Annie Thorp: Practice Makes a Pendulum
October 05, 2015
If you haven’t checked out our #PracticeMakes collection yet, you haven’t lived. In celebration of the ongoing roll-out, we asked Sarah, Narie, and Miyako what practice “makes” in their lives. Next up: our tireless CMO Annie Thorp.
“Practice makes a pendulum.”
In marketing, we talk a lot about optimization: running an ad or a campaign, collecting data, isolating the things that work, then doubling down on the things that drive acquisition, while cutting back on the things customers are not responding to. I think of it like watching a pendulum. We put things into the world, see where they’re unbalanced or inefficient, and then we correct.
Increasingly, I find that optimization has become my practice—at my job and in my life as a mom and wife. I experiment: a new bedtime for the kids, a new work-life “balance,” a new division of family responsibility, a new structure for my team. The next step is to be flexible enough to make changes when things aren’t working. I’m never perfect on the first try (or the millionth), but with each tiny adjustment, things do get better.
My practice doesn’t make me perfect; no one’s does (despite what you see on Instagram). But it does yield the small victories that motivate me to keep on swinging.
