This week Tom Brady entered the newsletter game.
There’s a few things I could pick holes in in his execution, but I’ll leave that for another day, because there’s a little part of the 1st edition that’s really useful for any type of instructor.
Tom talks about the difference between playing the game, and talking about playing the game as a presenter:
“On the football field, I’ve had enough reps that I can take in that mountain of information, make a quick decision and then my mind and body will do hundreds of little things all at once to produce an action. In broadcasting, you don’t get to do hundreds of things at once. You can only say one thing at a time, and you do it hundreds of times over.
Think about it like the difference between driving a car and talking about driving a car. You’ve probably spent thousands of hours behind the wheel in your life driving yourself to work or your kids to and from school. Many times, you probably relied on muscle memory more than conscious effort to get you from point A to point B. Now, imagine riding in the backseat while someone else is driving, and your job is to describe everything you’re seeing in real time to a blindfolded person sitting next to you so that when you arrive at your destination they’ll be able to understand where they are and how they got there.”
Going from doing to teaching can be incredibly frustrating because of this change in speed.
Breaking down what you’re teaching into it’s component parts and teaching each one individually, then building them back together into a whole. It’s slow, and not as easy as it looks.
A lot of “naturals” can’t do that first step. That muscle memory is so engrained, they’ve forgotten how they learned it in the first place.
I’ve done it in rowing. A stroke that takes less than two seconds can take several minutes to describe, step by step. (Thankfully I was no natural so I’ve thought about it for decades.)
In marketing, I can build out an opt-in page and follow-up sequence in under an hour, but describing all the steps to someone else could take all day.
The difference between content marketing and teaching is how you string these distinct actions together.
Marketing picks one at a time, and even if you present them in order, you can’t guarantee that’s how you’re users will see them. If you rely on your socials, you can pretty much guarantee they won’t.
Teaching is patiently going through each step until your student gets a result.
