a plan. It sounds simple, but it escapes a lot of people just the same.
If you must be somewhere at 4 pm, you will be late if you start getting ready to leave at 4 pm. Yet, I know people who do this.
In fact, if it takes forty minutes to get where you’re going, you are late if you’re still in the office at 3:20. The Theory of Relativity does not bend just because you’ve got rotten planning skills.
Here’s the pro rule: If your meeting’s at 4, you are not walking into the room at 4, nor pulling into the parking lot at 4, nor sitting at a traffic light a block away at 4. At 4 pm, you have already been sitting calmly in the place you’re supposed to be for at least five minutes, with your thoughts gathered and your darn act together.
You do not lose the time you spend waiting for a meeting to start. It’s still your time.
Meditate, read, work on notes, or just sit and enjoy being alive. But do it where you’re supposed to be… not back in your office or home getting ready, pretending you can navigate forty minutes of traffic in ten minutes this time.
Figure out the worst time it’s taken you to get across town. Then add ten minutes.
This way, you won’t have to watch for cops as you speed, you won’t be a menace trying to blow lights you’ve missed, and you won’t arrive with an adrenaline level through the roof.
Remember: No matter how good your excuse is, the people waiting for you don’t want to hear it.
If you’re late, you’re going to have to rely on your history. If you’re chronically on time, you’ll be forgiven. If you’re a late person, all you’ll ever get are eye-rolls as you waste more of their time trying to make your boring tale of wrecks, detours and slow tourists sound believable.
This kind of simple discipline is not hard to pull off.
It’s just rare.