Seth Godin's Blog, page 106

Do what you're good at, or...

get really good at what you do.

You have nearly unlimited strategic choices and options about your career and what your organization does.

Which means you can focus on doing things you are truly good at.

Or, if a particular task, project or career is important to you, you can do the hard work to get good at it.

But it makes no sense at all to grumble and do something poorly. To insist that the competition is playing unfairly. To try to persuade your market that their standards make no sense... 

The market is selfish. It doesn't care a whit about how hard you're working or how difficult the task is. If someone else is consistently telling a better story (and delivering on it), the market will find them.

            

Breakage vs. references

Years ago, I asked fabled direct marketer Joe Sugarman about the money-back guarantee he offered on the stuff he sold through magazine ads. He said 10% of the people who bought asked for their money back... and if any product dipped below 10%, he'd make the claims more outrageous until it got back up. He told me that this was a sweet spot, somewhere between amazing people with promises and disappointing them with reality.

That's one path.

The other path is the insurance company that points out that 99% of its customers would recommend them--after filing a claim. Imagine that standard: dealing with the emotions and financial impact of an insurance claim, knowing that you need to maintain a 99% delight standard.

That's the other path.

You can't do both. Either you dazzle with as much hype as you can get away with, or you invest in delighting people, regardless of how difficult it is.

            

Indomitable is a mirage

One seductive brand position is the posture of being indomitable. Unable to be subdued, incapable of loss, the irresistible force and the immovable object, all in one.

The public enjoys rooting for this macho ideal. Superman in real life, but with the rage of a caged tiger. It is our avenger, a Jungian symbol come to life.

This is Norman Mailer or Mike Tyson. It's Wells Fargo or VW.

There are problems.

First, it doesn't scale. When an indomitable brand or figure encounters an obstacle that can't be overcome, suddenly, the promise is hard to keep. And if the indomitable begins to succeed, he gets hungrier for the next conquest, making this failure inevitable.

Second, it's a bad strategy. In the long run, resilience always outperforms sheer strength. The instincts of the indomitable brand are to win every single battle, no matter how small. If you have armor, you will have chinks in that armor, and if those chinks distract or disable, the hero will stumble and eventually fall.

Mostly, though, the indomitable brand is self aware, and causes his own problems. The pressure is on for the next conquest, the next opponent to humiliate. The endless need for more people to bully, more opponents to vanquish, and more fights to pick (it's fuel) leads to drama, but not useful output.

If you must constantly create an 'other' to oppose, your tribe gets smaller.

If you can't say, "I made a mistake," then it's incredibly difficult to lead. You end up managing instead, picking small fights, skirting the rules and blaming the ref.

Ultimately, the brand that embraces the position of indomitable ends up weak and afraid, because there's no way out, nowhere left to go.

            

Enough ethics?

Most companies seek to be more profitable.

They seek to increase their Key Performance Indicators. More referrals, more satisfaction, more loyalty. They seek to increase their market share, their dividends, their stock price.

But ethics?

In fact, most companies strive to be just ethical enough. To get ethics to the point where no one is complaining, where poor ethics aren't harming their KPIs.

What if instead...

Being more ethical was the most important KPI?

Perhaps profit and market share and the rest could merely be tools in service of the ability to make things better, to treat people ever more fairly, to do work that we're more proud of each day.

It might be worth trying.

            

Unweasonable

Weasel words damage trust. And weasels are worth avoiding.

There are two traps to look out for:

Promotional weasel words. Every experienced marketing copywriter knows how to use them. "As much as half off," means, "There is at least one item on sale for half of some price of dubious origin. Everything else is any price we want it to be."

When you say, "nearly 500," it's a totally different message than, "500."

Words like, "renowned," "fabled," and "deluxe" are weasely. They let you wriggle out of your promise.

Resumes are a natural habitat for weasel words, fyi.

You can ban the weasel words if you like. It takes a leap of courage, and then things get easier.

The other kind:

When you try to enter into an agreement with a weasel, you'll need to over-lawyer and over-document every element of your interaction, because he'll be working overtime to rewrite, redefine and generally squirm out of what he said, what he promised and what you expect.

If you can, don't work with weasels.

First step: don't be one.

HT to the late Herschell Gordon Lewis for the original term. He was a truly nice guy and a great teacher of copywriting, which might be surprising given his other career as a gross-out movie pioneer.

            

Overdraft protection

The problem with taking all we can get away with is that we fail to invest in a cushion, in goodwill, in a reserve for when things don't go the way we expect.

Short-term thinking pays no attention to the possible need for trust. It pushes us to take what we can right now, without regard for tomorrow.

The magic of overdraft protection is that it almost always costs less in advance than we'd be willing to pay later.

What goes around...

            

Dropping the narrative

Okay, you don't like what your boss did yesterday or last week or last month. But today, right now, sitting across the table, what's happening?

Narrating our lives, the little play-by-play we can't help carrying around, that's a survival mechanism. But it also hotwires our feelings, changes our posture, limits our possibilities.

What does this human feel right now? What opportunities to make a connection, to grow, to impact exist that we've ignored because of the story we are telling ourselves about them?

The narrative is useful as long as it's useful, helping you solve problems and move forward. But when it reinforces bad habits or makes things smaller, we can drop it and merely be present, right here, right now.

            

Fully baked

In medical school, an ongoing lesson is that there will be ongoing lessons. You're never done. Surgeons and internists are expected to keep studying for their entire career—in fact, it's required to keep a license valid.

Knowledge workers, though, the people who manage, who go to meetings, who market, who do accounting, who seek to change things around them—knowledge workers often act as if they're fully baked, that more training and learning is not just unnecessary but a distraction.

The average knowledge worker reads fewer than one business book a year.

On the other hand, the above-average knowledge worker probably reads ten.

Show me your bookshelf, or the courses you take, or the questions you ask, and I'll have a hint as to how much you care about levelling up.

            

The ripples

Every decision we make changes things. The people we befriend, the examples we set, the problems we solve...

Sometimes, if we're lucky, we get to glimpse those ripples as we stand at the crossroads. Instead of merely addressing the urgency of now, we can take a moment to focus on how a quiet insight, overlooked volunteer work or a particularly welcome helping hand moves so many people forward. For generations.

How did you get to where you are? Who is going to go even further because of you?

Thank you for passing it forward.

            

Wedding syndrome

Running a business is a lot more important than starting one.

Choosing and preparing for the job you'll do for the next career is a much more important task than getting that job. Serving is more important than the campaign.

And a marriage is always more important than a wedding.

It's tempting to focus on the product launch, on the interview, on the next thing. Tempting, but ultimately a waste.

Our culture is organized around transitions, but they're a distraction. What it says on your wedding invitation doesn't matter a whole lot in the long run.