Seth Godin's Blog, page 16

Getting the word out

For some, this is the holy grail of marketing.

If only more people knew what you know.

If only they were aware of what you have to offer, of the work you can share.

Perhaps you can get more people to click on your video, read your tweet or see your Instagram.

Alas, awareness is not action.

Everyone reading this is aware that Peru is a country. But that doesn’t mean you’ve visited recently, or have plans to go soon.

Everyone reading this is aware that turnips are a root vegetable. But knowing they exist doesn’t mean you’re going to have them for dinner.

Awareness is important, but it is insufficient.

Action comes from tension, desire and fear. Action is the hard part.

            

The honor code

Does introducing an honor code presume that the people involved have honor, or is it designed to create a space where honor can develop?

An honor code: The simple expectation that we trust you, that you call your own fouls, that you act honorably even if you think no one is watching…

As we think about implementing this, we need to decide between, “people are so dishonorable, it makes no sense to trust them” and, “the only way to help people become more honorable is to trust them.”

A similar question: Is it foolish to build a school that relies on students to take responsibility, to learn for the sake of learning, to lead–even though we know that this isn’t what they’ve been trained to do since birth?

The chasm is, “kids only want to do the minimum, what’s on the test…” vs. “if we want students to develop a desire to actually learn, we’re going to have stop rewarding them for just what’s on the test.”

One more:

Should employers say, “the people who apply for jobs are distrustful and are so used to being overworked, manipulated and mistreated that we need to offer work that treats people like cogs, with tests, measurements and demerits,” or do we take a risk and trust them to lead? Perhaps the long-term approach of, “let’s treat people as we’d like to be treated, and trust them to use their best judgment” will actually change things…

And in all three cases, when it doesn’t work the first time, we have the same choice again. And again.

To trust people, to raise the bar, to insist on people finding their best selves.

Because that’s the best way to make things better.

            

Data is expensive

The iHome alarm clock, common in hotels, shows a small PM when the time is after 12 noon.

I arrived at my hotel at 7 pm, carefully setting the alarm for 6 am the next morning.

Of course, I failed to note that the tiny ‘pm’ wasn’t showing when I set the alarm, which means when I was setting the alarm, the clock thought it was currently 7 am, and the next morning, when 6 am rolled around, it thought the local time was 6 pm and didn’t bother to ring.

That’s as complicated to think through as it is to type, which is my point.

Rule 1: always set two alarms.

But the bigger takeaway is that AM/PM on a hotel clock is not only useless, it’s a problem waiting to happen. There are 2,000 clocks in this hotel. Who’s going to check them all?

The clock would do its job far better if there weren’t an AM/PM data bit.

Data isn’t free.

The microwave in my office also reports AM or PM. If you need the clock in the microwave to tell you whether it’s morning or night, you have bigger problems than a microwave can fix for you.

The metaphor is pretty clear: more data isn’t always better. In fact, in many cases, it’s a costly distraction or even a chance to get the important stuff wrong.

Here are the three principles:

First, don’t collect data unless it has a non-zero chance of changing your actions.

Second, before you seek to collect data, consider the costs of processing that data.

Third, acknowledge that data collected isn’t always accurate, and consider the costs of acting on data that’s incorrect.

Strip away all insignificant digits.

 

[PS An early in the new year reminder that the ShipIt Journal that moo.com created continues to help people make a ruckus around the world.]

            

Are you selling to a professional or an amateur?

A professional is going to buy from someone like you. They’re going to have a process to review the process, a method, an experienced approach to obtaining what they need. A professional isn’t going to think she can do it herself and isn’t going to make it an emergency.

An amateur, on the other hand, may or may not follow any of those principles. An amateur is comparing you to what? A miracle? To free? To something in between?

Professionals run the procurement process at Pottery Barn. Amateurs buy a new house every fifteen years. Professionals buy from other professionals. Amateurs ask friends for advice.

At scale, a large company in B2B selling has a multi-year approach to finding and working with professionals. Many talented soloists often can’t afford to work as patiently and so they often are exposed to amateurs.

It’s okay to sell to amateurs, but one should do it with open eyes.

When you don’t get the gig, it’s not because of something you did wrong at any particular meeting with an amateur… the mistake might simply be that you’re having these meetings with amateurs at all. Or that you’re going to amateur meetings expecting to be meeting with a professional.

There’s a way to optimize the sales pitch and even better, the service itself for when you are hoping to acquire an amateur on the way up, a chance to turn him into a pro. But perhaps your frustration is that you thought he was a pro in the first place…

Different stories for different people.

            

The $37,000 latte

If you live in the city and grab a coffee or a snack every afternoon for about $4, it’s a vivid example of the cost of debt.

You’re either a little behind or a little ahead.

Over ten years, if you’re funding that daily purchase with ongoing credit card debt, at $1,000 a year, it’ll cost you $24,408.40, and you might never find the means to repay the debt.

On the other hand, if that same $1,000 went into a low-cost investment fund that paid about 7% a year, you’d end up with $13,816.45 in the bank.

That’s because interest compounds. It’s because banks like to charge more than they pay out. And it’s mostly because we’re very aware of the short-term and happily ignore the long term.

            

The repetition of stories

It’s not difficult to maintain a grey cloud and a sullen outlook. The event is long over, but the story remains.

A proven approach is to keep repeating the narrative that led us ever deeper into this memory hole. As with a missing tooth, we probe that spot, over and over, examining it from all angles, again and again, in order to keep the story fresh.

On the other hand, forgotten stories have little power.

And the same approach works for a feeling of optimism and possibility. Repeating stories (to ourselves and others) about good fortune and generosity makes those stories more powerful.

What happens to us matters a great deal, but even more powerful are the stories we repeat about what happened.

            

Opportunity costs just went up

Every choice has a price.

If you have $100 to invest and you buy this stock instead of that bond, the interest you gave up in making your choice is your opportunity cost.

At the dinner buffet, you can take as much food as you like, but you can only consume so much food. Which means that eating the jambalaya means you won’t have room to eat a dosa. That’s your opportunity cost.

Opportunity cost is the key to making decisions. Once you know the value of the alternatives you’re giving up, you can be smarter about what you’re choosing to do.

Time is finite. We only get the next hour once, and then it’s gone forever. So choices about how we spend or invest our time come with real opportunity costs.

A car with a bumper sticker that says, “I’d rather be surfing,” tells us a lot about the driver (including the inconsistency of his or her actions). But it’s proof that each of us wrestles with opportunity costs every day.

With that in mind, the cost of watching a cat video on YouTube is real indeed.

And the internet has raised the opportunity cost of time spent.

Our access to the world of learning and online resources means that the alternatives are far more valuable than they used to be.

You’re about to spend 11 minutes perfecting an email to a customer. You could do a 90% ideal job in one minute, and the extra 10 minutes spent will increase the ‘quality’ of the email to 92%.

The alternative? Now, you could spend that ten minutes reading a chapter of an important new book. You could learn a few new functions in Javascript. You could dive deep into the underlying economics of your new project…

Or perhaps you’re about to spend an hour manually cleaning a database or tweaking some image files. You do this every day.

Today, though, you could invest an hour in learning to build a macro that will do this recurring job in just a minute a day from now on. Or you could figure out how to hire a trusted freelancer who will do the job on a regular basis for far less than it’s costing you to do it yourself.

Next week, the choices you made at the buffet won’t matter much. But if you learn a new skill, you own it forever.

Human beings don’t like thinking about opportunity costs. As they approach infinity, it’s easy to get paralyzed. As they get harder to compute, it’s difficult to focus and be mindful of the choices already made. That’s a challenge.

But worse, far worse, is to ignore them and fail to learn and connect and level up.

            

Contractor yield

Imagine you’ve got a set of plans for a simple one-family home. And imagine that you’re a developer with acres of land waiting to be subdivided.

You could hire four different contractors and have them build that house on four corners of your land.

Within weeks, you’d know which ones were efficient, careful and effective. You’d easily be able to measure their productivity, because they have access to the same suppliers and are building the same house.

Is there any doubt at all that the best of them would be dramatically better than the worst? It’s not hard to imagine a 3x difference between the two.

And yet, in most fields, like heart surgery, copyediting and continuing education, we fail to do this. In others, though, once we start doing it, it feels like we get carried away and can’t stop.

Just because it’s easy to measure doesn’t mean we should (and the opposite is even more true).

            

Relentlessly lowering expectations

We always compare performance on a relative basis. “Well, it’s better than it was yesterday…”

Toddlers, for example, seem like geniuses compared to the babies they used to be.

Some people around us have embraced a strategy of always lowering expectations so that their mediocre effort is seen as acceptable. Over time, we embrace the pretty good memo or the decent leadership moment, because it’s so much better than we feared.

And some? Some relentlessly raise expectations, establishing a standard that it’s hard to imagine exceeding. And then they do.

If you’ve been cornered into following, working with or serving someone in the first group, an intervention can be rewarding. For you and for the person trapped in this downward cycle.

Raising our expectations is a fine way to raise performance as well.

            

Magical technologies

Cars are many times more dangerous than airplanes. More dangerous per mile, more dangerous to bystanders, more dangerous in every way.

And yet there are very few people who say that they are afraid of being in a car. And yet we spend a fortune on the FAA and more than $8 billion a year in the US on the security theater we do before every flight. We carry life jackets on planes even though they’re needed about once every 33,000,000 flights.

That’s because flying is magic and driving is just riding a bike or a horse, but with a motor.

The challenge of the self-driving car isn’t that it’s a car with no driver. Actually, the self-driving car is an airplane with wheels.

Magical technology.

When a magic technology (one that we don’t believe we can understand) arrives and it feels like life or death, our instinct is to freak out, to make up stories, and to seek reassurance. Vaccines have had this challenge for generations. Because they’re long-lasting, involve a shot and feel like magic, we treat them totally differently than the unregulated market for placebos and patent medicines, regardless of their efficacy.

If you’re lucky enough to invent a magical technology, be prepared for a long journey.  Decades ago, I worked with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke on two different projects. Asimov was truly embarrassed that he was afraid to fly. And Clarke was famous for saying, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

What he left out was, “Magical technologies that involve media-friendly disasters are the hardest ones to sell.”