It’s true… but it’s really a HALF truth.

If you’re paying attention, this 2 minute article will save you about a year of frustration.

If you completely believe everything’s always changing and you MUST keep up with it, you’ll be in a perpetual state of overwhelm and you’ll hardly ever manage to get anything done. Every time somebody says “jump” you’ll jump. You’ll think that the latest, coolest, bright shiny object is the Secret Of Everything.

The symptom is, 2 months after every single product launch you’re 2 months further behind in having a business that actually works.

Here’s the real truth:

90% of what’s ‘new and different’ is completely irrelevant. A waste of your precious time.

Only 10% of it is ever going to make a difference for you at all.

Case in point: From the standpoint of actually selling something to somebody, there’s only been about a dozen major developments in online marketing since the late 1990′s:

-Autoresponders
-Online Auctions
-Shopping Carts
-Paypal
-Pay Per Click
-Contextual Advertising ie Content Network
-Streaming Audio & Video
-Social Networking ie Facebook and Twitter
-Blog software
-Live Chat
-Crowdsourcing

In other words there’s about one major development per year. Not 100!

Sure, within all these things there are other smaller major developments. But my motto is, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” Which is not some kind of cynical statement, it’s a massive time saver.

You may have noticed, I rarely jump up and down and yell at you about how something urgently needs your attention RIGHT NOW. That’s because success comes from mastering the basics, not from widespread panic.

When I do tell you something’s important, it’s well worth your time to sit up and pay attention.

I see the world like this: The surface is always changing but the really important stuff stays roughly the same. As you master the core principles, you quickly see how to apply them when something new comes along.

In other words:

When you can immediately recognize what part of the “brand new whiz-bang thing” is NOT new, that’s when you possess the ability to profit from it.

When Google AdWords was brand new, I immediately knew it was “Scientific Advertising” from 1918 all over again, only 10,000X faster. I knew the money was going to be made by being scientific about it. And by entering the conversation inside the person’s head.

When Facebook advertising was brand new, I immediately knew that it was just like the classified ads in “Black Belt” magazine: If you know somebody is a black belt, there’s a whole list of other things they’ll buy that don’t appear to have anything to do with Martial Arts. That’s Right Angle Marketing. What was old is new again.

I can absolutely promise you, in the next few years new innovations will come that are currently unimagined. Billion dollar empires will emerge from seemingly nowhere.

When they do, massive mobs of people will be yelling and shouting at you, urging you to pile on the bandwagon. But you will find that the hypesters don’t know how to use what’s new because they never understood what worked before.

The Social Media hype is starting to fade now. Which is precisely when real business people start to make real money from it.

One of the “rats” in our Facebook advertising research lab is a guy named Bill. Bill does NOT want me to disclose his full identity, so I have to keep him anonymous. We guided Bill as he built out his Facebook campaigns.

In the last 2 months he’s put $12,000 into Facebook ads and gotten $48,000 out.

Quietly. With no hype or fanfare.

Just skillfully applying the basics and adapting the old to the new.

I invite you to consider that when you learn from the masters . . . when you practice your craft like a master . . . then instead of being the frenetic Red Belt, you can be the serene, utterly confident, unflappable, 4th degree Black Belt.

You can be the champion who calmly and quietly steps onto the mat and demolishes his opponent with three lightning-speed strikes without so much as breaking a sweat.

Master the basics. Become a marketing black belt. Find the old within the new, and discover how to function in an entirely new level of serenity and confidence.

Perry Marshall