I almost never go to the beach Thursday through Sunday. Thursday night is already the weekend, and on the weekends people apparently look at the ocean and decide it needs an enormous speaker. DJ booths appear. Industrial-sized speakers appear. Music blasts across the sand, and then everyone mostly just sits there staring at the water. It's chaos, and I've made my peace with skipping it. The other thing I learned this summer is never to sit between two lifeguard stations. I made that mistake once, and it wasn't long before I was online shopping for industrial-grade ear protection just so I could read my book over the CONSTANT FUCKING WHISTLES. Here's how it goes. Someone swims out too far, and the whistle blows. They head back toward shore. Thirty seconds later they're out too far again, and the whistle blows again. They head back in. Thirty more seconds go by, and you already know what happens next. Nobody forgot what the whistle meant. Nobody needed the lifeguard to climb down and explain the rule a second time. They drifted. After 6pm, the lifeguards go home and the Parks employees take over. They patrol the beach on four-wheelers, whistling and yelling at anyone still swimming. People get out. The four-wheeler moves on. Everyone figures they've probably got about twenty minutes, so they get right back in the water. Eventually, you hear the whistle again. What clicked for me Watching this all summer made something click about my own work. For years, I'd finish a project with a client and think, I already created your messaging strategy. I gave you the language. I made it as easy to use as I possibly could. JUST USE THE DAMN STRATEGY YOU PAID FOR. I forgot one important variable, which is that I work with humans, and humans drift. Drifting isn't forgetting When the message that used to bring in clients stops showing up in your marketing, it's tempting to treat it like a knowledge problem. You assume you need a better strategy, a new angle, or someone smarter to tell you something you don't know yet. Most of the time, you already know. You know what you're selling, who needs it, and the language that makes them buy. You could probably recite it if someone woke you up at 3am. You just aren't using it anymore. That's drift. You get bored of saying the same thing. You add a new offer, then another one. You hear something on a podcast. You open AI with one idea and it hands you seventeen more. None of those moves feel like leaving. Each one feels like a small, reasonable step, the same way nobody in the water decides to swim out past the line. They just keep swimming, and the shore gets a little farther away every time they look up. Why it's happening faster now People have always drifted. What's changed is how little it costs. A shower idea used to need days of work before it turned into anything, and most of them quietly died along the way. Now you can be three hours into a brand new positioning strategy because something occurred to you in the shower, and AI will be right there cheering you on the whole time. AI didn't create the drift. It removed the friction that used to slow it down. The whistle is the job The lifeguard on that beach isn't teaching anybody to swim. Everyone in the water already knows how. His job is noticing when someone has gone too far and calling them back before it turns into a problem. That's a bigger part of my work than I ever gave it credit for. Sometimes a business really does need a new message, because it's grown or the market has changed. Far more often, the message that already makes money is still sitting right there, and the work is getting back to it. So if your income has started swinging and you can't figure out why, or you're winning some clients and losing others with no pattern you can see, go back to what you were saying when it was working before you build anything new. There's a good chance you didn't outgrow it. You drifted. If you've drifted away from a message that used to bring in clients and you want help finding your way back, take a look at Language That Sells.
