Adam’s Daily Post

If you got down on one knee in front of your beloved, and said…

“After careful evaluation of all the available suitors, l’ve resolved that you are the most likely to satisfy my needs. Marry me.”

…how do you think that’s going to go?

Most businesses plan their go-to-market and sales conversations to be received like this.

Most businesses plan to receive proposals like this.

When you plan to do better, the results are staggeringly different.

There are a few lenses to think about ‘content’…

Here’s one of them I quite like:

“Would I want to buy this?”

Not need to buy.

Not want to get freemium.

Not think about evaluating.

WANT to buy.

On a tshirt. A mug. A print. Something to put in a scrapbook, on a desk, on my wrist, for a gift. Buy. Have. Keep.

If the answer’s no… why not?

If someone overcame something, you can overcome that thing too.

Just like when you’re home alone cooking, and you balance that fork precariously on the top of a carton/can to keep the prongs clean. And you think that’s a quirky-you thing, that no one else does.

It’s not.

These are shared experiences.

The doubt? Shared experience.

If any one person overcame them, you can too.

The only real ‘competitors’ are those who aren’t prepared to think bigger.

Those who are/can/will, realize we’re all just trying to help people - and can help people better, if we’re in this together.

Those who aren’t/can’t/won’t, are stuck being afraid of not eating tomorrow, so they try to eat your lunch too.

We get to choose which camp we want to be in.

The toy industry powers the cartoon industry. Great cartoons are made, because they’re propped up by merchandising that lets us explore the worlds we enjoyed watching so much.

Why isn’t marketing and business the same?

Why isn’t marketing like the cartoons we thoroughly enjoy watching and experiencing - the best experiences in the world - fueled by the sale of products and services that let us explore those worlds further?

Smells like opportunity for every brand prepared to be brave, and create things people genuinely want to experience, that lead to products people genuinely want to guy.

There are (imo) two groups people fall into (finance-wise):

1. People who watch the numbers go up while pumping gas.
2. People who watch the world go by while pumping gas.

If you’re fortunate enough to be in the second group, anything extra is, as Gates says, all “the same hamburger”.

Show people what you did, they’ll copy the outcome without understanding how you did it.

Show people how you do it, they’ll get a bit closer to what you want.

Show people how you think, they’ll do as you did.

Show people how you think.

“Raise your prices!”

You hear this all the time.

Gurus make it sound like a confidence game, where the most delusional heights of confidence mean you’re worth most to the market.

But that’s not true, is it.

So instead of pursuing a raise or “raising your prices”, think of it this way:

When I have 20X extra value to share, I raise the price 10X.

That means you’re helping people so much more, while making your gift even greater.

Be out-give-able.

What’s ‘work life balance’?

Who says work and life should be at odds?

Why do they need balancing / reconciling with each other?

We have a name for unreconciled body parts that put the rest of the body at risk. We call them cancers.

Work should be a healthy, useful, and benign asset to our bodies. Not taking over, not hanging limp. Limbs like these don’t need reconciling. They need nourishing as part of a healthy body.

That’s what our work and craft should be treated like.

There’s a lack of care and honor going on.

And it’s in every space.

Even in spaces you’d think everyone is implicitly more rich with care and honor, such as artists - people for whom an emotional connection to your work is a huge variable in their performance.

There are plenty of people who will do half a project, then bail on you for something else.

Not all of them, of course. But too many.

I’ve had plenty of artists let me down over the years during collaborations.

And plenty of developers. And designers. And copywriters. And so on.

And it’s hard sometimes to remember the good ones, when you’re in the middle of getting slapped in the face by a bad one.

But the curse is on the bad ones. They have to walk many short walks to nowhere, rather than going on an long, rich, fruitful adventure.

Don’t stress about the bad ones.

Look for adventurers.