Archive of posts from January 2019

Biz magazines prefer to romanticize growth as a graduation from pain. Not so:

• Growing as a person means becoming a better version of yourself, but also means leaving some people behind. Not everyone’s going to like the new-and-improved version.
• Growing as a company means achieving new levels of success, but also means you’re always facing new challenges. The problems don’t go away, they simply change.
• Growing as a cause-driven company means making more of a difference, but also means...

It’s an old marketing saying and an old marketing lie. It was never in the list:

• A list is just a tool. Be it your own email list or LinkedIn’s entire user database, lists are just tools. If having access to these lists were money to you, LinkedIn wouldn’t be offering free membership, would they?
• A relationship is invaluable. It goes beyond money, often refusing transactions through a commitment to extend only the right options to those in your...

It’s just a market response to a broken workplace:

• Workers like it because it affords them freedom to work on meaningful projects, travel, and be near their families. Problem 1: the workplace was denying people the things that were important to them.
• Employers like it, particularly in the US, because they can get away with less responsibility for those supposedly in their care. Problem 2: People are being treated as tools rather than valued team members.

The gig...

Every business operating in the marketplace has problems. What’s our relationship with them?

• Hell: We all go through it. It’s a natural part of the process, as many of us will have learned. What we often don’t learn, is that our Hell is somebody else’s Hail Mary.
• Hail Mary: We all need these. Somebody who has the answer to address our own Hell. Another team or individual who is able to capably be our market Hail Mary.

One...

…is that they tend not to do as much good as you think they do:

• They make you feel good. You feel like you’ve done your good deed for the month. But it shouldn’t be about you, it should be about the cause you contributed to.
• They may not make good use of it. A machine designed to live on hand-outs isn’t usually a machine familiar with the value of a dollar. It just extends out its hand for...

What’s your TTA (time to action) when an opportunity arises?

• One year, to get everyone’s buy-in regardless of whether or not its important to them. Many reports, pitches, meetings, and studies must be conducted to see if it’s viable or not.
• One month, to get your internal “ducks in a row” and get things moving, rather than messing about with procrastination disguised as reports.
• One day, because it’s worth taking action and learning through doing, rather than just sat...

We won’t all have the chance to get to know you like you know you. But we will all get to form an opinion about you from your message:

• Your message will characterize you because that’s what we do to people we don’t truly know. It’s natural. Which one will you choose?
• Your message is your responsibility, you won’t find it in a guide or a webinar. If you could, it wouldn’t be yours, even if you share the...

Access to the people–and things–we wanted access to used to be a pipe dream. That became a popular excuse for inaction.

Things changed. But the excuses didn’t:

• We can contact almost anybody we want. Social networks will let us target anyone in the world. Anyone. Now the excuse is, “I don’t know what to say.”
• We can access almost anything we want. Our connected world allows us to leverage, barter, JV, finance or trade anything we like. Now the...

“The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.” – Aristotle

This one’s for the gurus:

• On breaking it: Most of us haven’t been in business long enough to experience the economy correct itself in a severe way. When it does, the pursuit of pleasure pales in value compared to avoiding pain.
• On faking it: Parading faux-wealth in the marketplace will only impress you, not those you’re trying to deceive. Masking your insecurities will...

The things that haunt us have something to teach us:

• The things we fear to lose show us what we hold dear. Should we protect them better, instead of fearing? Perhaps those we serve in the marketplace need the same help?
• The things we resent show us what we believe in. Should we do something about it, instead of resenting? That’s where social entrepreneurship comes from.
• The things that haunt you have something to teach you about succeeding: that...

I drove for one hour today. In that one hour I saw:

• Three near-miss encounters, one of which I was involved in. When someone’s attitude is, “I’ll get mine, to heck with everyone else”, accidents occur.
• Two mattresses on the sidewalk, presumably thrown off the back of a truck. When someone’s attitude is, “This suits me just fine, others can get over it”, our environment becomes a mess.
• Our industries are no different; whether it’s online marketers building a...

Being a native means “you’re like us”. How native are you to those you serve?

• Native social platform visuals > fancy TV-style visuals. If we can make the latter, we’re tempted to do it the fancy way. Except it’s not native. We earn attention when things are authentically fit-for-purpose. Asking me to rotate my device to see your landscape IGTV video says you’re just repurposing old stuff.
• Native email > fancy email. If we can create emails with fancy...

Ever wonder why we treat rules like laws in our work? They’re not the same thing:

• A country can have multiple governments. Hong Kong operates as a democratic region within a communist nation. It was weird once established but became a normal, celebrated piece of Hong Kong identity.
• A country can leave a union. England leaving the European Union is like New York leaving the US. It’s weird now–unfavorable even–yet it’ll become normal, in time.A team can change the...