I Didn't Mean To Learn Marketing
A while back, when I was still job hunting, building mini-projects, and trying to figure out what I wanted my future to look like, I became obsessed with a weird question.
"How does someone build the next Apple?"
Or Tesla.
Or Nintendo.
Or Microsoft.
You get the point.
Because when you're younger, companies feel almost magical.
You see the products.
The launches.
The technology.
The cool presentations.
The success.
And it's easy to assume that great companies are simply built by great engineers.
Which, to be fair, is partially true.
But the more I looked into it, the more that explanation felt incomplete.
If engineering alone was enough, every team full of brilliant engineers would've accidentally built the next Apple by now.
Clearly something else was happening.
And that realization sent me down a rabbit hole.
At first, I started looking at businesses the same way I look at software systems.
Instead of seeing "a company", I started seeing components.
Engineering. Product. Finance. Operations. Sales. Marketing.
And then a question appeared:
What do these people actually do all day?
Without all the corporate buzzwords.
Without the LinkedIn jargon.
Because from the outside, most of them felt like black boxes.
Engineering was easy.
I was already living inside that box.
Marketing, however, kept pulling my attention.
Just because it felt interesting.
Every company seemed to have it.
Every successful business seemed to depend on it.
And I couldn't quite put my finger on why.
And then, almost comically, a connection I'd made a while back reached out and said:
"If your N3 result comes through, we might have something for you."
Fast forward a little.
N3 went well.
And suddenly I found myself working part-time in a marketing role.
I thought I was about to learn campaigns.
Ads.
Growth hacks.
Social media tricks.
The usual marketing stuff.
Instead, I ended up learning something completely different.
The weird part is that I thought I was studying marketing.
Looking back, I think I was actually studying people.
Why do some ideas spread?
Why do some products get ignored?
Why do some communities grow while others disappear?
Why do some people seem to attract opportunities wherever they go?
And perhaps the question that still bothers me the most:
Why do some genuinely valuable things fail?
Because if value alone determined success, the world would look very different.
Google Glass was technologically fascinating.
Kodak literally helped invent digital photography and still lost the race.
Sometimes being good isn't enough.
Sometimes being first isn't enough.
Sometimes being right isn't enough.
Which is both terrifying and fascinating.
Because somewhere in the middle, people have to understand the value too.
The funny thing is that while I was asking these questions, I realized I had already been doing marketing myself.
I just didn't call it that.
When I was looking for jobs, I wasn't simply applying.
I was trying to stand out.
The bilingual portfolio. The mascots. The animations. The blogs. The projects. The Japanese learning journey. The weird mix of things that made me... me.
I thought I was just being creative. But I was also trying to communicate something.
Not just what I could do. But who I was.
And surprisingly, that mattered.
Then came the part I didn't expect.
Negotiation.
Positioning.
Understanding incentives.
Communicating value.
Finding situations where everyone wins. Or at least where everyone leaves reasonably happy.
One lesson hit me particularly hard.
I used to think professionalism meant being agreeable.
Turns out those aren't always the same thing.
One time, after terms had already been discussed and agreed upon, an influencer came back wanting to re-negotiate.
Past me didn't say "no" outright. I did communicate our side and the agreed terms. The problem was how I communicated it.
I was so focused on being polite and professional that I came across as too accommodating. My manager pulled me aside and basically said:
"You need to stop being so mellow. Otherwise people won't take you seriously either."
At first I didn't like hearing that. But the more conversations I had, the more it made sense.
Being respectful doesn't mean being vague. Being professional doesn't mean avoiding firmness. If you don't clearly define the value you're creating and the boundaries around it, other people will eventually redefine them for you.
And chances are they'll define it in a way that benefits them more than you.
The thing that surprised me most wasn't that marketing was useful.
It was how similar it felt to engineering.
Both are ultimately communication problems.
In engineering:
You take requirements and turn them into software.
In marketing:
You take value and turn it into understanding.
Both fail when assumptions replace communication.
Both require empathy. Both require clarity.
And both are giant optimization problems.
You're constantly adjusting variables, testing assumptions, collecting feedback, and hoping the outcome moves a little closer to what you envisioned.
Even though the tools are different.
The thinking feels surprisingly similar.
The deeper I go into my career, the more I keep running into the same realization.
Freelancing wasn't just coding.
Corporate isn't just work.
Learning Japanese isn't just vocabulary and grammar.
And marketing isn't just marketing.
Everything seems to have an invisible layer underneath it.
A layer made up of people.
Expectations.
Trust.
Communication.
Motivation.
Incentives.
And somehow that layer ends up mattering just as much as the technical one.
Sometimes more.
I still wouldn't call myself a marketer.
I'm just a regular curious engineer who wandered into another department and started asking questions.
But I'm glad I did.
Because I originally started looking into marketing to understand how great companies are built.
Instead, I ended up understanding people a little better.
And that might've been the more useful lesson.
Of course the journey continues beyond this as well.
Because every time I learn something new, it feels like I discover three more things I don't understand yet.
And somehow that's becoming my favorite part.
What's something you started learning because you thought it would help your career...
...but ended up changing the way you think altogether?
Maybe it was psychology.
Maybe design.
Maybe public speaking.
Maybe sales.
Or maybe you accidentally wandered into a completely different field and found lessons you never expected.
I'd love to hear about it.