If you need to be brutally honest when talking to yourself, you’d better be brutally honest when talking to others about your work. I don’t think it’s possible to craft slanted marketing messages about your “great progress” without closing your eyes to what’s actually happening. By contrast, if you Work with the garage door up and openly discuss the challenges you’re struggling with (aka Anti-marketing, you create a feedback loop which rewards skepticism and honesty. You make integrity a consistent part of your identity, rather than trying to wall it off from your marketing messages.

When speaking publicly, researchers and entrepreneurs alike tend to present the rosiest possible picture of their work. This often leads to harmful over-claiming (Pitching out corrupts within) and a less personal, more transactional relationship with others. An interesting antidote is to actively practice “anti-marketing”: to make a point of focusing publicly on the least rosy parts of one’s projects—what’s confusing, what’s frustrating, what’s not working.

if you Work with the garage door up and openly discuss the challenges you’re struggling with (aka Anti-marketing, after Michael Nielsen, you create a feedback loop which rewards skepticism and honesty. You make integrity a consistent part of your identity, rather than trying to wall it off from your marketing messages.