Inbound

February 3, 2026

Best Practices Are Garbage: Jay Schwedelson’s Take on Marketing, AI, and Growth

For years, marketers have been told there’s a “right way” to do things.

Follow the best practices. Copy what worked before. Don’t deviate from the playbook.

At INBOUND 2025, Jay Schwedelson shared why so much of the advice marketers rely on today is outdated, misleading, or actively holding teams back. In his session Best Practices Are Garbage: In Marketing and Life, he challenged career clichés, questioned how we measure marketing impact, and reframed common fears around AI.

So how do we move past best practices and actually grow through change and constant pressure to perform? Read on for the top takeaways from Schwedelson’s INBOUND session.

Why Best Practices Break Down

Best practices are supposed to make things easier. But as Schwedelson pointed out, many of them were built for a version of marketing that no longer exists.

“Best practices… they’re literally a Jurassic Park of outdated ideas.” — Jay Schwedelson

Many of today’s “rules” come from an era of predictable funnels, stable channels, and slower change. Today, buyers move differently. Platforms evolve constantly. And what worked last year (or even last quarter) doesn’t always hold up.

The real issue is assuming that past success guarantees future results.

Do this: Treat best practices as hypotheses instead of rules. If something is widely accepted, make it a priority to test it against your own audience, channels, and data.

Rethinking Career Advice That Sounds Right but Falls Short

Schwedelson also zoomed out to talk about work more broadly, calling out career advice that sounds motivating but often creates unnecessary pressure.

“You don’t have to love your job. You have to not hate your job.” — Jay Schwedelson

The idea that fulfillment means loving every minute of work can quietly lead to burnout or self-doubt. Instead, Schwedelson pointed to more realistic markers of a good role: learning, growth, and working with people you respect.

He also addressed the pressure to always appear confident and certain: “The three most powerful words that you could have in your career: I don’t know.”

You’re not expected to be an expert at everything and honesty builds trust faster than pretending to have all the answers.

Do this: Measure career success by learning and momentum, not constant happiness. Normalize saying “I don’t know” and following it up with action.

AI Anxiety Misses the Real Opportunity

Few topics generate more noise than AI, and Schwedelson was quick to call out: “Nobody’s an AI expert.”

That realization alone takes some pressure off. Most people are learning in real time and the real difference is who’s willing to engage and experiment instead of waiting.

Schwedelson also shared that he gives AI extensive context ( from business challenges to personal preferences) so the outputs are actually useful. “The more you tell it, the more you get out of it,” he noted.

Do this: Use AI regularly, not perfectly. Give it more context than you think you need, and focus on learning through use.

Why Modern Marketing Is More Than Attribution

“Attribution is total and complete garbage,” Schwedelson declared.

Not because measurement doesn’t matter, but because buying decisions rarely hinge on a single email, ad, or post. Most influence happens gradually, across multiple moments and channels. “Marketing now,” he said, “is surround sound.”

Content, ideas, and brand impressions accumulate until someone is ready to act, which makes single-touch attribution and rigid benchmarks misleading at best.

Do this: Look for patterns and progress and track improvement against your own past performance. Measure whether your efforts are compounding over time and not just which click came last.

A More Useful Alternative to Best Practices

So if best practices aren’t the answer, what is?

“Anything that’s a best practice is literally the first thing that you should test.” — Jay Schwedelson

Instead of asking whether something aligns with conventional wisdom, ask whether it works for your audience and your brand.

What works for one company, market, or moment may not work for another and teams need to be willing to question and test even their most trusted rules.

Do this: Pick one rule your team follows without question and design a low-risk experiment to challenge it this quarter.

Takeaways

Many of the “best practices” marketers rely on were built for a different era. Career clichés, rigid attribution models, and fear-driven AI narratives often oversimplify how growth actually happens today. Instead of chasing rules or benchmarks, Schwedelson encouraged marketers to test more, be honest about what they don’t know, and focus on learning faster than the market.

Watch Jay Schwedelson’s full INBOUND 2025 session below.