Sometimes, it's essential that you be completely understood. That every passenger knows where the emergency exit is, or that every employee knows how it is we do things around here.
But most of the time, if 2% of your audience doesn't get the joke, doesn't learn what you seek to teach them, doesn't understand the essence of your argument, it's not the problem you think it is.
Sure, the 2% who are underinformed can write reviews, tweet indignantly and speak up. You know what? It doesn't matter that much.
If you insist on telling everyone on the airplane precisely how to buckle their seatbelt (!), then yes, of course you're going to not only waste the time of virtually everyone, but you're going to train them not to listen to the rest of what you have to say.
If you insist on getting every single person in the room to understand every nuance of your presentation, you've just signed up to bore and alienate the very people you needed most.
When you find yourself overwriting, embracing redundancy and overwhelming people with fine print, you're probably protecting yourself against the 2%, at the expense of everyone else. (And yes, it might be 10% or even 90%…. that's okay).
When we hold back and dumb down, we are hurting the people who need to hear from us, often in a vain attempt to satisfy a few people who might never choose to actually listen.
It's quite okay to say, "it's not for you."
September 27, 2015
When did being called a 'realist' start to mean that one is a pessimist?
Sometimes, people with small goals call themselves realists, and dismiss those around them as merely dreamers. I think this is backwards.
"I guess I'm more of a realist than you," actually means, "I guess I've discovered that a positive attitude, a generous posture and a bit of persistence makes things better than most people expect."
Hope isn't a strategy, but it is an awfully good tactic.
September 26, 2015
You can learn math. French. Bowling.
You can learn Javascript, too.
But you can also learn to be more empathetic, passionate, focused, consistent, persistent and twenty-seven other attitudes.
If you can learn to be better at something, it's a skill.
And if it's a skill, it's yours if you want it.
Which is great news, isn't it?
[PS Starting today, we’re running a seven-day email sequence to teach you about the upcoming altMBA workshop. Find out more here.]
September 25, 2015
You could make it into a cookie cutter, a scalable, depersonalized, committee-approved ticket to endless growth.
Or you could make it more real, more human and more personal.
What is "it"?
It is the interaction you have with your best customer. It is the way you talk to your employees. It is your safety policy, your go to market strategy, your approach to the board meeting.
If you can't figure out how to talk to one person, it doesn't really pay to scale up your efforts to talk to a thousand.
September 24, 2015
Stop for a minute to consider those magazines that stack up like firewood at the doctor's office, or that beckon you from the high-priced newsstand before you get on the airplane. The celebrity/gossip/self-improvement category.
All the airbrushed pretty people, the replaceable celebrities and near celebrities. The mass-market fad diets, the conventional stories, the sameness tailored for a mass audience.
It's pretty seductive. If you can just fit in the way all these magazines are pushing you to fit in, then you'll be okay, alright, and beyond criticism. Boys and girls should act like this, dress like this, talk like this. Even the outliers are outliers in tried and true, conventional ways.
The headlines are interchangeable. So are the photos and the celebrities, the stories and the escapades and the promises.
Magazines believe they have to produce this cultural lighthouse in order to sell ads–there are advertisers that want average readers in order to sell them their average products. But this doesn't have to be you. These aren't cultural norms, they're merely a odd sub-universe, a costume party for people unwilling to find their own voice.
September 23, 2015
1. You can win four books, signed by the authors, with a tweet. Rules are here. Tell us why you are not part of the lockstep masses.
2. I recently blogged about long odds (one in a quadrillion) and how hard it is to predict the future. It turns out that of the 897 people who entered my presidential bracket game, there’s only ONE contender left. Even though only two candidates have dropped out, there's already more than a 99% failure rate in predicting this future. And I think the prize is safe, because the only remaining contender has picked Christie and Bush as the next two to go.
3. Within 24 hours of recent events virtually determining the first question I surveyed, we also have an answer to the second one. Today’s the day my blog hit 500k followers on Twitter. As you can see, the crowd was off a bit on this as well. I’ve emailed the seven top entries to send them a prize.
Thanks for giving it a whirl.
September 22, 2015
Sooner or later, important action taken comes down to this.
Fear: Of being ashamed, feeling stupid, being rejected, being left out, getting hurt, being embarrassed, left alone, dying.
Dreams: Of being seen, being needed, becoming independent, relieving anxiety, becoming powerful, making someone proud, fitting in, seen as special, mattering, taken care of, loved.
Marketers put many layers atop these basic needs (horsepower, processor speed, features, pricing, testimonials, guarantees, and more) but it all comes down to dreams and fears.
The most important part of a race car is the tires. Good tires will always beat bad ones.
The most important part of a cup of coffee is the beans. The grinder, the machine, the barista pale in comparison to the quality of what you start with.
And the most important parts of an organization are the people you begin with. Not the systems or the policies or even the real estate. Great people make everything easier.
And yet…
And yet we spend money on 4 wheel drive instead of snow tires.
And yet we upgrade our coffee maker instead of buying from a local roaster (or roasting our own).
And mostly, we run classified ads to find the cheapest common denominator employee and spend all our time building systems to protect our customers from people who don't care…
September 21, 2015
Some simple arithmetic will show you how much time you're spending on finding the path:
[The amount of time it took you to do it last time] minus [the amount of time it will take you next time]
If you come up with something close to zero, then you're running the path, doing it consistently and spending almost no time at all finding a path. You've already found one.
On the other hand, if the first time it took you to write that novel was 8 years, and retyping it would take five days, you're spending virtually all of your time finding out where you're going, not actually typing. Which is why writing novels is more difficult than commuting to work.
A few things to consider as you develop your skills as a pathfinder:
- If the value you create is in finding the path, are you being patient and generous with yourself as you hack your way through the weeds? You're not a typist, you're an explorer.
- Are others significantly more efficient and productive at finding paths in your industry? If so, it probably pays to learn what they've figured out.
- If you're not spending much time at all on pathfinding, what would happen if you did?
Lots of people run paths. Very few have the guts to find a new one.
September 20, 2015
By most accounts, more and more people are automatically blocking the ads in their browser.
Of course, people have been blocking ads forever. By ignoring them.
Fifteen years ago, when I began writing about Permission Marketing, I pointed out that when ads are optional, it's only anticipated, personal and relevant ones that will pay off.
And advertisers have had fifteen years to show self restraint. They've had the chance to not secretly track people, set cookies for their own benefit, insert popunders and popovers and poparounds, and mostly, deliver us ads we actually want to see.
Alas, it was probably too much to ask. And so, in the face of a relentless race to the bottom, users are taking control, using a sledgehammer to block them all. It's not easy to develop a white list, not easy to create an ad blocker that is smart enough to merely block the selfish and annoying ads. And so, just as the default for some advertisers is, "if it's not against the law and it's cheap, do it," the new generation of ad blockers is starting from the place of, "delete all."
Ad blockers undermine a fundamental principle of media, one that goes back a hundred years: Free content in exchange for attention. The thing is, the FCC kept the ad part in check with TV, and paper costs did the same thing for magazines and newspapers. But on the web, more and more people have come to believe that the deal doesn't work, and so they're unilaterally abrogating it. They don't miss the ads, and they don't miss the snooping of their data.
This reinforces the fundamental building blocks of growth today:
- The best marketing isn't advertising, it's a well-designed and remarkable product.
- The best way to contact your users is by earning the privilege to contact them, over time.
- Making products for your customers is far more efficient than finding customers for your products.
- Horizontally spread ideas (person to person) are far more effective than top-down vertical advertising.
- More data isn't the point. Data to serve explicit promises is the point.
- Commodity products can't expect to easily build a profitable 'brand' with nothing but repetitive jingles and noise.
- Media properties that celebrate their ads (like Vogue) will continue to thrive, because the best advertising is the advertising we would miss if it was gone.
Media companies have always served the master who pays the bill… the advertiser. At some point, the advertiser will wake up and choose to do business in a new way, and my guess is that the media that we all rely on will change in response. But in the meantime, it seems as though many online consumers have had enough.
September 19, 2015
