Seth Godin's Blog, page 136

Let's build a school

Consider a last-minute donation to Room to Read. They will facilitate the building of a school in a village that has no school.

Imagine growing up in a place with no school...

And your donation will be matched dollar for dollar. It's difficult to overestimate the long-term impact of literacy. I've been a supporter for years, and it always feels good.

And.. Some of my colleagues have stepped up and started the Compassion Collective, an urgent cause supporting those most in need from the refugee crisis. Please consider adding your support.

Also: If you get some downtime this vacation, you might want to check out two thank you gifts from me:

My course on business models. It's free for the first 2,000 people who take it this week, happy holidays.

And the persistently popular, if a little low-fidelity, Startup School podcast, recorded live a few years ago. 

            

Powering a digital future

Only twenty years ago, when we first started figuring out the digital landscape, there were no tools. None. 

Sending 400 emails was a feat, and having a website was a little like having a pet monkey. Rare, expensive and difficult.

Now, there are tools. (Scroll down to the see the huge list). Thousands of them. Most cheap, most vibrant, all of them interesting signposts on one version of the road to where we're heading next.

I've spent about ten hours going through this list. Data moves back and forth, information is presented in dozens of ways, systems are robust and can be used by organizations of any size.

The last decades were about everyone becoming a publisher (blogs, photos,videos). Now, everyone is also a digital marketer/data wizard.

Even if you don't use these tools to spread your message or manage your time, know that someone else is going to.

            

Half measures

If you're hungry, half a meal is better than no meal.

But if you need light, half a lightbulb is actually worse than none at all.

If you're hoping for an 8% return on your investment, 4% is a lot better than zero.

And half a home run is worse than nothing.

We make two common mistakes:

Refusing half when it's a whole lot better than nothing, and,

Accepting half when we'd be better off waiting for what we really need.

We are at our best when we set our standards before the offer comes, and when we don't waver in the moment.

            

Training and the infinite return on investment

Training pays.

Sometimes, it's easy to underestimate just how much it pays.

Consider an employee who is going to work 2000 hours for you this year. It's not unusual for an organization to spend only 10 or 20 hours training this person--which means about 1% of their annual workload. 

How much training would it take for this person to be 10% better at her job? If you invest 100 hours (!) it'll pay for itself in just six months. There aren't many investments an organization can make that double in value in a year.

But let's take it one step further:

Imagine a customer service rep. Fully costed out, it might cost $5 for this person to service a single customer by phone. An untrained rep doesn't understand the product, or how to engage, or hasn't been brought up to speed on your systems. As a result, the value delivered in the call is precisely zero (in fact it's negative, because you've disappointed your customer). 

On the other hand, the trained rep easily delivers $30 of brand value to the customer, at a cost, as stated, of $5. So, instead of zero value, there's a profit to the brand of $25. A comparative ROI of infinity.

And of course, the untrained person doesn't fall into this trap once. Instead, it happens over and over, many times a day.

The short-sighted organization decides it's 'saving money' by cutting back training. After all, the short-term thinking goes, what's the point of training people if they're only going to leave. (I'd point out the converse of this--what's the danger of not training the people who stay?)

It's tempting to nod in agreement at these obvious cases (or the similar case of getting, or not getting, a great new job based on how skilled you've trained yourself to be--again, a huge cliff and difference in return). What's not so easy is to take responsibility for our own training.

We've long passed the point where society and our organization are taking responsibility for what we know and how we approach problems. We need to own it for ourselves.

{Can we drip? Next week, starting on the 28th of December, we'll be sending a series of emails to people interested in the next session of the altMBA—how it works, why it works, who's involved. The most recent session is completely oversubscribed, and we'll be doing the next one in March, on a space available basis.

Please sign up for these quick emails before the holidays if you're interested in learning more.}

            

Living in a high-stakes universe

One path to self-motivation is to catastrophize.

After all, if this is the big moment, if everything depends on what's going to happen next, of course you'll need to gear up, focus and drop everything. The stakes are so high...

This is ultimately corrosive. You're crying wolf with yourself.

Over time, the only way to keep up this motivation is to demonize the other, to treat the outside world as an enemy, lying in wait, eager for you to fail. 

And that makes it harder for you to enlist colleagues, because, of course, they can't possibly see the same drama you're seeing, because you're inventing it.

The drama stops helping and starts to undermine your best work.

They call it the emergency room for a reason. The rest of us work in the regular room, where emergencies are rare, not the norm, where goodwill is the default, where few things are actually a matter of life or death.

We're capable of doing great work without the drama. In fact, over time, the lack of drama can enable us to do great work.

            

The edges

Is the universe infinite?

If it's not, the first question a smart person will ask is, "so what happens at the edge?"

That's how we define things... by the moments where they begin and end, by their edges.

This clearly applies not just to the universe, but to every project and concept and institution in our lives.

What does your organization not do?

When does this promotion/product/service end?

What's it like to start? To end it?

Defining the edges of performance and the promises you make defines who you are and what you do.

We live in the middle but we understand at the edges.

            

The next

Two hundred years ago, we had great-great-greats who lived in the dark, without much in the way of healthcare, commerce or opportunity.

Today, we complain that the MRI was chilly, or that the wifi on the transatlantic plane wasn't fast enough or that there's nothing new going on at the mall.

It's human nature to recalibrate. But maybe it's worth fighting that off, for an hour or even a day.

The world around us is uneven, unfair and yes, absolutely, over-the-top amazing. 

Boring is an attitude, not the truth.

Possibility is where you decide it is.

            

Decoding "who is it for?"

When you a tell a story to someone who wants and needs to hear that story, eyes light up, pulses quicken, trust is built and action is taken.

Two examples:

Satya makes and sells hats. Beautiful, bespoke, handmade hats.

But we're a hundred years past the time someone can say, "I make hats," and be done with it.

Some of the questions the marketer needs to ask, questions that amplify the, "who's it for?" mindset:

Are these hats for people who are already shopping for hats?

Are they a gift item for someone who is looking  to please someone who is looking for something new? Proven? Cheaper than it looks? Rare? 

Are they a shopping experience, a bespoke process that is exciting and filled with possibility, just for the person who values both the process and the hat?

Or, are these hats for women who appreciate beauty in any form, and who have already bought all the scarves they can handle? Or perhaps for people who want to buy what the people they admire are buying?

The marketer can change her story, but she can't easily change the worldview of the person she seeks to sell to. It's almost impossible to turn someone who doesn't care about hats (in particular) into someone who cares a lot about hats.

This person the product is for: What do they believe? Who do they trust? What do they seek? What are they afraid of?

Satya is well on her way to decoding this puzzle. 

Second example: Paul makes and sells amplifiers. To an outsider, these amps are ridiculously overbuilt, oversized and overpriced. To some hobbyists, though, they are magical, brilliantly engineered and priced at 90% less than what similar products cost. (!)

The questions, then, are about the story the potential customer tells himself:

Do I seek something corporate, mass produced, powerful, handmade, unique, rare, new, proven, high-value, high-priced, top-of-the-line, mysterious, invisible... Do I want to be able to tell myself a story about these every time I turn them on? Or tell a story to my friends? Ultimately, that story is about me, about my role in society and my vision of myself.

This goes way beyond specs and prices and the measurable. It's about role models and feelings and emotions first, with the words added later, and the machinery (or the felt) added last.

In Paul's case, he and his team have been direct and consistent in celebrating the nature of the design and the designer. They haven't said to the world, "here it is, it's for everyone," instead, they've said, "this is our story, this is who built it and who it's for, it might be for you if you're the person that resonates with this sort of story."

Most inventors and marketers start with what they have (the stuff) and try to work backward to the 'who is it for' question. It makes a lot more sense to go the other direction. Identify a set of fears, dreams and attitudes and then figure out what sort of story fits that lock in a way that delights the consumer. Then go build that.

Not just hats and amps. This thinking is also where Lululemon, Nike and AeroPress came from. Maybe your next project, too.

            

Paying the smart phone tax

It might be costing you more than you think.

Urgent or important?: Your phone has been optimized to highlight the urgent. It buzzes and beeps. It sorts things. It brings everyone else's urgent things right under your nose, reminding you about them until they become your urgent things. A full day on your phone is almost certainly a day where you buried the important in favor of the urgent.

The moment: The smart phone brings the world to us, in our pocket. But if the entire world is there, presenting its urgencies, it's harder than ever to be here, right now, in this moment.

Brevity over density: Just about everything produced on a smart phone is done in a hurry, because there's something urgent happening just a click away. As a result, we favor brevity. Brevity in what we consume (LOL) and brevity in what we produce (GTG). It's not clear that brevity ought to be our goal in all things, or in how we spend hours of each day.

The filter bubble: Even more than on the web, the closed gardens of the smart phone world mean that we're most likely to consume ideas that we already understand, from people we already agree with. Not a path to growth, certainly.

Off the hook: Because it's so easy to hit 'send' and because there's so much noise, we can easily relieve the tension of creation with a simple click. Easy in, easy out, easy delete.

Like most things that are taxed, smart phones are often worth it, creating connections and giving us information when we need it. Perhaps, though, turning our phones off for six hours a day would be a useful way to cornering us into creating work we can't live without. 

            

Regrets as fuel

If regrets about yesterday's decisions and actions help you do better work today, then they've served a useful purpose.

"I wish I'd taken that job."

"I should have been more careful before I shipped that out the door."

"I could have been more kind."

    "I'll do better next time."

Most of the time, though, we use regrets to keep us from moving forward. They paralyze us in the face of possibility. We don't want to do something if it reminds us of that black hole we have in our past.

It's useful if you can forgive yourself, because the regrets you're carrying around are keeping you from holding onto the possibility that you can contribute even more tomorrow.