Recently, I watched a special about nature’s toughest animal, the Tardigrade (Hypsibius Dujardin). The Tardigrade is known for its ability to survive harsh conditions and can be found nested anywhere from the boiling water of a hot spring to a solid block of ice — it can even survive high levels of radiation exposure and a trip to outer space! The thing looks like a miniature, alien hippopotamus, but as the special continued something weird happened…I found myself, as a marketer, relating to the Tardigrade’s everyday life. I would even go as far as to say we have a lot in common.

The Ability to Survive in Any Environment

Most marketers come out of college as naive wads of putty and spend their 20’s being molded, thrown into the fire and baked until they’re hardened enough to withstand the harsh terrain of corporate marketing.

Marketers, who can call themselves successful, have weathered storms like company acquisitions, multiple strategic directional changes, leadership turnover, up-ended product/service offerings and the constant migration between marketing software(s). The climate of today’s business landscapes are perpetually in flux, so marketers, as a species, have to quickly acclimate to day-to-day life in an active volcano or in some cases, on a desolate iceberg depending on the brand they’re supporting.

Tardigrades are technically thought of as an aquatic creature, but the resilient critters don’t actually even need water to survive. When in a place like the desert, Tardigrades enter a state called desiccation, which involves shriveling up, slowing their metabolism to a crawl and hibernating until water returns.

Again, as a marketer, I can empathize. For reasons that are mostly erroneous, our habitats devalue our contribution and are often inclined to take away our resources whenever the climate takes a turn for the worse. When marketing budgets dry up, CMO’s, departmental heads and directors are forced to change up the strategy to make due with what they have. As a result, the marketing departments may not operate at full capacity, but they still persevere and the marketers on those teams are forced to adapt.

The Tools to Survive

If Tardigrades could talk, I’m sure they’d tell you that acclimating to different environments requires more than just toughness, it also requires survival skills. As marketers, we too have to develop skills to survive. Over our careers, we have to be flexible enough to handle all different aspects of marketing, from digital to traditional, B2B to B2C, inbound to outbound, which requires us to keep up with the ever-changing theories, platforms, and methodologies.

Modern day marketing leaders know how to get their hands dirty and are more than just glorified managers — they are able to write, work in multiple software platforms like automation and CRM, make changes to a website, generate advanced reports, and set up ad campaigns in a pinch.

The marketing industry is constantly racing through trends and we’ve had to evolve swiftly to keep from falling behind. As I’m sure many of you can attest, personal growth is vital to our survival and those who attempt to get comfortable often become casualties of marketing Darwinism.

Be a Tardigrade

We are both survivors, dealing with an enormous amount of pressure (the Tardigrade can tolerate pressures six times that of the deepest oceans) and just as the world will never be able to kill off the Tardigrade, the business world will always need marketers to deliver messaging, generate leads, and engage with customers.

So, my marketing friends, the next time a company you work for comes upon hard times or liquidates the marketing department, remember we, like the Tardigrade, are indestructible.

This meme keeps showing up on my Linkedin and Facebook feeds and it’s high time someone called out the people posting it.

I doubt these people smirk at their friends and acquaintances like they’re Don Draper and brag about not having enough time to spend with their kids. They probably wouldn’t stand up at a party to announce, “I need to see a therapist once a week because I have no free time to do the things I enjoy!” So, why then do they feel it's necessary to shame people working a reasonable amount of hours with this condescending meme?

Ever notice that when you ask people how they’re doing, it almost seems mandatory for them to tell you how busy they are?  That’s the death gurgle of the old school work mentality trying its damnedest to endure.

The new guard is not about that overbearing work life. We prefer adopting new philosophies that draw out the best work, not just the most work. We embrace any technology that makes us more organized and productive. And, we have time for our lives outside of work.

YOU WORK 70 HOURS A WEEK? I REMEMBER WHEN I WASN’T PRODUCTIVE

The thinking behind the eight hour work day came from a man named Robert Owen, who believed we should divide our days up into three, eight-hour segments:

While the intention of this belief was honorable, eight hours is just an arbitrary number based on the most basic division (24/3=8). According to studies, whether you work more or less than that means very little about the work you contribute. In many cases, those studies have found that people acknowledge longer work days by procrastinating and getting less done on average.

More and more, we are seeing the adoption of organizational processes, like agile development and scrum, whose goals are not maxing out productivity.  In fact, Scrum basically chooses quality of work over quantity by prioritizing projects and maximizing the execution of agreed-upon amounts of work over an agreed upon amount of time. The people who spend all night at the office typically don't prioritize well and therefore take on too much work.  When they stretch themselves thin in this way the work suffers. Unfortunately, poor work doesn't produce and all that extra work ends up being the opposite of productive.

YOU WORK 70 HOURS A WEEK? I REMEMBER WHEN I WASN'T EFFICIENT

Since the days of the industrial revolution, the majority of jobs in America have become less manual and labor intensive in nature. At some point, people realized that we are not machines and we are not meant to be machines. We have actually created machines and are now more inclined than ever to use them to do what they are best at — manual tasks, solving algorithms, and maintaining or accessing databases — so we can do the things they cannot.

The computer takeover is upon us...the boring, menial task takeover

While some may cry that computers and automation are taking jobs away from people, they are actually reducing human error and taking common, unskilled work off of our shoulders.  This new-found freedom allows us to spend more time collaborating with one another, brainstorming creative new ideas, building strategies, planning and creating brilliant work, which are all the things computers are mostly unable to do. (I know we’re closing in on times where this statement becomes less and less true, but until Skynet brings about hell on Earth, we still run this b****.)

Humans tend to respond to menial weekly tasks in one of two ways: they either continue doing the tasks or they get fed up and find a way to automate or eliminate them (there is a third way to handle menial tasks, which is to ignore them completely, but that’s not exactly a solution). The people who choose to automate find themselves with all this newly realized free time and often use it where it belongs …. creating better work.  We can all agree that’s a bigger accomplishment than working longer hours, right?

Automation is your best friend, and technology is the party that brought you together.

Productivity experts are always telling us to "work smarter, not harder" and still many of us find ourselves working harder. Why? In my industry, as visionaries at companies like Marketo, HubSpot, and Salesforce progress automation technologies, we’re afforded the opportunity to shed nominal tasks that drain us of our creativity and limited capacity to stay focused.

YOU WORK 70 HOURS A WEEK? SO DID MY GRANDPARENTS

Let's be honest, most of us work more than forty hours a week anyway and, as ambitious as I am being in this post, I know for people like business owners and lawyers there is no getting around the long hours.

This is just a gentle reminder that even if you get off on working long hours, it is not something that should be used to shame others. In fact, hours worked is a pretty capricious stat when broken down. Let's stick to the nice posts about hard work like “rise and grind” and “every day I’m hustling.” And if we have to brag about anything work-related, let it be about actual accomplishments or things that help create work/life balance like getting to work from home, like I did today 😉