Why Your POV Is Probably Wrong About Everything

And yes, I’m talking to myself too.

There’s a quote that’s stuck with me for years.
You might know it from the film Under Siege 2, delivered with all the subtlety of a Steven Seagal movie:

“Assumption is the mother of all f*ck-ups.”

Crude? Yes.
Accurate? Painfully so.

I was reminded of this recently when I ran a small experiment that bruised my ego and challenged something I genuinely believed in.

The Experiment That Humbled Me

I’ve been preaching the gospel of authenticity for a while now.

Show your real self. Be raw. Be human. In a world increasingly flooded with AI-generated slop, the differentiator is YOU: imperfect, unpolished, genuine.
I believed this deeply. Still do, actually.

So when I started posting videos for my personal brand, I kept them intentionally amateur. Real me. Real voice. Real lighting (which is to say, questionable lighting). The assumption was clear: people are tired of fake, so real wins.

Then I tested the opposite. 😬
I created a few AI-generated videos using HeyGen… two AI avatars having a conversation. Fully synthetic. Obviously not real humans if you look closely.

The results?

My authentic, raw videos averaged around 200 views.
The AI-generated ones? 500 views. More than double.

Now, three videos aren’t statistically significant. I’m not drawing sweeping conclusions.
But it was enough to make me sit with an uncomfortable question:
What if my strongly held belief about authenticity is just… my belief? Not a universal truth?

We Confuse Conviction With Reality

This happens constantly in business.
We experience something a certain way (as a user, as a consumer, as a professional), and we assume the world works identically for everyone else.

It doesn’t.

I’ve spent over 30+ years in digital marketing. I’ve seen “best practices” crumble under the weight of actual data more times than I can count.

Image-heavy emails vs. HTML-formatted content. Every best practice guide tells you to balance images with proper HTML, use alt text, and keep things accessible and responsive. I’ve run campaigns where emails built entirely with images crushed the “properly formatted” versions. Same audience. Same offer. The “wrong” approach won. 🤦‍♂️

Responsive emails vs. static layouts. Mobile-first, they said. Responsive design is non-negotiable, they said. Then I tested static emails against responsive ones and watched the static versions outperform. Not once. Multiple times.

Every instinct, every piece of received wisdom, pointed in one direction.
The data pointed somewhere else entirely.

And Sometimes Your Gut Is Right

Here’s where it gets messy.

I’ve also had situations where everything looked perfect on paper. A business deal where the numbers aligned, the opportunity seemed golden, and every rational indicator said “go.”
But something felt off. A gut feeling I couldn’t articulate. I walked away.

Turned out to be the right call.

So what do we do with this? Data sometimes contradicts intuition. Intuition sometimes contradicts data. Neither is universally reliable.

The answer isn’t to trust one over the other, in case you’re asking yourself that.
The answer (at least for me) is to test both.

The Dangerous Comfort of Assumptions or POV

The real problem isn’t exactly being wrong. We’re all wrong constantly. 😅
The problem is not knowing we’re wrong because we never bothered to check.

We build entire strategies on assumptions we’ve never validated. We make decisions based on how we personally experience the world, forgetting that our experience is a sample size of one.

Your customers aren’t you.
Your audience isn’t you.
Your market isn’t you.

That thing you’re absolutely certain about? Test it.
That best practice everyone swears by? Test it.
That controversial approach you’d never try because it feels wrong? Especially test that one.

What I’m Doing Now

I’m keeping my raw, unpolished videos for my personal brand.
That’s a deliberate choice based on what I want to build: a human connection with people who value substance over polish.

But for sendXmail, where the entire proposition is AI-powered marketing automation?
I’m leaning into the AI-generated content experiment. It seems fitting. And more importantly, the early data suggest it works.

Will that hold? I don’t know. I’ll keep testing.
That’s the whole point.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Your POV is not universal. Mine isn’t either.

The sooner we accept this, the sooner we stop building castles on the foundations of assumptions.
The sooner we get comfortable being wrong, the faster we find what’s actually right.

Test your beliefs. Collect real data. Let the results humble you.

And when the data contradicts everything you thought you knew?
Good. Now you’re learning. 😉