Unorthodoxy

What do creativity, bell curves, the dying internet, and human nature have to do with sales and marketing? Challenging norms, Unorthodoxy: A Contrarian Marketer's Philosophy for Surviving the Dying Internet is a deeply contrarian book weaving together anecdotes on the mimetic nature of human creativity, the centralization of the internet, and the fallacy of bell curves to offer unique insights about what it takes to reach success in sales and marketing.

The internet has changed from a decentralized, diverse, and open arena with a high barrier to entry into a centralized, platform-focused, walled-garden silo where anybody in the world can compete. The only way to survive this shift is by focusing on the elements you can control, like your brand - and by making sure you're not blindly following the herd with proven strategies, industry benchmarks, or even best practices.

Unorthodoxy puts forth three (slightly misanthropic) main ideas:

• First, humans are not actually creative. We can only combine old things in new ways. As a wise man once said, man can not come up with a truly new monster.
• Second, evenly distributed bell curves do not practically exist in real life. Whether you're trying to quantify money, skills, morality, advertising, or agreeableness, thinking of things in terms of "averages" is incredibly misleading.
• And third, the internet is dying. To be more specific, the original distributed internet is gone, and a new monolithic centralized platform is taking its place.

About the Author

Gil Gildner co-founded Discosloth, a boutique paid search agency, and is the co-author of several marketing books. He lives with his family in the Ozarks and has visited over fifty countries. You can follow him on X @gilgildner.