We are all slaves to our energy. Energy is drive, motivation, focus, what “gets you up in the morning,” and all the other cliches we throw back and forth to describe that set of traits we use to overcome the barriers in front of us.

There are all kinds of energy in the world. There is the energy that lets you run a half-dozen errands a day. There is the energy that allows you maintain relationships with friends and family. There is the energy that helps you keep perspective, change and grow. Then there is the energy that lets you do creative work.

That’s what I’m interested in today.

On the web, people like me (and most likely you) have two tasks that drain our creative energy: building things and talking about them. That is to say, engineering cool new stuff and marketing it to our adoring fans.

You can’t do both at the same time.

Not well, at least.

Why? They both take the same kind of energy. The neurotic drive to build something extraordinary and the mental aerobatics needed to explain that thing in a way that fires something in the mind of your users is identical. When you try to do both, what you’ll find is that they start bleeding into each other.

That’s a very bad thing.

One of the biggest secrets to successful marketing is to market something that is genuinely extraordinary. The better the product, the less work you need to go through to get people to care. That’s why in the ages before the Internet the job of the marketer was always separated from that of the creative. The marketer’s job was to pick the best products available on the market. The creatives job was to do what they love, create great products and bring them to marketers to refine and distribute.

It was a balance of opposites. The marketer wanted something they could sell, the creative wanted something they could love. They would fight, bicker, and argue but eventually they would develop something that works.

These days many of us have taken up both roles. We build and we sell, trying to mix and match elements of both. If not carefully managed what we get is a product that has been compromised to the point of being neither extraordinary nor salable. By trying to build into our marketing or market into our building we drift towards the mediocre, the derivative. We end up with the worst elements of the creative/marketer relationship because most of us like ourselves far too much to have the hard arguments that make the relationship work.

The best entrepreneurs I’ve ever met separate their building from their marketing. They go into their caves to finish their projects, and only put on their marketing hats when they know that what they’ve built is ready for prime time. They separate the creative process from the selling process and give each the focused attention it deserves and require. They understand that they have limited energy to spend and that scattering it to the four corners will never produce their best work.

They understand that the marketers job is to sell extraordinary products and sometimes the best way to do that is to stop selling.

At least for a little while.

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