Five Ways to Disrupt Yourself: The Fight for Relevance

Most marketers are asleep … and they don’t even know they’re asleep. This is probably a natural human state — homeostasis. We tend to want to maintain our habits and the status quo. Who wants to disrupt yourself?

But if you’re a marketing professional, there is no status quo. To succeed today, you must be a change junkie, and that means fighting hard for personal relevance. You have to disrupt yourself.

Sound strange? Perhaps. But embracing chaos is also an essential life strategy for a marketer today.

I think a key to my long-term success is that I have been in a constant state of professional reinvention. Here are five ways I’ve learned to disrupt myself.

1. Disrupt yourself by teaching

I’ve found that teaching a class — especially at the grad school level — is an energizing challenge and a mandate to stay relevant.

The students I interact with at Rutgers University, mostly mid-to-senior-level marketing leaders from large companies, are incredibly challenging. If it’s a current marketing topic, I am bound to have a question about it in class. There is a strong symbiotic relationship between teaching, content creation, and consulting that is keeping me at the top of my game.