And Other Provocations, 2006–2012
PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in 2012 by Portfolio / Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Do You Zoom, Inc., 2012
Image: Istockphoto © 2011 Diane Labombarbe
All rights reserved
“Stop Stealing Dreams” was published as an ebook by the author. “The Future Is Arriving” appeared on The Domino Project website. The other selections appeared on the author’s website.
Photograph: Don Emmert / AFP / Getty Images
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ISBN: 978-0-67-092300-7
Foreword
Whatcha Gonna Do with That Duck?
INTRODUCTION: MAY 2004
NOW WAS ALWAYS A GOOD TIME TO START:
OPPORTUNITY. CHOOSING AND DOING. PICKING YOURSELF.
CARE MORE THAN THE COMPETITION:
RESPECT AND AUTHENTICITY.
TELLING STORIES AND SPREADING IDEAS:
MARKETING.
SUCCESS, FAILURE, AND THE SURE THING:
DOING THE WORK. RISK AND FEAR.
STANDING OUT AND FITTING IN:
BEING REMARKABLE.
NEW WORLD ORDER: CHANGE.
CONNECTION. TACTICS.
THE FUTURE IS ARRIVING: PUBLISHING. PAPER.
PLATFORMS AND GATEKEEPERS.
STOP STEALING DREAMS (WHAT IS SCHOOL FOR?)
ALSO BY SETH GODIN
The Icarus Deception
V Is for Vulnerable
Linchpin
Tribes
Meatball Sundae
All Marketers Are Liars
The Dip
Free Prize Inside
Purple Cow
Survival Is Not Enough
Unleashing the Ideavirus
Permission Marketing
Big Red Fez
The Big Moo (editor)
Small Is the New Big
Poke the Box
We Are All Weird
Find them all at sethgodin.com
For Helene, always
Thanks to Bernadette Jiwa and Niki Papadopoulos for the herculean task of culling six years’ worth of writing into this book. I couldn’t (and wouldn’t) have done it without you.
We’re surrounded by people who are busy getting their ducks in a row, waiting for just the right moment.
Getting your ducks in a row is a fine thing to do. But deciding what you are going to do with that duck is a far more important issue.
I don’t remember writing most of these posts.
I read them and I shake my head in agreement (most of the time). Sometimes I wonder what I was thinking at the time. But yes, I wrote them, every word, over the course of the last five or six years.
I’ve collected them in this handy set not because you can read them more easily during takeoff or landing, or in the tub or at the beach. No, I’ve collected them because there’s (still) something magical about the linear, permanent nature of a book. Even an ebook feels less evanescent than the disconnected, temporary nature of a blog post.
One of my creative heroes, Gary Larson, was generous enough to let us read the collected Far Side, thousands of brilliant little cartoons connected into permanent volumes. And the experience of reading them is different than the way he intended when he drew them. A cartoon or a blog post emailed to you now and then might break your stride or make you do a double take, but the relentless force of an entire book of them can have a genuine impact on you and those that you care to share with.
I guess that this is the real reason I collected these posts. So those that have been keeping up with the daily blog have a handy tool they can use to proselytize. Hand this to the heathen, see if you can get them to join the tribe.
Thanks for reading. Thanks for sharing. And most of all, thanks for doing difficult work.
Assume that:
Hard drive space is free.
Wifi-like connections are everywhere.
Connections speeds are 10 to 100 times faster.
Everyone has a digital camera.
Everyone carries a device that is sort of like a laptop, but cheap and tiny.
The number of new products introduced every day is five times greater than now.
Walmart’s sales are three times as big as they are now.
Any manufactured product that’s more than five years old in design sells at commodity pricing.
The retirement age will be five years higher than it is now.
Your current profession will either be gone or be totally different.
What then?
If I had to pick one piece of marketing advice to give you, that would be it.
Now.
Make something happen today, before you go home, before the end of the week. Launch that idea, post that post, run that ad, call that customer. Go to the edge, that edge you’ve been holding back from … and do it today. Without waiting for the committee or your boss or the market. Just go.
Actually, as you’ve probably guessed, the best time to start was last year. The second best time to start is right now.
The reason they teach biology before they teach chemistry in high school is that biology was invented first. Even though you need chemistry to do biology, but not vice versa.
The reason that you have a water bubbler in your office is that it used to be difficult to filter water effectively.
The reason that Blockbuster exists is that VCR tapes used to cost more than $100.
The reason that SUVs have a truck chassis is that the government regulates vehicles with a truck chassis differently.
The reason you have a front lawn is to demonstrate to your friends and neighbors how much time and energy you’re prepared to waste.
The reason the typewriter keyboard is in a weird order is that original typewriters jammed, and they needed to rearrange the letters to keep common letters far apart.
The reason we don’t have school in the summer is so our kids can help with farm work. Or because it’s too hot and there’s no air conditioning …
The reason there’s a toll on that bridge but not on that road is that there used to be a ferry on that river, and the ferryman needed to make a living.
The reason you go to a building to go to work every day is that steam or water power used to turn a giant winch-like structure that went right through the factory building. Every workman used that power to do his work. As factories got more sophisticated, it remained efficient to move the workers, not the stuff.
What’s your reason?
Some conventional wisdom says that you need to be first to win. People will point to eBay and Microsoft and Starbucks and the William Morris Agency and say, “if it’s a natural monopoly or a market where switching costs are high, the first person in, wins.”
This argument has been amplified lately by the high cost of building a name for yourself (it would just cost too much to build a brand bigger than Starbucks in a post-TV world) as well as the network effects of things like eBay and Hotmail.
Skeptics scream foul. They point out that not one of the examples I gave above was actually the first mover. There were plenty of others that came first, and, they argue, the fast follower won by learning from the mistakes of the innovator. They argue that innovation is overrated, and low costs and good service are the key.
I think both sides are wrong (and right) and the mistake is caused by the erroneous belief that there’s a market.
There isn’t a market.
There are a million markets. Markets of one, or markets of small groups, or markets of cohorts that communicate.
If you’re an eBay user, my guess is that eBay was the first auction site you used. If you use Windows, my guess is that you never used CPM. And if you are a Starbucks junkie, my guess is that you don’t live near a Peet’s.
What happens: the market often belongs to the first person who brings you the right story on the right day.
Yes, you must be first (and right) in that market or this market.
But that doesn’t mean you have to be first (and right) in the universe.
The market is splintering more than even some pundits predicted in 1998 (that would be me). Which means that the idea of monolithic marketing messages to monolithic markets makes no sense. The race is now to be the first mover in the micro-markets where attention matters.
Of course, those micro-markets are leaky. People don’t cooperate. They talk to each other. So pretty quickly, that splintered market coalesces into something bigger.
Most learning, especially most organizational learning, occurs through trial and error.
Error occurs whether you want it to or not. Error is difficult to avoid. It’s not clear that research or preparation have an enormous impact on error, especially marketing error. Error is clearly not in short supply.
Trial, on the other hand, is quite scarce, especially in some organizations. People mistakenly believe that one way to successfully avoid error is to avoid trial.
We need more trial.
One of my favorite conversations goes like this.
“Oh, by the way, I read your book, Purple Cow. I liked it a lot. I even underlined some paragraphs.”
“Thanks!” I say. Underlining is the goal of people in my line of work.
“I can imagine that it’s really helpful to a lot of people. Unfortunately, in my [business/organization/line of work], most of what you write about doesn’t really work.”
The reason it’s such a good conversation is that people in every possible line of work have managed to tell me that the ideas don’t apply to them, and that gives me a chance to ask them more details about what they do—and within a minute or two, we’re both jumping up and down, excited with the possibilities of how it does work in their line of work. Ministers, freelance photographers, real estate agents, middle managers, website marketers—doesn’t matter, it always seems to come down to one thing:
Say “no” to being average.
This morning, Bradley was explaining to me that it couldn’t work in his profession as a freelance writer. It seems that almost all the clients want average stuff. Which is no surprise, since average is, by definition, the stuff most people want. I asked, “Are there any writers in your field who you hate because they get paid way too much compared to your perception of the effort they put in and the talent they have?”
“Sure,” he said, feeling a little sheepish about being annoyed by their success.
“And how do they get those gigs?”
It’s because they stand for something. Because they are at the edges. Because if an editor wants a “Bob-Jones-type” article, she has to call Bob Jones for it … and pay Bob’s fees. Bob would fail if he did average work for average editors just to make a living. But by turning down the average stuff and insisting on standing for something on the edge, he profits. By challenging his clients to run stuff that makes them nervous (and then having them discover that it’s great), he profits.
This is scary. It’s really scary to turn down most (the average) of what comes your way and hold out for the remarkable opportunities. Scary to quit your job at an average company doing average work just because you know that if you stay, you’ll end up just like them. Scary to go way out on an edge and intentionally make what you do unattractive to some.
Which is why it’s such a great opportunity.
What happens when your inbox is empty?
What happens when all the agenda items and all the incoming emails are cleared?
Time to go home.
A job well done. Congratulations, you earned your paycheck.
This is the factory mindset that has been drilled into us since kindergarten. You get assignments, you do your best, and you finish them.
It is at this point that we draw the line between workers and entrepreneurs, between people who work in marketing and marketers.
The challenge is NOT to empty your inbox. The challenge is not to get your boss to tell you what to do.
The challenge is to ask a two-part question:
What next? What now?
Asking is the hard part.
Let’s say you’ve got a really good idea. And you’ve had good ideas before.
You show it to your colleagues. They analyze it. They tell you why it’s not a good idea.
Hmmm.
Do you go with your instinct? Is your gut reaction to be trusted? After all, you’ve been right before. After all, you’ve been wrong before.
The analysis, based on past events, certainly seems sound. But following your instincts is the only way you’re going to do something unsound.
And unsound things become hits. Sound ones never do.
Who Moved My Cheese? was unsound. So was publishing a book two years after you started blogging every chapter. So was an expensive, unfitted, almost untailored suit from Milan. So was running against Joe Lieberman.
The challenge is not to somehow persuade those in search of soundness to change their minds. The challenge is to do enough of a gut check to decide whether you should defend your instinct. And then do it.
It happened again. There I was, meeting with someone who I thought had nothing to do with books or publishing, and it turns out his new book just came out.
With more than 75,000 books published every year (not counting ebooks or blogs), the odds are actually pretty good that you’ve either written a book, are writing a book, or want to write one.
Hence this short list:
So, just about everything that can be improved, is being improved. If you define “improved” to mean more features, more buttons, more choices, more power, more cost.
The washing machine I used this morning had more than 125 different combinations of ways to do the wash … don’t get me started about the dryer. Clearly, an arms race is a good way to encourage people to upgrade.
I wonder, though, if “good enough” might be the next big idea. Audio players, cars, dryers, accounting … not the best ever made, not the most complicated, and certainly not the most energy consuming. Just good enough.
For some people, a clean towel is a clean towel.
What’s the point of talking to a group?
I’m serious. We spend a lot of time in presentations, or at the United Nations, or sending our kids to school. We have orientation sessions and keynote speeches and long-winded oratory on the floor of the Senate. Why?
One reason: to incite. To share emotion. To sell. And that’s never going to go out of fashion, as far as I can tell.
But most of the speeches I’m talking about don’t incite. I heard an excerpt on the radio the other day … someone at the EU going on at length about admitting Romania and Bulgaria to the EU. There was even a mention of food safety issues. Thousands of people listening to one person drone on about food safety. This wasn’t an emotional speech designed to sell us on an idea. Instead, it was designed to teach us.
To teach us the way a schoolteacher I heard recently teaches: by reading a text. She stands up at the front of the room and, along with showing a few Web images, reads a text to the class.
Here’s my point: In our scan-and-skip world, in a world where technology makes it obvious that we can treat different people differently, how can we possibly justify teaching via a speech?
Speech is both linear and unpaceable. You can’t skip around and you can’t speed it up. When the speaker covers something you know, you are bored. When he quickly covers something you don’t understand, you are lost.
If marketing is the art of spreading ideas, then teaching is a kind of marketing. And live teaching to groups is broken, perhaps beyond repair. Consumers of information won’t stand for it. We’re learning less every time we are confronted with this technique, because we’ve been spoiled by the remote control and the Web.
If you teach—teach anything—I think you need to start by acknowledging that there’s a need to sell your ideas emotionally. So you need to use whatever tools are available to you—an evocative PowerPoint image, say, or a truly impassioned speech.
Then, and this is the hard part, if you’re teaching to a group of more than three people, you need to find a way to engage that is nonlinear. Q&A doesn’t work for a large group, because only the questioner is engaged at any given moment (if you’re lucky, the questioner represents more than a few, but she rarely represents all).
If it’s worth teaching, it’s worth teaching well. If it’s worth investing the time of 30 or 230 or 3,330 people, then it’s worth investing the effort to actually figure out how to get the message across. School is broken. Legislative politics are broken. Linear is broken. YouTube and Bloglines, on the other hand, are new platforms, platforms that enable the education of millions of people every day, quickly and for free.
If you could do tomorrow over again, would you?
Most of us live programmed lives. Tomorrow is set, finished, done, and you haven’t even started it yet.
And we accept that as part of the deal in setting goals and reaching them.
But what about the tomorrow thirty days from now? Or a year?
If you could do those over, would you? How?
Ninety-nine percent of the time, in my experience, the hard part about creativity isn’t coming up with something no one has ever thought of before. The hard part is actually executing the thing you’ve thought of.
The devil doesn’t need an advocate. The brave need supporters, not critics.
I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line.
You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking.
The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to.
It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the braindead stuff.
We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish.
Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep?
And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless.
And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”)
The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer.
Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff.
And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base.
I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking.
Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years.
Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company … because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig. …” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems.
What a waste.
Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.
I just got a note from Nathan, who asks,
I recently realized that I want to be a marketer. So now with a résumé that includes “Research Analyst” for an economics professor, “Finance Director” for a Nevada governor candidate, and a degree in physics from Harvard, I find myself applying for jobs in marketing. Ultimately, I would like to be VP of Product Development or perhaps CEO at a new company (I love bringing remarkable ideas to fruition), and I have suddenly realized marketing, not finance, is the way to go for me. And, as I search for jobs and try to find an entry point for my newfound path, I have a few questions:
My answer is easy to write, harder to implement. In my experience, the single best way to become a marketer is to market. And since marketing isn’t expensive any longer (it takes more guts than money), there’s no need to work for Procter & Gamble. None. In the old days, you could argue that you needed to apprentice with an expert and that you needed access to millions (or billions) to spend. No longer.
So, start your own gig. Even if you’re 12 years old, start a store on eBay. You’ll learn just about everything you need to learn about digital marketing by building an electronic storefront, doing permission-based email campaigns, writing a blog, etc. Who knows more about marketing—Scoble or some mid-level marketing guy in Redmond?
You don’t need a lot of time or a lot of money. You can start with six hours every weekend. Over time, if (and when) you get good at it, take on clients. Paying clients. Folks that need brilliant marketers will beat down the door to get at you. After a while, you may decide you like that life. Or, more likely, you’ll decide you’d rather be your own client.
People who want to become great fishermen don’t go to work on a salmon trawler. And people who want to become marketers ought to just start marketing.
When you are sitting right on the edge of something daring and scary and creative and powerful and perhaps wonderful … and you blink and take a step back.
That’s the moment. The moment between you and remarkable. Most people blink. Most people get stuck.
All the hard work and preparation and daring and luck are nothing compared with the ability to not blink.
People spend money (and make money) and join organizations and invest time and enormous energy to solve this problem. Every day.
I’m working today. In fact, if I’m conscious, I’m working. That’s largely because it doesn’t seem like “work” today. I’d write this blog even if no one read it.
More and more people are lucky enough to have a gig like mine—work you’d do even if you didn’t have to, even if you didn’t get paid to do it. This is a bigger idea than it seems, because it changes the posture of what you do. Different motivations ought to lead to different results.
My version goes like this: If I’m doing this for fun (and I am), then I might as well be doing something remarkable/great/worth doing. Otherwise, why bother?
Here’s something I wrote in 2003, shortly before Purple Cow came out. I reference it a lot; I guess I think it’s good:
Your great-grandfather knew what it meant to work hard. He hauled hay all day long, making sure that the cows got fed. In Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser writes about a worker who ruptured his vertebrae, wrecked his hands, burned his lungs, and was eventually hit by a train as part of his 15-year-career at a slaughterhouse. Now that’s hard work.
The meaning of hard work in a manual economy is clear. Without the leverage of machines and organizations, working hard meant producing more. Producing more, of course, was the best way to feed your family.
Those days are long gone. Most of us don’t use our bodies as a replacement for a machine—unless we’re paying for the privilege and getting a workout at the gym. These days, 35% of the American workforce sits at a desk. Yes, we sit there a lot of hours, but the only heavy lifting that we’re likely to do is restricted to putting a new water bottle on the cooler. So do you still think that you work hard?
You could argue, “Hey, I work weekends and pull all-nighters. I start early and stay late. I’m always on, always connected with a BlackBerry. The FedEx guy knows which hotel to visit when I’m on vacation.” Sorry. Even if you’re a workaholic, you’re not working very hard at all.
Sure, you’re working long, but “long” and “hard” are now two different things. In the old days, we could measure how much grain someone harvested or how many pieces of steel he made. Hard work meant more work. But the past doesn’t lead to the future. The future is not about time at all. The future is about work that’s really and truly hard, not time-consuming. It’s about the kind of work that requires us to push ourselves, not just punch the clock. Hard work is where our job security, our financial profit, and our future joy lie.
It’s hard work to make difficult emotional decisions, such as quitting a job and setting out on your own. It’s hard work to invent a new system, service, or process that’s remarkable. It’s hard work to tell your boss that he’s being intellectually and emotionally lazy. It’s easier to stand by and watch the company fade into oblivion. It’s hard work to tell senior management to abandon something that it has been doing for a long time in favor of a new and apparently risky alternative. It’s hard work to make good decisions with less than all of the data.
Today, working hard is about taking apparent risk. Not a crazy risk like betting the entire company on an untested product. No, an apparent risk: something that the competition (and your coworkers) believe is unsafe but that you realize is far more conservative than sticking with the status quo.
Richard Branson doesn’t work more hours than you do. Neither does Steve Ballmer or Carly Fiorina. Robyn Waters, the woman who revolutionized what Target sells—and helped the company trounce Kmart—probably worked fewer hours than you do in an average week.
None of the people who are racking up amazing success stories and creating cool stuff are doing it just by working more hours than you are. And I hate to say it, but they’re not smarter than you, either. They’re succeeding by doing hard work.
As the economy plods along, many of us are choosing to take the easy way out. We’re going to work for the Man, letting him do the hard work while we work the long hours. We’re going back to the future, to a definition of work that embraces the grindstone.
Some people (a precious few, so far) are realizing that this temporary recession is the best opportunity that they’ve ever had. They’re working harder than ever—mentally—and taking all sorts of emotional and personal risks that are bound to pay off.
Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the things that you’d rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, tunnel under that barrier, drive through the other barrier. And after you’ve done that, to do it again the next day.
The big insight: the riskier your (smart) coworker’s hard work appears to be, the safer it really is. It’s the people having difficult conversations, inventing remarkable products, and pushing the envelope (and, perhaps, still going home at 5 P.M.) who are building a recession-proof future for themselves.
So tomorrow, when you go to work, really sweat. Your time is worth the effort.
As a young, first-year student at the Stanford MBA program (most of the other 300 students had wasted a few years working at a bank, but he came straight from undergrad), Chip Conley picked out four other students—strangers to him and to each other—and invited them to a weekly brainstorming session. He explained to us that once a week we’d meet for four hours and brainstorm business plans and entrepreneurial ventures.
A year later, we had compiled more than 500 great ideas and countless lousy ones, and we had figured out how to think about the structure of a business. I think the five of us would all agree we learned more in that room in the anthropology department than we did in the classes we were paying for.
The extraordinary thing about Chip’s little bit of initiative in setting up the group is how rare it is. Successful people have this in common. It’s not the giant breakthroughs, it’s the willingness to take little chances.
Chip has gone on to be the most successful of our team, running one of the largest independent hotel chains in California. We had a deal: I agreed not to open hotels; he agreed not to write books. He’s written a book [update: now it’s a few], and they’re worth checking out.
Even if you don’t have an anthropology department nearby, there’s no doubt that there’s some small piece of initiative you can grab ahold of tomorrow.
Padmanabhan wrote me a nice note today, asking why I so freely give away ideas. (It was nice because he thought some of the ideas were actually good ones.)
I responded that ideas are easy; doing stuff is hard.
My feeling is that the more often you create and share ideas, the better you get at it. The process of manipulating and ultimately spreading ideas improves both the quality and the quantity of what you create; at least it does for me.
History is littered with inventors who had “great” ideas but kept them quiet and then poorly executed them. And history is lit up with doers who took ideas that were floating around in the ether and actually made something happen. In fact, just about every successful venture is based on an unoriginal idea, beautifully executed.
So, if you’ve got ideas, let them go. They’re probably holding you back from the hard work of actually executing.
Golf (or maybe tennis) has the true myth of the sweet spot. That special part of the club (racket) that magically makes the ball go farther and straighter.
There’s a sweet spot in promotion and PR as well. Let me give you a few examples from the book world to get us started:
Peter Drucker was in the sweet spot for the Harvard Business Review. His background, reputation, and style of writing contributed to his writing more pieces for them than anyone else. (My stuff, on the other hand, is blacklisted by the HBR. They won’t even consider my work.)
If you want to get reviewed by the New York Times Book Review, don’t even consider self-publishing. Don’t write a how-to book. Don’t write something particularly funny, either. But it sure helps to be published by Knopf. Literary fiction by respected writers published by Knopf is the sweet spot (history comes in a close second).
There’s a sweet spot for getting on Oprah and for being on NPR as well. You rarely hear about romance novels on All Things Considered.
My point isn’t that you shouldn’t try to get these middlemen to broaden their horizons or that you should give up on something you’re passionate about. It’s just that it might be easier to build a new sweet spot than it is to persuade an established middleman to change his rules for you.
I never had a chance with existing magazines, so I invented a writing style for myself that worked well with Fast Company, which until then had never had a columnist. Bloggers around the world are discovering that it’s cheaper and faster and more effective to build their own media channels than it is to waste time arguing with the old ones.
So I guess my advice would be to either build your product and network along the way to align with exactly what the middlemen want, or reject them and live/thrive without them. It’s the middle ground that’s really frustrating.
Google yourself.
If you’re a salesperson, your prospects already do.
If you’re looking for a job, your prospective employers already do.
If you’ve got a job, your coworkers already do.
What do they see? Do you know?
If you don’t like it, you can fix it. Start a blog, even if it’s just a few pages’ worth. Have some colleagues suggest you for Wikipedia (if the powers that be think you’re notable enough), or make sure you’re represented on HubPages or Squidwho, or write an article for ChangeThis.
You can be finished by tonight. It’s worth it.
Someone asked me the other day if posting a blog post every day is intimidating or a grind.
I view it as something I get to do. I spend most of my blogging time deciding what not to post.
The best work, at least for me, is the stuff you get to do. If you are really good at that, you’re lucky enough to have very little of the have-to stuff left.
Maybe it should be “the forces for mediocrity …”
There’s a myth that all you need to do is outline your vision and prove it’s right—then, quite suddenly, people will line up and support you.
In fact, the opposite is true. Remarkable visions and genuine insight are always met with resistance. And when you start to make progress, your efforts are met with even more resistance. Products, services, career paths … whatever it is, the forces for mediocrity will align to stop you, forgiving no errors and never backing down until it’s over.
If it were any other way, it would be easy. And if it were any other way, everyone would do it and your work would ultimately be devalued. The yin and yang are clear: without people pushing against your quest to do something worth talking about, it’s unlikely that it would be worth the journey. Persist.
Persistence isn’t using the same tactics over and over. That’s just annoying.
Persistence is having the same goal over and over.
Most people spend a lot of time to get an education.
They wait for the teacher (hopefully a great one) to give them something of value.
Many employees do the same thing at work. They wait for a boss (hopefully a great one) to give them responsibility or authority or experiences that add up to a career.
A few people—not many, but a few—take. They take the best education they can get, pushing teachers for more, finding things to do, exploring non-defined niches. They take more courses than the minimum, they invent new projects, and they show up with questions.
A few people, not many, take opportunities at work. Marketers have the easiest time of this (it’s sort of hard to commandeer the chain saw) but don’t do it nearly as often as they should.
What have you taken today?
I trust Sara Fishko.
I don’t know her, I’ve never bought anything from her, and I wouldn’t recognize her if we met, but I trust her.
Every once in a while, over the last few years, Sara’s voice has come out of my radio, telling me about one interesting cultural event or another. She’s consistent. She shows up. She has built a body of work over time, taking her time, that has led to trust.
Twitter can do that for you.
Not for a million New Yorkers, but perhaps for a hundred or a thousand people you want to reach. Blogs do the same thing.
The best time to look for a job next year is right now. The best time to plan for a sale in three years is right now. The mistake so many marketers make is that they conflate the urgency of making another sale with the timing of earning the right to make that sale. In other words, you must build trust before you need it. Building trust right when you want to make a sale is just too late.
Publishing your ideas—in books, or on a blog, or in little twits on Twitter—and doing it with patience, over time, is the best way I can think of to lay a foundation for whatever it is you hope to do next.
I like reading magic books.
I don’t do magic. Not often (and not well). But reading the books is fun. It’s a vicarious thing, imagining how a trick might work, visualizing the effect, and then smiling at how the technique is done. One trick after another, it’s a pleasant adventure.
A lot of people read business books in just the same way. They cruise through the case studies or the insights or examples and imagine what it would be like to be that brilliant entrepreneur or that successful CEO or that great sales rep. A pleasant adventure.
There’s a huge gap between most how-to books (cookbooks, gardening, magic, etc.) and business books, though. The gap is motivation. Gardening books don’t push you to actually do something. Cookbooks don’t spend a lot of time trying to sell you on why making a roast chicken isn’t as risky as you might think.
The stakes are a lot higher when it comes to business.
Wreck a roast chicken and it’s $12 down the drain. Wreck a product launch and there goes your career.
I’m passionate about writing business books precisely for this reason. There are more business books sold than most other nonfiction categories for the same reason. High stakes, high rewards.
The fascinating thing is this: I spend 95% of my time persuading people to take action and just 5% of the time on the recipes.
The recipe that makes up just about any business book can be condensed to just two or three pages. The rest is the sell. The proof. The persuasion.
Which leads to your role as the reader. How to read a business book—it’s not as obvious as it seems.
If you’re reading for the recipe, and just the recipe, you can get through a business book in just a few minutes. But most people who do that get very little out of the experience. Take a look at the widely divergent reviews for The Dip. The people who “got it” understood that it was a book about getting you to change your perspective and thus your behavior. Those who didn’t get it were looking for bullet points. They wasted their money.
Computer books, of course, are nothing but bullet points. Programmers get amazing value because for $30 they are presented with everything they need to program with a certain tool. Yet most programmers are not world class, precisely because the bullet points aren’t enough to get them to see things the way the author does, and aren’t enough to get them motivated enough to actually program great code.
So, how to read a business book:
Effective managers hand books to their teams. Not so they can be reminded of high school, but so that next week she can say to them, “Are we there yet?”
In the U.S., the next two weeks are traditionally the slowest of the year. Plenty of vacations, half-day Fridays, casual Mondays, martini Tuesdays … you get the idea.