God's 200K/Year Bet

In an effort to build brand and pursue impulse buys, I used to spend between $14k and $16k a month on billboards along interstates 15 and 84. Invariably, when people learned I spent nearly $200,000 annually on those signs they'd all ask the same question - Do they work? My answer was always the same - "Yes, I just don't know which ones."  My $200k/year bet was that some unknown fraction of drivers would see, remember, and eventually buy. I wasn't good at isolating the signal from the noise, yet I kept the campaign running because the aggregate lift was real. Likely I was wrong about which lever moved the needle, but right that some lever does.

A close friend once shared that one of the fundamental tenants governing his life is this - "I live my life like I'm wrong about most things, I just don't know how wrong." The translation of which for me and my life is - "I live my life mostly ignorant, I just don't know how ignorant."

My friends rule is the same principle at the level of personal belief. He assumes a high error rate in his worldview, not out of paralysis, but to force continuous updating. The moment you pretend to know how you are wrong, you stop looking.

In 1920, the electron and freshly named proton were regarded as the ultimate atom of matter. The neutron's discovery in the 30's shattered that certainty, revealing nuclei; quarks arrived in the 1960's, and the Higgs boson materialized in 2012. Each breakthrough came because someone refused to close the book. Today the Standard Model crowns 17 point-like particles as "fundamental." History continues to whisper in someones ear, "keep looking," not because we're sure something lurks beyond, but because stopping guarantees we'll never know. The fuel isn't certainty of success; it's the refusal to let the "known" become calcified into the "knowable."

In the book of Ether (Covenant of Christ), the Lord spoke with the brother of Jared and chastened him for three hours for not continuing to pray. Not because he did not know the Lord but because there was more. They had lived by the sea for four years. Maybe after four years he assumed he'd arrived. Maybe fatigued by the effort it had taken to get this far they'd become comfortable in their present existence, knowing "more" would once again take tremendous effort. They weren't lost. They were settled. Comfortable. Assuming the journey's hardest legs were behind them. The rebuke wasn’t for not knowing--it was for not seeking.

So now, in my personal and spiritual life I continue to run the expensive experiment that I mostly can't fully explain. Billboards, Philosophies, Business models or spiritual guess work—The cost isn't waste. It's tuition. You pay to learn which parts are signal and which are noise. You pay to shrink the ignorance you finally admit you have.

The Lord's $200k/year bet is that some unknown fraction of seekers will see, remember, and eventually buy.

Stay allergic to certainty.

It's the only way to keep the book open.

Carry On

Signed

John The-Not-So-Beloved