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.

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.

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