Is there anything more frightening than showing up (really showing up) in the place where you are unknown and alone?
All our warning systems are on high alert. From an evolutionary perspective, strangers represent danger. They are not only a direct threat, but carry the risk of rejection and all the insecurity that comes with it.
But the opposite can be true: Strangers can represent opportunity. The opportunity to learn, to make new connections, to build bridges that benefit everyone.
This is an internal debate, not something that comes from outside. When we look for rejection and reasons to hold back, that’s exactly what we will find. On the other hand, if we seek possibility and look for people that need us as much as we need them, there they are.
Everyone is, at some level, shy. Everyone has the instinct to hold back, because that instinct is baked in. Those that overcome it aren’t born gregarious, they are people who realize the self-fulfilling truth of finding what they’re looking for.
The connected person is no different from you, they've merely made a generous choice, confronting their innate fear instead of hiding from it. The reward for overcoming this inertia belongs to the connector and to everyone she connects.
It’s easier than ever to convene, to organize, to create spaces where strangers will cease to be strangers and turn into allies and friends. Those that convene overcome their resistance just one time, and then benefit from the generosity they’ve delivered to the group. The only difference between a group of strangers and a group of friends is that the friends benefitted from someone willing to go first.
When we weave together strangers and turn them into a tribe, we create real value, value that lasts.
July 3, 2013
Most of the time, the work is only seen by fans. The new record, or the public hearing that's being held, or the presentation for the committee. It's going to reach people who already know what's in store.
But, in the connected media world, sometimes an idea starts to blow up. The views on the music video start to trend, the book starts to get talked about. Who notices? People who notice things that are trending. If you're in this group, you may have fooled yourself into thinking that everyone cares about what's trending, but in fact, not so many do.
The buzz hunters don't care so much about the content or the artist–they won't be back for the next piece from this person. What they care about, though, is the trend, the buzz and the heat.
When enough buzz hunters are buzzing, then the masses show up. They want something else, of course. They want what the masses are watching.
Finally, if someone has really screwed up, if there's a trial or a scandal or something catastrophic in politics, the creeps on cable will descend. They'll camp out, spin and look for sound bites. Every time they do, they turn the story into the very same story, they embrace the arc of tragedy, they look for two-dimensional and the black and white.
The audience for online gossip, cable sensationalism and the stuff at the newspaper checkout sees the same thing day after day. They have a very different view of the world because of the circle of media they've chosen to live in.
What's extraordinary about the media attention curve is that each group brings its own truth, its own lens to see what's going on. The fan sees the world one way, the buzz hunter very differently.
The actual work doesn't change so much as the way we talk about it.
You get two choices here: the first is to decide which circle you'll live in when you consume media. And the second is to decide which circle you'd like those that you seek to reach are living in.
July 2, 2013
There's no doubt that a well-read recording of a novel can make a long car ride pass much more quickly. We're eager to find out what happens next, and sometimes, it's even worth sitting in the driveway just to find out.
I'm more interested, though, in non-fiction audio, particularly the kind you listen to ten or fifteen or a hundred times in a row.
When I was starting out on my own, success was not around the corner or even in sight. For years, I was flirting on the edge of failure. I was thrown out of salescalls, rejected by just about every organization I approached and was pretty stuck. More than once I considered giving up the entire entrepreneur thing.
One of the key factors in both surviving this time and figuring out how to shift gears was my exposure to (as we called them then) books on tape, particularly the work of Zig Ziglar. I listened for sometimes hours every day. I've been grateful to Zig every day since, and I still listen regularly.
This is a fairly modern tool, one that rewires our brains with consistent results. Of course, you need a car or some other sort of mindless commute, an mp3 player and the right material–a perfect storm of just the right sort of distraction and repetition.
I'm hard pressed to think of another form of modern media that has such consistently successful results.
People who haven't tried it don't want to. It feels a bit off-putting or mesmeresque to intentionally brainwash yourself with content designed to change your outlook. Here's the simple opportunity: try it. Twenty minutes a day, every day for a month. It's cheap and you can do it in private!
One listen isn't going to do you any good, but if you make it a habit, you might be surprised. One thing I've noticed is that on a per units-sold basis, I hear from audiobook readers about five times as often as those that read my books in print. I hope it works for you.
As a fun summer diversion, I'll be answering a question every week about one of my books. Go ahead and ask…
The question form is right here. There's a prize every week for submitting the question I end up using.
July 1, 2013
If that's your path, there are three options:
- Work on keeping the boat going straight
- Bail water ever faster
- Find a new boat before it's too late
We call the first one persistence and diligence.
The second one—urgency.
And the third one, the one that's often the best strategy: quitting.
Go ahead and change your tactics when the situation demands. Your goals are real, your intent stays the same–but the way you get there needs to change.
Sometimes having the vision to see what's ahead is more productive than trying to get there faster.
Many marketers work overtime to confuse us about money. They take advantage of our misunderstanding of the time value of money, of our aversion to reading the fine print, of our childish need for instant gratification and most of all, our conflicted emotional connection to money.
Confusing customers about money can be quite profitable if that’s the sort of work you’re willing to do.
A few things to keep in mind:
- The amount of money you have has nothing to do with whether or not you’re a good person. Being good with money is a little like being good with cards. People who are good at playing cards aren’t better or worse than anyone else, they’re just better at playing crazy eights.
- Money spent on one thing is still the same as money spent on something else. A $500 needless fee on a million-dollar mortgage closing is just as much money as a $500 tip at McDonalds.
- If you borrow money to make money, you’ve done something magical. On the other hand, if you go into debt to pay your bills or buy something you want but don’t need, you’ve done something stupid. Stupid and short-sighted and ultimately life-changing for the worse.
- To go along with #3: getting out of debt as fast as you possibly can is the smartest thing you can do with your money. If you need proof to confirm this, ask anyone with money to show you the math. Hint: credit card companies make more profit than just about any other companies in the world.
- There’s no difference (in terms of the money you have) between spending money and not earning money, no difference between not-spending money and getting a raise (actually, because of taxes, you’re even better off not-spending). If you’ve got cable TV and a cell phone, you’re spending $4,000 a year. $6,000 before taxes.
- If money is an emotional issue for you, you’ve just put your finger on a big part of the problem. No one who is good at building houses has an emotional problem with hammers. Place your emotional problems where they belong, and focus on seeing money as a tool.
- Like many important, professional endeavors, money has its own vocabulary. It won’t take you long to learn what opportunity cost, investment, debt, leverage, basis points and sunk costs mean, but it’ll be worth your time.
- Never sign a contract or make an investment that you don’t understand at least as well as the person on the other side of the transaction.
- If you’ve got a job, a steady day job, now’s the time to figure out a way to earn extra income in your spare time. Freelancing, selling items on Etsy, building a side business–two hundred extra dollars every week for the next twenty years can create peace of mind for a lifetime.
- The chances that a small-time investor will get lucky by timing the stock market or with other opaque investments are slim, fat and none.
- The way you feel about giving money to good causes has a lot to do with the way you feel about money.
- Don’t get caught confusing money with security. There are lots of ways to build a life that’s more secure, starting with the stories you tell yourself, the people you surround yourself with and the cost of living you embrace. Money is one way to feel more secure, but money alone won’t deliver this.
- Rich guys busted for insider trading weren’t risking everything to make more money for the security that money can bring. In fact, the very opposite is starkly shown here. The insatiable need for more money is directly (and ironically) related to not being clear about what will ultimately bring security. Like many on this path, now they have neither money nor security.
- In our culture, making more money feels like winning, and winning feels like the point.
- Within very wide bands, more money doesn’t make people happier. Learning how to think about money, though, usually does.
- In the long run, doing work that’s important leads to more happiness than doing work that’s merely profitable.
June 30, 2013
In the long run, there are only two sustainable positions–you sell less for less or you sell more for more.
It's tempting to think that you can pull a Wal-mart and appear to deliver more for less, but that's far more rare than it appears. And the market is smart (and getting smarter) so delivering less for more, while apparently a great gig, doesn't last.
People are going to figure out what's on offer, and they're going to seek out real value. For some, that means getting a little less (less service, less quality, less panache) and paying less, or getting a lot more (more meaning, more insight, more joy) and paying a bit more.
Time to pick.
[After I published it, I realized that something about this post isn't quite right. Here's my take:
More or less are simple concepts to understand in the scarcity-based industrial economy. If I want to put better butter in the croissants, I need to pay more and charge more for it…
On the other hand, the connection economy isn't based on scarcity. And in an abundant world of connection (where tribes become more valuable as they scale, where vulnerability and art are valuable in and of themselves) then in fact, yes, you can have more for less. The benefits of the trusted, integrated community, the one that gives permission and seeks to be in sync–these benefits actually open the door for delivering more… in exchange for the guts and the tears it takes to do that scary work that we seek to connect over.]
June 29, 2013
With the much-heralded demise of Google Reader, millions of people are about to be left at the mercy of a blended, algorithmic mash of incoming news. Instead of picking what they'll see and when, Google seems to want people to rely on luck as well as the coral-reef like filtering of a social network.
Resist!
Subscribe for free.
Find your favorite sources, pick a newsreader or rely on good old email, and subscribe. You should be the one who determines what's showing up in your inbox.
As they say in the dead-tree business: never miss an issue.
FWIW, you should definitely export your feed list from Google Reader today, as it will be gone forever soon. (more details).
June 28, 2013
Rules for treating inbound customer calls with respect:
0. Spend a lot more money on this. Hire more agents. Train them better. Treat them with respect and they'll do the same to those they interact with. Have a bright red light flash on the CEO's desk whenever anyone, anywhere, is on hold for more than 5 minutes. If it gets to seven, have the call automatically route to the mobile phone of the CEO's spouse.
1. Have a very smart and very motivated front line. "I'll connect you directly to the person who can help you if you let me know what you need…" Don't have these people pretend that they can help. It leads to long conversations and frustration.
2. 80% of your inbound calls are about the same ten things. First, eliminate those problems in future products, packaging and policies. The best way to handle these calls is to eliminate them. Second, put clear, fun and complete answers to these questions online where they are easy to find. And third, hire talented voice actors to record engaging answers to each, and offer them as a first resort as a result of #1, above.
3. Change your on-hold music to Gary Gulman and Hannibal Buress routines.
4. Whenever the wait is more than two minutes, offer a simple way to be called back, and then make sure it works.
5. If you're closed, tell us the hours you are open and the relevant websites. Make sure the information is accurate.
Even famous companies get all of these wrong… Only one of the five steps is truly expensive, and yet all six are regularly ignored by companies that don't care or act like they don't.
(NB it's just fine to make it clear that a call is not important to you. I've never built a company around amazing phone support, precisely because it's so difficult to keep the promise. As far as I'm concerned, it's fine for some industries to not do the phone well. Just be clear that this is the case by routing people off the phone or at least not lying about it).
It's nice when someone loves your brand or your restaurant or your project.
But we don't get to love without respect, first. As J Mays at Ford points out, it's important to know that this car gets 48 miles per gallon, that it's incredibly reliable, that people you admire drive one–these are sources of respect.
If you can't earn my respect, don't even bother shipping it out the door.
Respect is insufficient by itself, though. Respect doesn't get the heart to race, respect doesn't often lead to waiting in line or gushing about an idea to someone else. No, those things come from falling in love, from the ineffable and magic switch that gets flipped when we are touched by something on an emotional level.
Without respect, don't expect love. There are too many options and too much information for me to fall in love with something incomplete or incompetent. But respect just isn't enough. Meeting spec will get you respect, without a doubt, but stopping there will never earn you love.
Time to invest in magic. Time to take the risk and leap into the unmapped, unsafe and unreliable territory where love lives.
June 27, 2013
