Seth Godin's Blog, page 245

Self directed effort is the best kind

How much are you paying for a drill sergeant?

Perhaps you can burn 500 calories on the treadmill before you give up for the day. With a personal coach, though, you could do 700. The trainer gets you to exert more effort.

You wake up on a Monday morning after a long hard weekend of misbehaving. You have a splitting headache. You can easily call in sick, no one will freak out. But then you remember that there's a $500 bonus at stake if you keep your attendance perfect. You make the effort because someone else is bribing you.

On the playground, it's tempting to rip into a kid who stole the swing from you. You're about to whack him, but then you see your mom watching. With a great deal of effort, you walk away.

Effort's ephemeral, hard to measure and incredibly difficult to deliver on a regular basis. So we hire a trainer or a coach or a boss and give up our freedom and our upside for someone to whip us into shape. Obviously, you give up part of what you create to the trainer/coach/boss in exchange for their oversight.

Has it become a crutch? Are you addicted to a taskmaster, to someone else's to do list, to short term external rewards that sell your long-term plans short? If no one is watching, are you helpless, just a web surfing, time wasting couch potato? Who owns the extra work you do now that you're being directed?

There's an entire system organized around the idea that we're too weak to deliver effort without external rewards and punishment. If you only grow on demand, you're selling yourself short. If you're only as good as your current boss/trainer/sergeant, you've given over the most important thing you have to someone else.

The thing I care the most about: what do you do when no one is looking, what do you make when it's not an immediate part of your job... how many push ups do you do, just because you can?

Marketing to nobody

Nobody wears a watch any more.

Nobody wears a tie either.

Nobody shops at a bookstore, at least nobody I know.

The market of nobody is big indeed. You can do really well selling to nobody if you do your homework. In fact, most companies selling to nobody outperform those that are trying to sell to everyone.

Selling vs. inviting

Selling is often misunderstood, largely by people who would be a lot more comfortable merely inviting.

If I invite you to a wedding, or a party, or to buy a $500,000 TV ad for $500, there's no resistance on your part. Either you jump at the chance and say yes, or you have a conflict and say no. It's not my job to help you overcome your fear of commitment, to help you see the ultimate value and most of all, to work with you as you persuade yourself and others to do something that might just work.

If the marketing and product development team do a great job, selling is a lot easier... so easy it might be called inviting. The guy at the counter of the Apple store selling the iPad2 isn't really selling them at all. Hey, there's a line out the door of people with money in their pockets. I'm inviting you to buy this, if you don't want it, next!

The real estate broker who says that the house would sell if only he could get below market pricing and a pre-approved mortgage is avoiding his job.

The salesperson's job: Help people overcome their fear so they can commit to something they'll end up glad they invested in.

The goal of a marketer ought to be to make it so easy to be a salesperson, you're merely an inviter. The new marketing is largely about this--creating a scenario where you don't even need salespeople. (Until you do.)

Selling is a profession. It's hard work. Ultimately, it's rewarding, because the thing you're selling delivers real value to the purchaser, and your job is to counsel them so they can get the benefit.

But please... don't insist that the hard work be removed from your job to allow you to become an inviter. That's great work if you can get it, but it's not a career.

In search of six major brands

For a high-profile project (can't announce it yet) for charity that we're doing in September, we're looking for six companies with significant marketing budgets that want to participate and be featured. Household names, or brands on the way to becoming one are ideal.

If you're the CMO or part of the team, and want to know more, drop a note to Lauryn by Wednesday. Thanks.

Share your confusions

If you're building for digital, for a place where you can't possibly be present to guide or to answer questions, I think it's vital you have someone who can review your work. Same for instruction manuals, secret ballots and road signs.

Not to make suggestions to make it better (what do they know?) but to share their confusions.

I don't think that's a phrase, but it should be. Share your confusions is a way of asking someone to dissect your work and point out what's not totally clear.

How long is your long run?

The bank robber may have a long run of just thirty minutes. Stealing money today appears worth it because tomorrow is just too far away to consider.

There are organizations and nations that have been around for hundreds of years and expect to be around for another thousand. They have a long run a little longer than yours.

I think we can agree on what the short run is. The question worth asking your brand, your boss or your family is: what's the long run? Most of the time, we err on the side of short.

What's high school for?

Perhaps we could endeavor to teach our future the following:

How to focus intently on a problem until it's solved.

The benefit of postponing short-term satisfaction in exchange for long-term success.

How to read critically.

The power of being able to lead groups of peers without receiving clear delegated authority.

An understanding of the extraordinary power of the scientific method, in just about any situation or endeavor.

How to persuasively present ideas in multiple forms, especially in writing and before a group.

Project management. Self-management and the management of ideas, projects and people.

Personal finance. Understanding the truth about money and debt and leverage.

An insatiable desire (and the ability) to learn more. Forever.

Most of all, the self-reliance that comes from understanding that relentless hard work can be applied to solve problems worth solving.

Seeing the truth when it might be invisible

I'll believe it when I see it.

This is a problem.

It didn't used to be. It used to be a totally fine strategy to work your way through life only believing what you could see and touch, only caring about what impacted your life right now.

Two things changed:

First, over time, the base of knowledge we have about the world has increased exponentially, and that knowledge compounds. Electrons and ozone and game theory and databases might all be invisible, they might be beyond your understanding, but they're still important, still looming right at the edges of the life you live right now.

And second, of course, is the notion of a worldwide web of information, a system that brings every bit of news and data and discovery right to your door. While you may want to disbelieve what's happening around you, that won't make it go away, and what's "around you" is now a much larger sphere than it ever was before.

If you are too trusting of the invisible, then you buy that $89 ebook that comes with the promise of instant riches, or you sign up for ear candling, or invest time and money with a charlatan. If you haven't figured out how to discern the invisible stuff that's true from the invisible stuff that's a trick, you're helpless in a world where just about every decision we make has to do with things that are invisible.

Thus, two kinds of serious errors: believing in invisible things that aren't true, or insisting that the truth might not be. They're caused by fear, by deliberate misinformation and by being uninformed.

We have to accept that once we start down the slippery slope of always (or never) believing, we end up in Alice-in-Wonderland territory. Do you have firsthand knowledge that the Earth is round (a sphere)? Really? Have you ever seen the tuberculosis bacteria? Perhaps it doesn't exist, they might say it's just a fraud invented by the pharmaceutical industry to get us to buy expensive drugs... Or consider the flip side, the Bernie Madoff too-good-to-be-true flipside of invisible riches that never appear. After all, if someone can't prove it's a fraud yet, it might be true!

Eight things you've probably never seen with your own eyes: Buzz Aldrin, the US debt, multi-generational evolution of mammals, an atom of hydrogen, Google's search algorithm, the inside of a nuclear power plant, a whale and the way your body digests a cookie. That doesn't mean they don't exist, nor does it mean you can't find a way to make them useful.

Do governments and marketers lie to us? All the time. Does that mean that the powerful (reproducible, testable and yes, true) invisible forces of economics, history and science are a fraud? No way.

Once you go down that road, you're on your own, no longer a productive member of a society built on rational thought. Be skeptical. Test and measure and see if the truth is a useful hypothesis to help move the discussion forward. Please do. But at some point, in order to move forward, we have to accept that truth can't be a relative concept, something to use when it suits our agenda but be discarded when we're frightened or want to score a point.

Richard Feynman said, "I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!"

Merely because it's invisible doesn't mean it's true--or false.

Is it a skill to figure out what's true, even if it's invisible? I think it is, and a rare and valuable one.

Worldwide Linchpin Meetup is coming Wednesday, May 18

Tens of thousands of people in more than a thousand cities have tried this so far.

It's free and it's fun. Thanks for leading the way and for connecting over work that needs doing...

The feedback I've gotten from around the world from these events has been just amazing. I think you'll find extraordinary support and some very cool people as well.

Find out details here or take a look at the cities list:

What's the point of popular?

You'd think that it's the most important thing in the world. Homecoming queen, student body president, the most Facebook friends, Oscar winner, how many people are waiting in line at the book signing...

Popular is almost never a measure of impact, or genius, or art. Popular rarely correlates with guts, hard work or a willingness to lead (and be willing to be wrong along the way).

I'll grant you that being popular (at least on one day in November) is a great way to get elected President. But in general, the search for popular is wildly overrated, because it corrupts our work, eats away at our art and makes it likely we'll compromise to please the anonymous masses.

Worth considering is the value of losing school elections and other popularity contests. Losing reminds you that the opinion of unaffiliated strangers is worthless. They don't know you, they're not interested in what you have to offer and you can discover that their rejection actually means nothing. It will empower you to even bigger things in the future...

When you focus on delighting an audience you care about, you strip the masses of their power.