What a monk, a real estate mogul, and a musician can teach us about marketing
I’ve spent the past four years asking people who broke the marketing rule book how they actually did it, and trying to figure out what we can learn. These are almost always CMOs, but every once in a while, I ask leaders and entrepreneurs who do not hold that title how they approach marketing.
A Zen teacher who runs a meditation center. A reggae musician carrying his father’s legacy while carving out his own. A real estate broker who turned open houses into a full-on media empire.
None of them set out to be marketing gurus, yet they all are.
Our industry spends most of its time optimizing funnels, segments, KPIs, and quarterly targets, and now what to do with AI to make it all happen faster and cheaper. I say this as someone who is building an artificial intelligence practice.
But after more than a hundred episodes of my podcast, the conversations that most rearranged my thinking came from three people who work in three unrelated fields, who each arrived at the same conclusion: A brand is character at scale. What you practice daily, in public, over years, compounds into what people believe about you. And character, it turns out, is built the same way everywhere—in a meditation hall, a recording booth, or a town car headed uptown.
The monk
Koshin Paley Ellison has spent decades sitting with the dying, which gives him an unfair advantage in knowing what actually matters. In his book Untangled, he traces a chain: Feelings become thoughts, thoughts become words and words become actions—and over time, your actions become your character. He wasn’t talking about brands. But I’ve never heard a better description of how one gets built. Not through what you proclaim in a manifesto. Through what you repeatedly do day in and day out.
When I asked him why successful people so often feel empty, his response was: “Many of us know what our values are. But how much of our day do we actually spend nourishing those things? Often it’s very little. We go for what’s easy. And going for what’s easy in the short term is fine, but in the long term it is devastating.”
Swap “we” for “brands” and he’s just described a common brand problem. Every brand can recite its values. Very few spend their days—or their budgets—nourishing them. The easy thing is the retargeting campaign, the discount, the engagement hack. The devastating thing is what a decade of easy does to a brand’s character.
The musician
Ziggy Marley told me something that would get most marketers fired: “I write songs for myself. I don’t write them for anybody else.” No audience research, no persona targeting, no test-and-learn. And yet look at his crowds: kids who just discovered reggae standing next to people who saw his father play. When your work is a true expression of your character, you don’t need to segment your audience. The audience finds the character.
But don’t mistake that for winging it. The discipline underneath is fanatical. For his album Brightside, he retuned every instrument to 432 Hz—a frequency he believes resonates differently with the body—and tested that on tour for a full year before entering the studio. He recorded 16 songs and released eight, because cramming more grooves onto vinyl degrades the sound, and he refused to trade quality for volume. That’s a character decision.
The real estate mogul
The broker proves character can be trained. Ryan Serhant got his real estate license and walked into the office on September 15, 2008—the morning Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. Twelve years later he launched his own company into the teeth of the COVID-19 pandemic. Twice he refused to be what Koshin, the monk, calls “acted upon by the world.” His explanation of the first big deal—a broke former soap actor picking up a client in a Macy’s suit and a town car he couldn’t afford—is practical leadership advice. “I can’t change my circumstances, but I can change my energy. And the energy will affect my outcome.” He closed that $2.3 million deal at midnight at the St. Regis, and he’s been closing and closing ever since.
Today, every salesperson at his company takes improv classes. Not sales training but improv. Confidence, in his world, is not a personality trait you hire for. It’s a rep you put in daily, the way athletes train. His mantra makes the whole philosophy clear: “Take care of the work, and the work will take care of you.” Focus on the money and it never shows up. Focus on the practice and it compounds.
The monk gave me this advice: “Earlier in my life I would have said, ‘I’m a rebel, I’m a lone wolf.’ I used to think that was really great,” Koshin told me. “And what I realized is that it was just nowhere. Learning how to commit for periods of time can be super helpful in beginning to change our patterns.” Commitment is a practice.
None of this showed up in a dashboard. Technology will keep transforming how we market and what we invest in. But the monk, the musician, and the mogul are evidence that the fundamentals of why people connect, believe, and belong really haven’t moved an inch. Audiences can’t be fooled about character for long, because character is the one thing you can’t A/B test your way into. You can only practice it, daily, until people believe and trust you or your brand.
The monk teaches that there are no shortcuts: Character is built the way practice is built daily, unglamorously, long after the manifesto is written. The musician teaches conviction: Make what you believe in, not what the testing tells you, and trust the audience to find it. The broker teaches energy: You can’t control the circumstances, only what you bring to them.
Take care of the character, and the character will take care of the brand.