Seth Godin's Blog, page 235

Can and should

Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.

The end of the industrial era is opening countless doors. So many doors, in fact, that it's easy to become paralyzed. Without a clear understanding of what you want, it's harder than ever to get it.

Most of the time, we treat our careers like a buffet. "Show me what's available and then I'll decide..."

With the revolution going on all around us, there's so much on the buffet you're likely to just grab something convenient. Better, I think, to decide what matters first, and go do that.

R&D in public

Companies do research and development, particularly large ones. This is an investment, one that fails often but is essential to future growth.

The web is R&D in public. So are apps. Not just for tech companies. For any company that is trying to figure out how its customers think and what they want.

We shouldn't be so quick to excoriate those companies that launch interactive tools that fail. In fact, we should be critical of those that don't.

Consumers and creators

Fifty years ago, the ratio was a million to one.

For every person on the news or on primetime, there were a million viewers.

The explosion of magazines brought the ratio to 100,000:1. If you wrote for a major magazine, you were going to impact a lot of people. Most of us were consumers, not creators.

Cable TV and zines made it 10,000 to one. You could have a show about underwater spearfishing or you could teach people to make hamburgers on donuts. The little star is born.

And now of course, when it's easy to have a blog, or an Youtube account or to push your ideas to the world through social media, the ratio might be 100:1. For every person who sells on Etsy, there are a hundred buyers. For every person who actively tweets, there are a hundred people who mostly consume those tweets. For every hundred visitors to Squidoo, there is one new person building pages.

What does the world look like when we get to the next zero?

Selling the benefits of charity

Everything we do, we do because somehow it benefits us.

We go to work for the satisfaction (I hope) and because we get paid. We smile at a stranger because it feels good to be nice (and perhaps we'll get a smile in return). We pick up litter when no one is looking because telling ourselves a story about being a good person is worth the effort.

Some people have figured out that charity is an incredible bargain. For the time and money it costs, the benefits exceed what could be attained in almost any other way. A bargain compared to chocolate, or an amusement park visit or buying a shiny new car you probably don't need.

For some, the benefit is in the way society respects the donor. Hence buildings named after Andrew Carnegie or Bill Gates. For many, though, hidden charity is worth far more, because the incentives are purer. A donation earns you peace of mind.

I'm fascinated by people who see no benefit in donating to charity, who, in fact, see a negative. My hunch is that for these people, the worldview is: if charity is important, I better give more. If that's true, the thinking goes, then whatever I give isn't going to make me feel good, it's going to make me feel worse... for not giving enough. Easier to just avoid the issue altogether.

I think marketers of causes that do good have a long way to go in selling the public on the core reason to give... don't give because you get a tote bag, or a prize at the charity auction or even a plaque. The scalable unique selling proposition is that being part of the community is worth more than it costs.

Bypassing the leap

Every now and then, a creative act comes out of nowhere, a giant leap, a new way of thinking apparently woven out of a brand new material.

Most of the the time, though, creativity is the act of reassembling many elements that are already known. That's why domain knowledge is so critical.

The screenwriter who understands how to take the build that went into the classic Greg Morris episode of the Dick Van Dyke show and integrate it with the Maurce Chevalier riff from the Marx Bros... Or the way Moby took his encyclopedic knowledge of music and turned into a record that sold millions... if you don't have awareness and an analytical understanding of what worked before, you can't build on it.

That's one of the reasons that the recent incarnation of the Palm failed. The fact that the president of the company had never used an iPhone left them only one out: to make a magical leap.

It's not enough to be aware of the domain you're working in, you need to understand it. Noticing things and being curious about how they work is the single most common trait I see in creative people. Once you can break the components down, you can put them back together into something brand new.

Set the alarm clock the night before

Situational goal adjustment is a real problem.

Don't set the clock when you're tired, set it when you are planning your day. Don't whittle away at your sales goals right after a serious rejection, set them when you're on a roll.

The discipline is in obeying the rule you set when you were in a different mood than you are now. That's what makes it a rule as opposed to a guideline.

History doesn't always repeat itself

...but it usually rhymes.

There's a tendency to confuse the next big thing with the one, it, the last big thing, the end of the line.

Communism, Populism, McCarthyism, Progressivism, Libertarianism...

Impressionism, Cubism, Modernism, Pop, Hyperrealism...

Sufiism, Norse Gods, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Christian Science...

Email, the web, web 2.0, mobile...

Newton, Einstein, string theory...

Newspaper, Radio, TV, the Internet...

Most of the time, we're dealing with a moment, a step in a trend. We fail when we fall in love and believe there is no next step.

The heckler

How dare you.

You should be ashamed of yourself.

Is this the best you can do?

I've written about the lizard brain and my friend Steve talks about the voice of the resistance.

It occurs to me, though, that most of us have to hassle with the heckler.

The heckler keeps a running critique going, amplifying its tone and anger as it goes on endlessly about all the things we shouldn't do, all the things we're not doing enough, and most of all, at our lack of entitlement to do much of anything new or important.

The heckler cannot be eliminated. It's been around since the beginning of our species, and we're hard wired to have it.

What can be done, though, is alter how the rest of the brain reacts or responds to the heckling.

If you engage with the heckler, if you qualify yourself, justify yourself or worst of all, rationalize yourself, the heckler will pounce, turning a small wedge into a giant hole. Like a standup comedian, it's almost impossible to outwit or shut down a dedicated heckler.

But there is a strategy that works. Acknowledge and move on.

When the heckler announces that you're incompetent, unqualified or hardly ready to step forward, think, "oh." And then proceed.

You give it no purchase. No opportunity to escalate. Each jibe is met with "noted."

Over time, the heckler gets quieter, because it just isn't worth the effort.

Delivering on never

I will never miss a deadline

I will never leave a typo

I will never fail to warn you about a possible pitfall

I will never charge you more than the competition

I will never violate a confidence

I will never let you down

I will never be late for a meeting

There are lots of sorts of never you can deliver to a customer. You can't deliver all of them, of course. Picking your never and sticking with it is a fabulous way to position yourself.

When the truth is just around the corner

...what's your posture?

Sometimes, we get close to finding out who we really are, what's the status of our situation, what's holding us back. When one of those conversations is going on, do you lean in, eager for more, or do you back off, afraid of what it will mean?

Do you go out of your way to learn about your habits, relationships and strengths? Or what's driving traffic to your website? Or why you didn't get that job?

When your organization has a chance to see itself as its customers do, do your leaders crowd around, trying to glean every insight they can about the story and your future, or do they prefer the status quo?

There are more mirrors available than ever. Sometimes, though, what's missing is the willingness to take a look.