Seth Godin's Blog, page 190

If you want to get paid for your freelance work

...then access to tools is no longer sufficient. Everyone you compete with has access to a camera, a keyboard, a guitar. Just because you know how to use a piece of software or a device doesn't mean that there isn't an amateur who's willing to do it for free, or an up and comer who's willing to do it for less.

...then saying "how dare you" is no longer a useful way to cajole the bride away from asking her friend to take pictures at the wedding, or the local non-profit to have a supporter typeset the gala's flyer or to keep a rock star from inviting volunteers on stage.

...then you ought to find and lead a tribe, build a base of people who want you, and only you, and are willing to pay for it.

...then you need to develop both skills and a reputation for those skills that make it clear to (enough) people that an amateur solution isn't nearly good enough, because you're that much better and worth that much more.

...then you should pick yourself and book yourself and publish yourself and stand up and do your work, and do it in a way for which there are no substitutes.

It's true, if someone wants professional work, then he will need to hire professionals.

But it's also true that as amateurs are happy to do the work that

professionals used to charge for, the best (and only) path to getting paid is to

redefine the very nature of professional work.

Scarcity is a great thing for those that possess something that's scarce. But when scarcity goes away, you'll need more than that.

All the slow hedgehogs are dead

For fifty years, it was a national disgrace.

Motor cars in the UK often left behind road kill. Hedgehogs would meander across the road and splat.

Today, you hardly see that anymore. One reason is that there are fewer hedgehogs due to suburbanization. The real reason, though, is that slow hedgehogs became former hedgehogs, which meant that they were unable to produce more slow hedgehog kids. The new hedgehogs are fast.

Draw your own organizational analogy.

Two questions behind every disagreement

Are we on the same team? and

What's the right path forward?

Most of time, all we talk about is the path, without having the far more important but much more difficult conversation about agendas, goals and tone.

Is this a matter of respect? Power? Do you come out ahead if I fail? Has someone undercut you? Do we both want the same thing to happen here?

The reason politics in my country is diverging so much from useful governance has nothing to do with useful conversations and insight into what the right path is. It's because defeat and power and humiliation and money have replaced "doing what works for all of us" as the driving force in politics.

If you feel disrespected, the person you disagree with is not going to be a useful partner in figuring out what the right path going forward might be. If one party (employee/customer/investor) only wins when the other party loses, what's the point of talking about anything but that?

Deal with the agenda items and the dignity problems first before you try to work out the right strategic choices.

Memory and media

Not too many millenia ago, just about everything we remembered happened to us. In real life.

Books and then radio and TV changed that. Orson Welles demonstrated that a radio drama could create feelings (and then memories of those feelings) that were as powerful to some as the real thing.

Eleven years ago, we all experienced an event of such enormity that it still haunts us. Some escaped, some saw it out their office window while others watched on TV.

Just a decade later, we're far more likely to both celebrate and generate our memories in 140 character bursts, or in short updates or in a 'breaking news' email. The short version amplifies our other memories. Neil Armstrong's death shook us not because we knew him, but because we remember watching him on TV... The blip of information alone was sufficient to give us pause.

A few generations ago, the only music most people heard was music we heard in person. Today, the most famous (and in some ways, important) people in our lives are people we will never meet.

As we continually replace real life with ever shorter digital updates, what happens to the memories we build for ourselves and the people we serve? More and more, we don't remember what actually happened to us, but what we've encountered digitally. It scales, but does it matter in the same way?

Shorter

Please don't include the phrase, "I'll keep this brief," in your remarks.

Please don't quote Robert Browning or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at us. If less is more, just give us less, not an explanation.

Say what you need to say, then leave. Less is actually more, and the length of your speech or your document has nothing at all to do with your impact or your status.

What to obsess over

They use stopwatches at McDonald's. They know, to the second, how long it should take to make a batch of fries. And they use spreadsheets, too, to whittle the price of each fry down by a hundredth of a cent if they can. They're big and it matters.

Small businesspeople often act like direct marketers. They pick a number and they obsess over it. In direct mail, of course, it's the open rate or the conversion rate. For a freelancer or small business person, it might be your bank balance or the growth in weekly sales.

I think for most businesses that want to grow, it's way too soon to act like a direct marketer and pick a single number to obsess about.

The reason is that these numbers demand that you start tweaking. You can tweak a website or tweak an accounts payable policy and make numbers go up, which is great, but it's not going to fundamentally change your business.

I'd have you obsess about things that are a lot more difficult to measure. Things like the level of joy or relief or gratitude your best customers feel. How much risk your team is willing to take with new product launches. How many people recommended you to a friend today...

What are you tracking? If you track concepts, your concepts are going to get better. If you track open rates or clickthrough, then your subject lines are going to get better. Up to you.

Worth doing?

One reason to do something is because you get paid to do it.

But it's sad to think that this might be the only reason to do something.

Now that you've got a skillset and trust and leverage and a following and the tools to make something happen, are you going to invest your heart and soul into something that's important or waste it selling something you're not proud of?

A simple truth about photo albums

When you hand someone a photo album or a yearbook, the first thing they will do is seek out their own picture.

Knowing that, the question is: how often are you featuring the photo, name, needs or wants of your customers where everyone (or least the person you're catering to) can see them?

Thinking about supermodels

Models are fairly generic placeholders, attractive men and women who anonymously walk down the runway at a fashion show or stand up for a photo shoot. It's surprisingly unglamorous and isn't particularly steady or financially rewarding.

Supermodels, on the other hand, are a relatively recent innovation, and they are in a totally different (financial) category. The interesting thing is that everyone benefits: the model makes a lot more money, the advertiser gains more credibility from using the known face and the audience gets the frisson of recognition that comes from celebrity. Supermodels aren't necessarily prettier, they're merely more famous, a niche that serves all the parties.

There's a leap between model and supermodel. There isn't really a stable niche for reallygoodmodel and extremelygoodmodel. You are either seen as worth the super premium or you're not. This quantum leap from one state to the other makes it an unpredictable career, one fraught with risk, because you never know when you're going to pop.

You've probably guessed that supermodel status exists in many fields. Stocks, brand names, consultants, doctors, even dog trainers.

The leap must be an intentional one. You don't walk there. You leap.

The soapbox and the city

Cities work because they create collisions between and among diverse individuals. Ideas go to cities to be born and to be spread, and the chaos that bubbles just under the surface feeds those ideas. The web, at its most effective, is a digital city, a place where access is equal and ideas race and connect and morph.

If you want to find creative work, go to a city. If you want to find inspiration, expose yourself to diversity, not a bubble. The city is chaotic, without much of a filter.

The soapbox, on the other hand, is the amplified voice of a single speaker. The soapbox is the newspaper with subscribers, the Twitter account with followers, the blog with readers. A soapbox cannot ever scale to be like the city, because given the chance, the mob, attracted by the attention that comes with the soapbox, will grab the microphone and create nothing but noise. Open mic night is an interesting concept, but it never sells out Madison Square Garden.

Everyone deserves their own soapbox. The web has handed everyone a microphone and said, "here, speak up." But everyone doesn't deserve their own audience. That's something that's earned. Once you're on your soapbox, by all means take inspiration from the city. Learn from the diverse voices you hear. But your soapbox is yours, and the people who listen to you came to hear you, not everyone.

Access isn't really the issue when it comes to soapboxes. The issue is whether cultural and social forces will further push those with something to say (which is every resident of the city, which is all of us) to patiently and clearly say it, to build the audience that they are able to.

Your soapbox might be the reputation you have in the comments section of a favorite blog, or your page on a social networking site. It might be those that listen to you in the conference room of your organization. But it's yours.

For the first time in the history of media, those that are able to consume the media are also able to create it. That's a powerful (and thus frightening) choice.

One day soon, it's possible that corporate interests will impose barriers on soapbox access, all in an effort to reclaim power for themselves. Until then, the race is on to build your tribe, to tirelessly connect and to earn an audience that wants to hear from you.