Adam Fairhead
In school and in sales letters, it’s that which surprises and relates to us that we remember most.
A company that has a new and improved product for a low low price? Yawn, seen it all before, and we’ll see it all again.
An internet marketer with an ‘irresistible offer’ of a limited-stock ebook? Yawn, next.
A company that features our world, our story, our pains and our goals right on the homepage? Gosh, how did they know? We’re surprised,...
Adam Fairhead
“Logic is an invention of man and may be ignored by the universe” – Will Durant, historian
Self-interest is a powerful force. People don’t move to act, buy or change because of logic, but because of their emotional enrollment.
And emotional enrollment doesn’t follow the greatest works or the greatest ideas. It follows great stories that paint a picture of their own world, where they like the ending.
Logic may be ignored be the universe. It may be...
Adam Fairhead
If you ever give or receive feedback, consider this:
If you give real feedback to your team members and your clients: If you “check them” in their thinking and their direction, but don’t “check yourself” in the process (and before you click ‘Send’) then you might find that you’re given the moniker of ‘Jerk’.
If you receive feedback from your team and your clients: if you “check yourself” in your thinking and direction, but don’t (fairly and without ego) “check...
Adam Fairhead
Whatever you’re working on in your team, project or business:
It’s the best it’s ever been, if you’ve given it time, attention and care so far. It won’t be perfect but to not acknowledge the progress made to date is to embrace a toxic freneticism that kills great work.
It’s the worst it’ll ever be, too, if you’ve a commitment to progress. Progress comes from a continual marathon approach to our craft, rather than a hasty sprint that steals our...
Adam Fairhead
These are words we should never hear from those we serve.
For clients, “How’s it going?” means you dropped the ball. They’re anxious because they’re counting on you, and you haven’t shown up enough. They don’t know what’s going on. You’re not communicating enough.
For past clients, “How’s it going?” means you dropped them. You got the cash, rendered the service, then walked away. They don’t know what more is possible for them, and you didn’t show enough care to...
Adam Fairhead
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool. — Richard Feynman
If you think your product is the greatest, watch out. Your audience isn’t coming at it with that perspective, and the void between your thinking can make it difficult to empathize with their needs or what they need to hear from you.
If you think your marketing is fine the way it is, watch out. Your...
Adam Fairhead
What do you like to go first on?
Perhaps it’s new tech? The latest and greatest inventions that bring modest productivity gains at the expense of the financial and emotional investment of committing to beta software and hardware experiments?
Maybe it’s new ideas? Philosophical ideas that may or may not work, or Moleksine productivity hacks designed to potentially make your GTD method faster or more delightful?
Whatever it is, there’s probably something.
You go first and you tell others. That’s...
Adam Fairhead
Let’s see which of these three things you are:
What’s a Thinker? Someone who thinks deeply and prehends the universe, ideating new ways of doing things… but doesn’t necessary do a darned thing with those thoughts.
You can spot them from their curation of certificates and lack of output.
What’s a Doer? Someone who takes action. They see things that need doing, and they get them done, as they’re supposed to be done… but doesn’t necessarily think of new, divergent...
Adam Fairhead
Ever seen the Eisenhower Matrix?
Careful, it could turn you into a workaholic robot. Here’s how to avoid that.
It suggests that Urgent + Important = Do Now. In reality, to build work that matters and enjoy the ride, Urgent + Important = A situation you should design out of your life. Who wants to design a life or business based on perpetual streams of critical firefighting?
Same applies for Urgent + Not Important.
Next, it suggests that Not Urgent...
Adam Fairhead
When is something “finished”?
When it’s perfect? Every angle considered and addressed to a world-class degree?
When it’s past being criticized harshly? Where you can make absolutely certain that nobody will have a negative word to say about it?
When it’s everything you wanted it to be? Immortalized as the height of your abilities in its respective field?
The problem with searching for “finished” is the temptation to hide it from the world until it gets to “finished”… despite it...
Adam Fairhead
When we create great work, we (should) nurture a passion for our craft, our audience, and our tools.
But that doesn’t mean we should keep working on all of these things:
Our craft will continue to evolve, trends will come and go. We get to decide whether we want to chase the trends, or focus on mastering timeless disciplines that matter most.
Our audience will continue to evolve, because people are messy and the world continues to change. We get...
Adam Fairhead
What is a setforward?
It’s a word I made up to mean “the opposite of a setback”.
A setback is normally when things we’re working on are tediously pushed back for reasons seemingly beyond our control. Something went wrong, an unexpected thing happened. We encountered a ‘setback’.
A setforward is another way of looking at the same thing.
A failed presentation or investment opportunity is a setback if we feel it should have succeeded, but it didn’t. But if we...
Adam Fairhead
Taxes are part of the trade you made:
If you want to live in a country that provides lots of amenities and protections, you’ll likely pay a hefty tax for that. That tax is optional, it’s a trade, money in exchange for the things you want (to live there).
If you want to grow your body of work to become more profitable, you’ll probably incur more fees, from service providers and the state. Those taxes are optional, it’s a trade,...
Adam Fairhead
I hear a lot from folks that they want to improve in their craft but don’t know how.
It’s probably not a new tech gadget that’ll make you better. The new iPad does basically the same thing as the last one. The spec boost won’t make you better, but mastering an important skill you use it for will (whether you’re on the new one or not).
It’s probably not the permission you’ve been waiting for that’ll make you better. You’ve...
Adam Fairhead
Complexity has its place…
If you’re making Adobe Photoshop, complexity has its place. It’s supposed to be complicated, an interface to learn and return to many times. Something you can use for 20 years and still not know all its tricks.
If you’re making a helicopter, complexity has its place. You can’t sacrifice torque pedals because you think cyclic controls are sufficient. It all has its place, and so the complexity is essential.
But most of the time, complexity doesn’t...
Adam Fairhead
And is it really better?
You can change the landscape of your industry with a breakthrough product. But does it make sense? If people can’t clearly understand what it is, is it really better?
You can uncover a way to change the world for better, a path to a better way of operating as a society. But does it make sense? If people don’t get it and can’t embrace it, is it really better?
You can make a more generous...
Adam Fairhead
For most marketing tricks, there are a few companies that jump to mind that succeeded with it.
Invite-only (scarce) websites? Tools like Dropbox and Dribbble come to mind, at least one of which we’ve all surely heard of.
Sensationalist Facebook ads? Several course creators with claims of outsized success come to mind, complete with whiteboards of untold wisdom.
Email signature placement? Hotmail’s explosion into fame put this one on the map, followed closely by Gmail.
The list goes on and...
Adam Fairhead
The race to automate a business or marketing campaign is both alluring and the path to your demise.
When the landing page can be made in only 3 clicks and the rest is done by the machine, where’s the messy human connection?
When the copy on the page is mostly templates, swipe files and generators, where’s the messy human connection?
When the digital advertising is targeted and follows you around the web like a stalker, where’s the messy human connection?
...
Adam Fairhead
Before Zeno founded Stoicism, he was told that to live a good life he needed to talk with the dead.
Books are our way of doing that. Among the best minds in every field of expertise and every school of thought are available to all of us in online bookstores for nominal fees.
When it comes to advancing our work, the question isn’t whether or not we can access the best wisdom. Only whether or not we will choose to...
Adam Fairhead
Which do you trade in?
Let’s find out:
If you work alongside people who get you precisely what you want because they fear the reprimands of getting it wrong, you’re trading in anxiety.
If you work alongside people who make things that are greater than you imagined, you may be trading in enthusiasm.
It takes guts to do better, to raise the bar, to elevate your work. It might not work. It could backfire. It’s a step into the unknown....
Adam Fairhead
The problem with changing the world, is that the world is too many things.
Tackling the world shows how little we know about the world. Every pocket of it is filled with rich nuance that reacts to empathy and connection far more than visionary bravado.
Changing the world without understanding its beauty means you’re as likely to make it worse as you are better. In all likelihood, you’ll achieve neither.
But changing the world of just a small group of...
Adam Fairhead
It’s easy to promise you’ll eat no chocolate tomorrow after eating chocolate.
We make such a promise because our current emotional state stamps all over our future selves.
It’s easy to condemn yourself for the way you behaved years ago during that thing with that person.
We make such judgements based on how we feel now, with the data we have now, not on how we felt or what we knew then.
These empathy gaps prospectively and retroactively make us...
Adam Fairhead
If you do work that matters, you probably experience the feeling of “too much to do” fairly regularly.
Perhaps you have 50 things to do today. 50!
50 things to do in one day is a lot of things.
But if it’s actually just 5 things to do with 10 small pieces in each, it’s much easier to handle.
Especially when 4 of those things don’t need doing until the end of the week.
Turns out there was only one...
Adam Fairhead
“Should I be doing this?”
“Is this what more successful people do or would they be doing something else?”
Ever caught yourself asking these questions?
No sweat:
What Bill Gates has for breakfast doesn’t matter. Even if it did, it’s not the thing that made him his fortunes or his philanthropic breakthroughs.
What others are doing only matters if you’re trying to do the exact same thing. And if you are, you’re late to the party. What you’re doing is...
Adam Fairhead
Every great project brims with an overflow of ideas. They seemingly never stop coming.
That’s a good thing: it reveals a passion to create and a commitment to see it through.
The problem emerges when we either:
A: Try to do it all in version 1: It won’t all fit in version 1, and version 1 isn’t version 1 if it all fits in. The beauty of version 1 is found in the absence of the rest, an exciting reminder...
Adam Fairhead
This is the 1000th consecutive daily post, yay!
That’s a post every single day since late 2017.
What can we learn from this?
Every day you think you don’t have an idea today, but when you train the creative muscle, simply sitting and engaging it is sufficient to produce a flood of creative direction. It’s a muscle, it can be trained. We get stronger.
Every day there are hundreds of other things going on. Each day there’s that niggling suspicion,...
Adam Fairhead
“Makeshift” things – temporary constructs of any kind – get a bad rep.
They’re temporary, created swiftly, and don’t solve a problem for good.
And they’re precisely what effective, permanent bodies of work are built upon.
The product or service you want to build could start with the perfect idea, perfectly executed, with perfect market reception. But those who have experienced success know this is exceptionally rare, and not to be counted on.
More likely, it will start with a...
Adam Fairhead
In post #671 we talked about “Red Fred Theory”, where we can assert a little alien called Fred is true and there’d be no way to prove (or disprove) it.
Most businesses have a Red Fred hiding inside it; an element we’ve come to believe that others may not, that is totally besides the point:
Your flagship product may be wonderful. But it can sometimes become a Red Fred. If your audience doesn’t actually want that product, you may...
Adam Fairhead
You’re a part of it.
You may not feel it right now, but you’re a part of your business’ ancestry.
Your business may fizzle and die in your lifetime. Perhaps it was designed to. Or perhaps it was designed to outlast you and continue for many generations.
One thing is certain: unless it was designed for the latter, it was designed for the former.
While reading a longnow.org essay this evening, I was reminded of such “cathedral thinking” by remembering...
Adam Fairhead
In marketing and business, we hear about “truths” that everyone accepts as absolute fact.
Even when they aren’t:
Scarcity creates urgency? Sometimes. Other times, it makes us fear for the future of our investment. We trust our iPhones over newcomer no-name manufacturers because we know for sure that, next year, there will be another that our things will work with.
Premium feel creates desire? Sometimes. Other times, the feeling of accessibility or reliability far outperforms a sector bias.
Success leaves...
Adam Fairhead
“I’m not paid to think about that, so I won’t.” With that attitude, you never will be!
Here’s the alternative:
“I’m not paid to think about that, but that’s not the point.” With that attitude, you ultimately, eventually will be.
Because you’re right, it’s not the point. Granted, we’re often paid for our contributions to society, but in retrospect.
The world doesn’t give down payments to those seeking to make it a better place.
Choose what you want to think...
I create a newsletter called GrowthCandy. Each issue shares one idea to help build and spread your work, delivered as a short comic. Fast to read. Easy to apply. Hard to forget!