Deeds Speak\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/h2>\n
Read Time: 6\u00a0Minutes<\/em><\/p>\n Hello<\/p>\n Before we dive into this week’s Digest, I have something to share with you that I care about deeply.\u00a0<\/p>\n Nobody hands you a manual for your own head. You get one for a car, a mortgage, a phone. For the thing running every decision you will ever make, you get nothing.<\/p>\n Therapy is the closest thing we have to that manual. That is exactly why I spent weeks going through the evidence behind it. People walk in trusting it completely, because what else is there?<\/p>\n I want you to walk in with your eyes open. That is the only reason I wrote this.<\/p>\n Everything I can prove about therapy \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n A note before this one. I write about positioning every week, usually from the outside of somebody else’s company. This week it’s mine. Where the whole thing started for me, and why I’ve never been able to put it down.<\/em><\/p>\n People decide what you are by watching what you do at your own expense. I learned that in 1993, in the back of a car, from a woman making just under a thousand dollars a month.<\/p>\n We came to Canada that year. My father kept his job in India as a journalist, so he’d visit us and fly back, visit and fly back. That went on for five years. The three of us lived in the basement of my uncle’s house, my dad’s elder brother, and part of my mother’s paycheque went to him as rent. She typed data entry at a baby photo studio. Everything we needed came out of what was left.<\/p>\n Once a week we went to McDonald’s, and I always ordered a double Big Mac and a large fries. This was the highlight of the week for my mom, my sister, and me.\u00a0On the way home, if the occasion arose, she’d point out the window at a police car and read the two words off the door.<\/p>\n Deeds Speak.<\/p>\n A sign put there for the public. A rule for how you’re meant to carry yourself. She’d say it to us the way parents say things they hope will outlast the drive. Be good. Don’t just say it. I don’t remember the road. I remember the two words.<\/p>\n What she had to work with<\/strong><\/p>\n I think about the position she was in, and I still don’t know how she managed it. New country. Basement in her brother-in-law’s house. Husband on another continent. A thousand dollars a month against rent, food, clothes, two kids. No money for anything extra and not much time to sit us down and explain the world.<\/p>\n What she had was a sign on a car and a drive home, so she used it. Same two words, week after week, a free public instruction somebody else had already put in front of us.<\/p>\n I’ve never asked her what she thought she was doing. My guess is she wanted two kids who could be trusted in a place that had no reason yet to trust us. Behave in a way that survives being watched. That was the whole curriculum.<\/p>\n Kids can’t check a claim. <\/strong><\/p>\n We have no way to test whether what an adult tells us is true. All we can do is watch whether they live it. That isn’t a folk observation. Infants imitate faces before they understand a single word, and Bandura’s work on observational learning showed children picking up behaviour from watching adults, with no instruction involved and no reward attached. The watching comes online years before the listening does.<\/p>\n So the lesson arrived by the same route it described. She said the words once a week. She walked 45 minutes each way (despite the Canadian winter) to the photo studio, paid my uncle, fed us, and held the household together while my father was on the other side of the world. The saying was small. The doing ran every day, in front of two children with nothing else to look at.<\/p>\n If she’d only said it, I’d have lost it by high school.<\/p>\n The part I missed for thirty years<\/strong><\/p>\n There’s more in that story than the sign, and I was too busy admiring the sign to see it. A thousand dollars a month. Partial rent. A basement. One double Big Mac and one large fries a week, split three ways.<\/p>\n Nobody in my family ever announced a strategy. My mother never sat us down and said we’re a serious household making a long bet on this country, and every dollar is going into that bet. The allocation said it. Every week, where we could see it.<\/p>\n We knew what our family valued because we could watch where the money went and where it wouldn’t go. The things we didn’t do told us more than any speech would have.<\/p>\n Profit & Loss<\/strong><\/p>\n I write now that a company’s P&L is the only positioning statement it has ever written. Where the money actually went. Who actually got hired. What the company actually refused to build. I’ve said it a dozen ways in a dozen rooms, and I always presented it as something I worked out from the outside, reading filings and hiring patterns. I worked it out in the back seat of a car on the way home from a drive-thru. It just took me until now to notice.<\/p>\n “Actions speak louder than words”<\/strong><\/em> gets read as an argument against marketing. Do good work and the market will find you. Build it, and they’ll come. Let the product speak. That reading has cost every company I’ve watched try it. A deed only speaks under two conditions. Somebody has to see it. And it has to have been expensive enough that a competitor couldn’t have faked it that morning.<\/p>\n My mother’s conduct spoke because my sister and I were in the room for all of it. Six days a week, no gaps, nothing staged. Two children and one adult in a small space is close to total observation.<\/p>\n A company gets nothing like that. The customer sees a sliver of what the business does, filtered through whoever answered the phone, and everything else happens where nobody is looking.<\/p>\n Which is why marketing has a job. The job is narrow. Take the deeds that already cost you something and make them visible to the people deciding about you. The moment it starts manufacturing belief where no costly deed sits underneath, the claim goes out and gets tested, and there’s nothing there to hold it.<\/p>\n My mother wasn’t telling me to stay quiet. She was teaching me how to tell which claims to believe. Look at what it cost the person saying it.<\/p>\n Why I’m still a student<\/strong><\/p>\n I posted a couple of days ago that fifteen years into this work I’ve never felt like an expert. Chemicals, logistics, sports teams, airlines, gelato, schools, politics, jewelry, luxury, multimillion-dollar deals inside a Big Four building. Every new industry made me smaller.<\/p>\n I understand now why that keeps happening. The rule hasn’t moved since 1993. People decide what you are by watching what you do at your own cost. My mother had it worked out on a thousand dollars a month.<\/p>\n What moves is the price. What counts as expensive in this market, to this buyer, this quarter. What cost the airline something was free for the gelato shop. What the jeweller’s customer read as commitment, the logistics buyer didn’t register at all. The reading is local, and it keeps shifting while you’re standing in the room.<\/p>\n An expert would have a template for that. I’ve never built one that survived contact with a second industry, and I’ve stopped trying. Thirty-three years later, I’m still working on two words my mother read off a car door, and I’ve never been sure whether it was the words that stuck or the woman saying them.<\/p>\n Make the AI CMO Yours<\/strong><\/p>\n Roughly 6,000 of you downloaded the AI CMO. A few wrote back with the same question. Can I get one that knows my company?<\/p>\n Yes. I’m opening a few slots.<\/p>\n The version you downloaded knows how marketing works. It has never watched your company do anything. It doesn’t know what you charge and why, what your last three launches taught you, which customers you said no to, or the words your team isn’t allowed to use. It has the rules and none of your record.<\/p>\n Everything above this line says one thing. What a company has actually done, at its own expense, is the only honest account of what it is. Your record is sitting in decks, briefs, pricing calls, research nobody read, and the doc that hasn’t been touched since 2024. That’s the material.<\/p>\n Here’s what we’ll do:<\/strong><\/p>\n Day 1: <\/strong>we get on a call. You tell me your situation in your own language, messy parts left in. You send me what you have \u2014 presentations, notes, screenshots, a baby elephant.\u00a0<\/p>\n Days 2 to 4:<\/strong> I build.<\/p>\n Day 5:<\/strong> you get a package your whole team installs in one click. Same thinking, your record underneath it. Every marketer working from one source of truth instead of 40 people writing 40 different versions of what your company does.<\/p>\n One thing straight. This ain’t no McKinsey deck. A package nobody opens is worth nothing, so on the call I’ll ask who on your team will use it and when. If the answer is fuzzy, I’ll say so, and we fix that before I build anything. I’d rather give the slot back than ship something that sits closed.<\/p>\n A few slots. Reply “CMO” and I’ll send the details.<\/p>\n Access 30+1 Positioning Reports<\/a><\/p>\n There are three ways to go deeper, depending on where you are.<\/p>\n 1. Read and follow.<\/strong>\u00a0 2. Use the systems.<\/strong>\u00a0 3. Work together.<\/strong>\u00a0 DIGEST<\/strong><\/p>\n Memo<\/em><\/a>\u00a0| Read previous digests<\/em><\/u><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u265b 28.07.2026 Deeds Speak\u00a0 Read Time: 6\u00a0Minutes Hello Before we dive into this week’s Digest, I have something to share with you that I care about deeply.\u00a0 Nobody hands you a manual for your own head. You get one for a car, a mortgage, a phone. 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<\/p>\n\nIf any of this was useful
\n<\/h3>\n
Everything I publish is free. The Gravity Reports, the Digest, the positioning frameworks \u2014 all of it is on the blog<\/a> and in your feed and inbox.
LinkedIn<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0X<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n
I\u2019ve built a set of diagnostics for founders and brand leaders who want to do this work on their own company. Start with the free Analyzer \u2014 it shows you the gap between what you think you sell and what customers actually buy, and tells you whether AI recommends you when buyers are searching in their language. If you want to go further, the Clarity Kit and Monopoly are built for the same diagnostic, at a deeper level.
Start with the free Analyzer<\/a><\/em>
CEO\u00a0Clarity Starter Kit<\/em><\/a>
Monopoly<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n
I take on a small number of advisory clients each year. These are founders and leadership teams who want an outside read on their position \u2014 the same method as the Gravity Reports, applied to their own company. If that\u2019s relevant, the best place to start is a conversation.\u00a0Better call Paul.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n