Founders: You Won't Find Productivity Gurus Teaching This
Key Takeaways:
Stop listening to productivity gurus.
The flaws they say you have are strengths.
Silence, Observation, Procrastination… In boardrooms where velocity is worshipped, those words are anathema. But this way of thinking is our SOP: Silence, Observation, Procrastination. By following the path less taken, we've arrived at a repeatable way to raise the signal‑to‑noise ratio on ideas, helping them to perform in the market.
We think we're in pretty good company, too...
Take these three examples: Leonardo da Vinci, Miles Davis, Steve Jobs … each one of these creative geniuses followed their own blueprint using those same “career‑killing” habits modern productivity gurus love to shame: chronic procrastination, strategic silence, and obsessive observation.
Da Vinci let ideas over‑ripen in notebooks for years until the right question surfaced.
Davis treated silence like an instrument, holding the room until a single note meant more.
Jobs lingered over details — type, materials, gestures — watching how people actually behaved before he chose what to ship. Different centuries, different mediums, same “flaws.”
Here's how it works in a nutshell: Procrastination buys incubation; Silence makes space for truth to surface; Observation feeds non‑obvious inputs into briefs, pitches, and products. For startup founders and business leaders, the question isn’t whether you can afford to lean on your so-called flaws — it’s whether you can afford the cost of shipping loud, fast, and forgettable.
Stop Rushing, Start Watching
Most B2B marketing teams equate speed with success. Cranking out more blog posts, more ads, more stuff feels like progress. But in the attention economy, the loudest voice isn’t the one that wins ... it’s the sharpest.
When everyone is shouting, adding to the noise only makes it easier to ignore you. Counterintuitive as it sounds, slowing down and watching can be a competitive edge. What if procrastination, silence, and obsessive observation aren’t weaknesses at all, but creative superpowers that sharpen your work?
Consider the CEO of AI company Fathom, who proudly calls himself an “extreme procrastinator.” Rather than hurt his business, he says procrastination has been one of his greatest assets: “ruthless prioritization in disguise." In other words, waiting and watching can pay off. Let’s explore how strategic procrastination, purposeful silence, and intense observation can help cut through the noise and refine your marketing signal.
Procrastination: The Pause That Pays
Procrastination has a bad rap. Sure, mindlessly delaying work can be destructive – but strategic delay is different. It’s not laziness, it’s making space for clarity. How many rushed campaigns flop because they lacked resonance or a clear message? A rushed blog post that adds nothing new can burn brand equity. Sometimes, pressing “pause” means the idea has time to breathe, combine with others, and mature into something far more powerful.
Steve Jobs understood this. He was famously patient (some might say procrastinating) when making product decisions, waiting until a vision felt inevitable. As Wharton professor Adam Grant notes, Jobs would put off jumping into execution: “Time spent noodling on possibilities was time well spent letting more divergent ideas come to the table, instead of diving right in with the most obvious, familiar solution.”
That pause for divergent thinking often led to Apple’s hallmark simplicity and elegance. In fact, research suggests that procrastination can be a virtue for creativity. “Delaying task progress may have hidden benefits,” one study found, as moderate procrastination gives your mind a chance to incubate and connect ideas in the background. You’re not avoiding work; you’re tilling the soil for a more original idea to sprout.
Look at Leonardo da Vinci. The ultimate Renaissance procrastinator, he often left paintings unfinished for years. But his “delays” weren’t idle. During the 15 years he tinkered with the Mona Lisa, he was studying anatomy, physics of light, and nature ... then feeding those insights into his art. His procrastination was incredibly productive. One biographer noted da Vinci’s countless notebooks where he’d obsessively sketch muscles, flowing water, bird wings — an endless catalog of observations. When he finally returned to painting, those details made his work revolutionary. The Mona Lisa’s mysterious smile, for example, owes much to Leonardo’s prolonged study of optics and human anatomy before he felt ready to finish the piece.
The Method to the Madness: If you procrastinate, you might recognize some of these patterns. Looming deadlines can actually sharpen focus – the pressure forces you to strip an idea to its essence and ditch the fluff. That’s why many creators say they do their best work right before the due date. Also, stepping away from a project can trigger incubation: your subconscious mind keeps working on the problem, making connections when you’re in the shower or on a walk. (Psychologists note that an incomplete task stays active in our minds, inviting creative solutions until it’s solved.) Perfectionism plays a role too. Some delays aren’t avoidance at all, but the drive to get it right. As Adam Grant puts it, you “can’t rush creativity” … sometimes you’re waiting until the concept feels worthy of execution.
Crucially, great procrastinators often develop rituals to channel their “slacker” tendencies. Novelist Victor Hugo literally trapped himself into writing by giving his servants his clothes. He knew if he could wander outside, he would procrastinate, so he eliminated the option (yes, he wrote naked under a large shawl until he finished a chapter). Steve Jobs would take long walks, a form of active procrastination where the stroll cleared his mind and sparked new ideas. And da Vinci’s obsessive note-taking was a way to turn procrastination into structured discovery. He wasn’t not working on the painting; he was gathering raw material to eventually make it better. In short, there’s often a disciplined method beneath the apparent “madness” of procrastination.
Silence: The Loudest Move in the Attention Economy
In a market drowning in content and chatter, sometimes the boldest thing you can do is stay quiet. Noise is the default now … every brand posting 10 times a day, every minor update spun into a press release. But silence? Silence is unexpected. Silence makes people wonder if you’re cooking up something big. Restraint can actually cut deeper than shouting. As jazz legend Miles Davis said about music, “It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play.” The same applies to brand communication: by not playing every note, you leave room for impact when you do make a sound.
Strategic silence builds anticipation. Think about Apple’s pre-launch secrecy and minimalist teasers. By saying nothing until they have something major to announce, they ensure that when Tim Cook finally walks on stage, the world is at full attention. In B2B marketing, a little silence can signal confidence.
Instead of flooding LinkedIn with mediocre “hot takes” or churning out weekly whitepapers that say nothing new, consider saying less but with more substance. Fewer, sharper assets can command more attention than a high volume of noisy content. In fact, marketing leaders in 2025 report that in a world of infinite content, quality and clarity are what break through – “standing out requires more than volume.” When you publish only the truly valuable pieces, your audience perks up because it’s scarce. People start to think, “If they’re saying something now, it must really matter.”
Silence also lets your audience fill the gap with their own curiosity. It’s the psychology of scarcity: we always want what’s in short supply. The streetwear brand Supreme mastered this. They never advertise in the traditional sense; they don’t hype their products in advance. Instead, they drop new items with zero fanfare – sometimes literally with secret, unannounced “drops” – and let the scarcity + mystery drive fans into a frenzy. No tweets saying “New collection coming!”; it just appears, and the silence beforehand amplifies the hype. Supreme’s word-of-mouth and secrecy have been so effective that every product sells out within minutes without the brand having to say a word. They proved that in an age of noise, quiet exclusivity builds obsession.
Or consider film studio A24. They often use sparse, understated marketing for their movies, sometimes leaning on cryptic trailers or simple posters that reveal little. This deliberate quietness lets word-of-mouth and audience speculation do the work. By “leaving a sense of mystery and intrigue,” A24 compels viewers to actively engage and create buzz on their own. Fans lean in harder because the studio isn’t spoon-feeding every plot point in a loud ad campaign. A24 then builds cult followings for films with a fraction of the promotional noise big studios make.
In practical terms, embracing silence might mean not commenting on every industry trend (especially if you have nothing unique to add). It might mean holding back, choosing to speak only when a sharp angle or insightful data point bubbles up in your mind. That contrast – quiet most of the time, loud when it counts – can make your brand voice more authoritative and credible. Remember, being the signal in a sea of noise sometimes means not broadcasting 24/7.
Intense Observation: The Hidden Edge
Creativity isn't always about action; often it's about observation. If you research some notable products or campaigns, you'll soon realize they're not simply dreamed up on a whim but are born from painstaking insight into the world and the behavior of consumers.
The trick is to observe objectively, rather than trust assumptions or even what customers may say they want. (Often, customers don’t do what they say they’ll do – there’s a well-known “say–do gap” where survey answers and real behavior diverge. Only by observing real behavior can you catch what truly resonates.)
Take James Dyson, for example. He didn’t invent the bagless vacuum on a hunch – the idea was incubated as he obsessed over how vacuums failed. Dyson noticed a local sawmill that used cyclone technology to separate dust from air and wondered if the same principle could fix vacuum cleaners constantly losing suction. That acute observation led to a five-year quest of 5,127 prototypes until he finally perfected the first Dyson vacuum. Over five thousand trials! That’s the power of intense observation wedded to persistence – literally reinventing an industry by deeply understanding the problem first.
In marketing, your equivalent might be pouring over how users navigate your app, where prospects really come from (as opposed to what the sales team thinks), or watching how a piece of content actually performs instead of just how you felt about it. It’s analyzing which blog post visitors dwell on vs. bounce, reading live chat transcripts to catch the exact words customers use (and then mirroring that language), or noticing an emerging need before anyone says it outright. Great editors and creative directors are like detectives and painters: they zoom in on every tiny detail (every “brushstroke”) and ask why it’s there, then zoom out to see if the whole picture makes sense. This level of observation can turn a decent campaign into a razor-sharp one.
History’s innovators were master observers. Leonardo da Vinci (yes, him again) filled thousands of pages with notes and sketches on anatomy, physics, architecture – essentially creating a personal encyclopedia of the world. He would spend months observing the subtle curl of a smile or the way light falls on a face. When he painted The Last Supper, he gave each apostle a distinct expression and gesture drawn from real life. A contemporary analysis notes that Leonardo’s studies of human emotion and facial expression enabled the lifelike drama we see on that mural – it set his work apart from predecessors who painted static poses. His art was groundbreaking not because he imagined better, but because he observed better.
On the literary side, writer Joan Didion carried a notebook at all times, capturing slices of life wherever she went, such as “dialogue overheard in hotels and elevators and at the hat-check counter…”. It was the minute details of strangers and atmospheres that struck her. Her essays are revered for their almost microscopic observation of American life and culture. That’s no accident; they’re built on years of jotting down the real-world snippets most of us overlook. Didion herself said she keeps notes to remember “how it felt” to be her in certain moments – an archive of observations she can draw on when writing. It’s a practice any content creator or strategist can learn from: archive what you observe, and later you’ll have a treasure trove of real, resonant details to make your content richer.
Even in the data-driven world of finance, observation is king. Warren Buffett famously spends 80% of his day reading and thinking, just quietly soaking in information He attributes his ability to make swift, high-stakes investment decisions to the fact that he’s spent so much time preparing by studying the markets and companies in silence. In his words, his job is “just corralling more and more facts and information, and occasionally seeing whether that leads to some action.” He’s not frantically trading or reacting every minute; he’s watching, digesting, and only acting when his accumulated observations indicate it’s time. As growth leaders, we can take a page from that playbook: spend more time listening, reading, and observing your market than blindly “doing marketing.” When you truly know your audience and landscape, the opportunities for breakthrough ideas become obvious.
Want more counterintuitive strategies to cut through the noise? Let’s talk. Connect with Skellator today and schedule a meeting to discuss your business and what we can do for your business and brand with our unique approach to marketing and content.
