Never Change Your Swing: Pete Rose's Slump Advice Is a Personal Branding Strategy

Me Gustan Los Deportes · Pete Rose on getting out of a slump

Short answer: building a personal brand means saying the same few things a thousand different ways, and most of those ways will miss. Pete Rose's advice for a hitter in a slump is the plan for that. Leave the swing alone, because the swing got you to the big leagues. Change only where you stand in the box. For a personal brand, the swing is your foundation: a few core themes and the beliefs under them, settled once, from first principles. The stance is everything about how you say them: the hook, the angle, the example, the format, the time you post. Marketing results are also fat-tailed, in Rory Sutherland's phrase, which means a few attempts return most of the value. The way to find those few is many varied attempts with a steady swing.

The clip above is about two minutes long and worth watching first. The quotes below are Rose's own words, trimmed from the clip's captions; [slump] marks where the captions misheard him. The commentary is this post's reading. In the clip Rose never mentions marketing.

Never admit you're in a slump

Rose opens with a rule about the word itself:

"When you get into a [slump] you never admit you're in a [slump]. Don't ever let a pitcher tell you you're in a [slump]."

(Pete Rose, 00:14)

A slump is a label, and Rose's first instruction is to refuse it, above all when the pitcher is the one applying it.

A personal brand has two kinds of slump. The first comes after a start: content that used to land stops landing. The second comes before anything lands at all. Someone new to publishing makes a piece, puts real time into it, watches it go nowhere, and feels foolish for having posted it. Brand strategist Erica Mallett calls that climb cringe mountain, and her point is that it is the normal route, not a sign of failure:

"everyone who is now cool or good at something has had to climb a cringe mountain. And I think we need to normalize this because people think that they should be good at something from the jump."

(Erica Mallett, The 505 Podcast, 18:10)

Her fix is a reframe Rose would recognise: "it's all just practice" (19:50). A practice swing cannot be a slump. In both slumps the pitcher is whoever hands over the verdict: a post that flopped, a follower count that sat still, a friend's raised eyebrow. A bad run is a result. It is not a verdict, and refusing the verdict is what keeps the at-bats coming. That is the whole case for consistency.

Rory Sutherland makes the same point from the marketing side:

"marketing is fat tailed in that 10% of what you do probably delivers 120% of the value and therefore judging it on a day-by-day granular level is a totally mistaken approach to marketing"

(Rory Sutherland, We Have a Meeting Podcast, 45:31)

The 10% and the 120% are his illustration, not a measurement. The claim underneath is the useful part: if most of the value arrives in a few attempts, the stretch between them will often look like a slump, and a slump verdict is the wrong tool for reading it.

Change your position, never your swing

His fix is a short list of small moves: stand closer to the plate or farther from it, move up in the box or back, choke up on the bat or down, swing a heavier bat or a lighter one. Every move changes where he stands. None of them changes how he swings:

"Never change your swing. Your swing got you to the big leagues."

(Pete Rose, 00:37)

This is the whole structure. Two things sit on opposite sides of a line.

The swing is your brand foundation. It is the inner work: what you are about, what you care about, what you would still be talking about in five years. Mallett gives it a shape. Pick three themes, the big recurring ideas you play with. Write three beliefs under each. That makes nine:

"your job as a creator is to find a thousand different ways to say the same nine things. You are just communicating your beliefs over and over again. And that is literally what building a brand is about."

(Erica Mallett, The 505 Podcast, 12:53)

Asked whether a creator's themes change as they grow, she answers the way Rose would: "often your themes won't change but your beliefs might," and "the way you go about those themes is often what changes" (49:21). The swing holds. The approach moves.

The stance is how you say it. Rose lists positions, and none of them touches the swing. Here is one way to carry each across. It is a reading, not Rose's list, and anything else that leaves the message alone belongs on it too.

And beyond the table: a different hook, a different first three seconds, a different example, a different order, a different time of day. Or a different need in the viewer. One version of an idea speaks to the person afraid of missing out, or worn out by how complicated it all is. Another speaks to the person who is already moving and wants the next step. Same belief, different pitch.

There is a catch on the foundation side. A swing too narrow leaves no room to move. If the themes are so tight that every piece has to look the same, there is no choking up, no stepping back, and so no way to take a different at-bat and learn from it. Settle the foundation, but make it a base layer you can build many things on, not a script.

The common mistake runs the other way: the stance stays fixed and the swing changes. The last post flopped, so the next one gets a new topic, a new voice, a new identity. That throws away the only thing with evidence behind it. It also makes the next result unreadable, because two things moved at once and nobody can say which one mattered. Mallett's version of the same warning is that building a brand means "finding a thousand different ways to say the same things rather than a thousand different things" (15:45).

There is a second reason to hold the swing steady. Sutherland puts the source of marketing's value like this:

"the real value of marketing isn't what you do day-to-day. It's the fact that every sort of 6 months or a year or every 18 months you stumble on something which is of disproportionate and enduring value."

(Rory Sutherland, Chris Donnelly Podcast, 03:06)

A discovery has to be made by something. Rewrite the swing after every miss and there is nothing steady enough to get lucky with.

Read the pattern, then move toward it

Pitchers keep a chart on every hitter, Rose explains, so a hitter should keep one on himself. If a pitch keeps beating him, he moves to meet it. If they keep crowding him, he steps away. The moves come from the pattern, not from a hunch:

"You're going to develop a pattern, and you make your adjustments based on the pattern."

(Pete Rose, 01:08)

Each of Rose's moves answers a specific way pitchers are getting him out, and the pattern comes from many at-bats, not the last one.

A piece of content has its own scoreboard, and it runs in order:

1. Showing up. The piece is seen at all: impressions.
2. Contact. Someone stops for the first three to five seconds instead of scrolling past.
3. Staying. They keep watching or reading: retention.
4. Value. It was worth enough to save, share or comment on.
5. The home run. Those signals tell the platform people want this, and it shows the piece to more and more people. That is all organic virality is: a distribution system deciding something is a winner.

Each rung is a different place a piece can miss: a clean miss, a foul ball, contact that does not carry. Your numbers are the chart. They show where each piece fell off and which positions got further up the ladder.

A chart needs a sample. One post tells you almost nothing, and reading it closely just produces confident guesses. That is why volume matters, and volume is only possible with a settled swing: when you know what you are saying, a new way to say it is cheap, so you can afford many at-bats. Two rules fall out of it. Change one thing at a time, so the chart can answer. And read the chart across a run of attempts, not the latest.

Same swing, different result

Rose ends by showing how one swing sends the ball to different parts of the field:

"I can have the same swing ... Just a difference in where my hands are. Same swing."

(Pete Rose, 01:50)

One mechanism, three different outcomes, and the only variable is where the hands are. Over enough at-bats that turns into judgement. A creator who has watched a hundred versions of the same nine beliefs land and miss starts to know which approach sends the ball where: this angle holds attention, that format gets shared, this topic works best framed as a problem and that one as an opportunity. That knowledge only exists on the far side of the volume.

This post is one example. Pete Rose is one way into the idea of a steady core with a moving delivery. It may not be the way that connects. The next version could open on a different story, put the baseball later, or drop it for another example altogether. The foundation is what makes that kind of testing calm instead of desperate: the point stays fixed, so every version is a fair test of the delivery.

Here the analogy needs care, because baseball is not fat-tailed. A hit is worth at most four bases, so no single at-bat can outweigh a season, and a good hitter's results settle around an average. A post has no such ceiling. Sutherland's description of the other kind of distribution:

"A thin tail distribution, you can discount the outliers because they're rare and don't make that much difference. In a fat tail distribution, it's the outliers that carry most of the freight."

(Rory Sutherland, Chris Donnelly Podcast, 69:27)

That is why Rose's discipline is a good habit in baseball and the central strategy in marketing. When a few attempts carry most of the value, stopping early costs far more than it does in a game with capped outcomes, and so does swapping the swing for one that looks safer. The at-bats are cheap. The outlier is not.

What to do with this

1. Find your swing. Three themes you could talk about for five years, three beliefs under each. Write them down.
2. Take ten at-bats. Ten pieces, each saying one of those beliefs.
3. Move one thing per piece. The hook, the example, the format, the need it speaks to, the time it goes out.
4. Chart it. For each piece, note what you moved and how far up the scoreboard it got.
5. After ten, keep the stance that went furthest, and keep the swing.

If a piece misses, it was one at-bat. If it felt cringe, that is the climb.

Sources

• Pete Rose, "Pete Rose talks about slump's (2016)", uploaded by Me Gustan Los Deportes: youtu.be/0JVK2Yukniw. Quotes from the video's automatic captions.
• Erica Mallett, "How to Make Your Brand So Magnetic They Stop Scrolling", The 505 Podcast: youtu.be/aN02fSGO2TU.
• Rory Sutherland, "Brand New: The Best Rory Sutherland Interview You'll Ever Watch (4K)", We Have a Meeting Podcast: youtu.be/B8F2f7Yu42E.
• Rory Sutherland, "Psychology Hacks of the World's Best Advertisers", Chris Donnelly Podcast: youtu.be/r3WEezRssRw.