Seth Godin's Blog, page 219

The more or less choice

I think it comes down to one or the other:

How little can I get away with?

vs.

How much can I do?

Surprisingly, they both take a lot of work. The closer you get to either edge, the more it takes. That's why most people settle for the simplest path, which is do just enough to remain unnoticed.

No one can maximize on every engagement, every project, every customer and every opportunity. The art of it, I think, is to be rigorous about where you're prepared to overdeliver, and not get hooked on doing it for all... because then you just become another mediocrity, easily overlooked.

That means more "no." More, "no, I can't take that on, because to do so means not dramatically overdelivering on what I'm doing now."

And it means more "yes." More, "yes, I'm able to confront my fear and my competing priorities and dramatically step up my promises and my willingness to keep them."

An empty Kindle...

More than 5,000,000 people got a Kindle today. If you're looking for something to put on it, I've been working hard on that all year... (plus some bonus titles worth a download.)

Have fun!

Gift wrapped

A wrapped present is tranformed when it is opened. Anticipation turns into information, and frequently, one is worth far more than the other.

Too often, we overlook the value of imagination and dreams and the _____. We figure, as marketers or managers or leaders or engineers that all we have to do is meet the spec, fill in the blank and we can prove we did a good job.

Often, though, the story a person tells herself is worth more that the object itself.

Merry

You can't be merry by yourself.

Sure, you can be content, happy, possibly even delirious. But merriment requires a group, and that group is almost always a group you can see and touch, one that's sharing the same molecules of air, face to face.

The digital revolution continues to get deeper, wider and more important. But it has made no progress at all at increasing merriment. That's up to us.

Firemen, donuts and meetings

When a building is burning down, fireman coordinate their actions, make decisions and save lives.

They do this without Aeron desk chairs or Dunkin Donuts. They do it without subcommittees, McKinsey studies or input from the boss in another city.

To quote Al Pittampalli, "why bother going to a meeting if you're not prepared to change your mind?" To which I'd add, "Don't bother having a meeting if you're not there to change or make a decision right now."

Somewhere along the way, meetings changed into events where we wait for someone to take responsibility (while everyone else dives for cover).

How would you do it differently if the building were burning down? Because it is.

Unexpected turbulence

Is there really any other kind?

If we see turbulence coming, we tend to avoid it. The art is in knowing that turbulence might come and looking forward to it, bracing for it and embracing it at the same time.

If your plan will only succeed if there is no turbulence at any time, it's probably not a very good plan (either that or you're not going anywhere interesting.)

Trustiness

We're all looking for someone to trust. People and institutions that will do what they say and say what they mean.

Banks used to use marble pillars and armed guards to make it clear that our money was safe. Doctors put diplomas on the wall and wear white smocks. Institutions and relationships don't work without trust. It's not an accident that a gold standard in business is being able to do business on a handshake.

Today, though, it's easier than ever to build a facade of trust but not actually deliver. "Read the fine print," the financial institutions, cruise ship operators and business partners tell us after they've failed to honor what we thought they promised.

It's incredibily difficult to build a civil society on the back of "read the fine print." Emptor fidem works so much better than caveat emptor. When we have to spend all our time watching our back and working with lawyers, it's far more challenging to get anything done--and it makes building a business and a brand infinitely more difficult.

The question that needs to be asked by the marketer is, "are we doing this to create the appearance of trust, or is this actually something trustworthy, something we're proud to do?"

Building trust is expensive. You can call it an expense or an investment, or merely cut corners and work on trustiness instead.

Trust is built when no one is looking, when you think you have the option of cutting corners and when you find a loophole. Trustiness is what happens when you use trust as a PR tool.

The difference should be obvious. Trust experienced is remarkable, trustiness once discovered leaves a bad taste for even your most valued customers.

The perverse irony is this: the more you work on your trustiness, the harder you fall once people discover that they were tricked.

(With a hat tip to Colbert)

The new lazy journalism

When journalism was local, the math of reporting was pretty simple: you found a trend, an event or an issue that was important and you wrote about it. After all, you were the voice to your readers. Being in sync with a hundred or a thousand print journalists around the world was important, otherwise your readers woul'd be left out of a story everyone else knew about. And being in sync let a reporter know she was working on the right stories.

It wasn't lazy. It was smart. Your job was to report to the people in your town first, and to report what would be important tomorrow, which was the same thing everyone in every other town was doing.

But it led to events like this one:

Of course, now there is pretty much no such thing as local when it comes to news. Anyone in the world can read about anything in the world. As a result, this habit of being in sync completely undermines what we need from professional journalists.

How many times have I read the story about Louis CK in the last week? Did I need a newspaper to write precisely the same story days after I read it for the first time? How much do we care about the race for 'first' when first is now measured in seconds or perhaps minutes?

We don't need paid professionals to do retweeting for us. They're slicing up the attention pie thinner and thinner, giving us retreaded rehashes of warmed over news, all hoping for a bit of attention because the issue is trending. We can leave that to the unpaid, I think.

The hard part of professional journalism going forward is writing about what hasn't been written about, directing attention where it hasn't been, and saying something new.

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No one ever bought anything in an elevator

The purpose of an elevator pitch isn't to close the sale.

The goal isn't even to give a short, accurate, Wikipedia-standard description of you or your project.

And the idea of using vacuous, vague words to craft a bland mission statement is dumb.

No, the purpose of an elevator pitch is to describe a situation or solution so compelling that the person you're with wants to hear more even after the elevator ride is over.