Seth Godin's Blog, page 57

Listening clearly

It's entirely possible that people aren't listening closely to you any more.

There's so much noise, so much clutter... hoping that customers, prospects, vendors and co-workers will stop what they're doing and listen closely and carefully enough to figure out what you mean is a recipe for frustration.

Perhaps there's an alternative. Maybe, instead of insisting that people listen more closely, you could speak more clearly.

That's what great design and great copy do. They speak clearly so that people don't have to listen so hard.

            

Your social thermometer

Would you rather be the smartest person in the room or the least informed?

If you're the smartest, you can generously teach others. On the other hand, if you're the least informed and hungry to level up, you couldn't ask for a better place to be.

When you walk into a room, do you look around to see if you're the best dressed, the tallest, the most powerful, the richest, the prettiest, the best connected? Or are you hoping that people with some of those attributes are there, ready to share what they know with you?

Some people walk three steps behind the group, no matter how fast the group is walking. Others will tire themselves out, throwing elbows if necessary, to be first in line. Some people interrupt a lot, others are begging to be interrupted.

This changes over time, day by day even, depending on what we're looking for. And it happens in just about all the social settings in our lives. The challenge is finding a place that creates the change you seek. Too often, we go to conferences or parties or professional events where everyone is looking for someone other than us. Someone they can dominate or brush up against, someone they know or want to pitch...

It's easy to decide to level up. It takes guts to put yourself into a mix where it's actually going to happen.

Today's the last day for early applications for the April session of the altMBA. More than 1,800 people have enrolled in sessions of our small-group workshop so far, and it might be worth considering. After Monday, applicants pay a higher tuition.

Surrounding yourself with people in a hurry to get where you're going is a great way to get there.

            

Freedom, fairness and equality

Freedom doesn't mean no responsibility. In fact, it requires extra responsibility. Freedom is the ability to make a choice, and responsibility is required once you make that choice.

Fairness isn't a handout. Fairness is the willingness to offer dignity to others. The dignity of being seen and heard, and having a chance to make a contribution.

And equality doesn't mean equal. Equality doesn't guarantee me a starting position on the Knicks. Equality means equality of access, the opportunity to do my best without being disqualified for irrelevant reasons.

            

Perfect vs. important

Is there a conflict?

Does holding something back as you polish it make it more likely that you'll create something important?

I don't think so. There's no apparent correlation.

Instead, what we see is that, all things being equal, polished is better than rushed, but the most important factor is whether or not you've actually done the work to make something remarkable/generous/challenging/useful/artful.

More time spent on that is always better than more time polishing.

            

Please don't kill the blogs

An open note to Google

To the gmail team,

You've built a tool for a billion people. Most of my blog readers use it every day, and so do I. Thanks for creating an effective way for people to connect to the people and ideas they care about.

That comes with responsibility. The same responsibility that the postal service has... to deliver the mail.

I'm aware that you don't charge the people who use gmail for the privilege. In fact, we're the product, not the customer. Your goal is to keep people within the Google ecosystem and to get the writers and marketers who use email as a permission asset to instead shift to paying money (to Google) to inform and reach their audience.

So you invented the 'promotions' folder.

It seems like a great idea. That spam-like promo mail, all that stuff I don't want to read now (and probably ever) will end up there. Discounts on shoes. The latest urgent note from someone I don't even remember buying from. The last time I checked, you've moved more than 100,000 messages to my promotions folder. Without asking.

Alas, you've now become a choke point. You take the posts from this blog and dump them into my promo folder--and the promo folder of more than a hundred thousand people who never asked you to hide it.

Emails from my favorite charities end up in my promo folder. The Domino Project blog goes there as well. Emails from Medium, from courses I've signed up for, from services I confirmed just a day earlier. Items sent with full permission, emails that by most definitions aren't "promotions."

Here's a simple way to visualize it: Imagine that your mailman takes all the magazines you subscribe to, mixes them in with the junk mail you never asked for, and dumps all of it in a second mailbox, one that you don't see on your way into the house every day. And when you subscribe to new magazines, they instantly get mixed in as well.

It's simple: blogs aren't promotions. Blogs subscribed to shouldn't be messed with. The flow of information by email is an extraordinary opportunity, and when a choke point messes with that to make a profit, things break.

The irony of having a middleman steal permission is not lost on me. That's what you're doing. You're not serving your customers because you're stealing the permission that they've given to providers they care about it. And when publishers switch to SMS or Facebook Messenger, that hardly helps your cause.

The solution is simple: Create a whitelist. Include the top 10,000 blogs (you probably still have the list from when you shut down Google Reader). Make the algorithm smarter, and make it easier for your users to let you know about the emails that are important enough to be in their inbox. When an email sender shows up regularly, it's probably a smart idea to ask before unilaterally shifting it to the promo folder.

Of course, users are free to choose a different email client. Alas, senders aren't. And as a publisher, it hurts me that I can't keep the promise I've made to my readers.

And, while you're upgrading the system, what's up with all the weird sex spam we've been getting the last four months? It doesn't seem that difficult to distinguish it from actual human emails...

Google and Facebook are now the dominant middlemen for more than 85% of all online advertising. Along the way, Google has also dominated much of the email communication on the planet.  You get all the money but I think you need to up your game in return. 

Thanks in advance for fixing this.

My readers want to get the stuff they asked to get. You probably do too.

            

The four elements of entrepreneurship

Are successful entrepreneurs made or born?

We’d need to start with an understanding of what an entrepreneur is. They’re all over the map, which makes the question particularly difficult to navigate.

There’s the 14-year-old girl who hitches a ride to Costco, buys 100 bottles of water for thirty cents each, then sells them at the beach for a dollar a pop. Scale that that every day for a summer and you can pay for college.

Or the 7-time venture-backed software geek who finds a niche, gets some funding, builds it out with a trusted team, sells it for $100 million in stock and then starts again.

Perhaps we’re talking about a non-profit entrepreneur, a woman who builds a useful asset, finds a scalable source of funding and changes the world as she does.

The mistake that’s easy to make is based in language. We say, “she’s an entrepreneur,” when we should be saying, “she’s acting like an entrepreneur.”

Since entrepreneurship is a verb, an action, a posture… then of course, it’s a choice. You might not want to act like one, but if you can model behavior, you can act like one.

And what do people do when they’re acting like entrepreneurs?

1. They make decisions.

2. They invest in activities and assets that aren’t a sure thing.

3. They persuade others to support a mission with a non-guaranteed outcome.

4. This one is the most amorphous, the most difficult to pin down and thus the juiciest: They embrace (instead of run from) the work of doing things that might not work.

As far as I can tell, that’s it. Everything else you can hire.

Buying into an existing business by buying a franchise, to pick one example--there’s very little of any of the four elements of entrepreneurial behavior. Yes, you’re swinging for a bigger win, you’re investing risk capital, you’re going outside the traditional mainstream. But what you’re doing is buying a proven business, not acting like an entrepreneur. The four elements aren't really there. It's a process instead. Nothing wrong with that.

All four of these elements are unnatural to most folks. Particularly if you were good at school, you're not good at this. No right answers, no multiple choice, no findable bounds.

It's easy to get hung up on the "risk taking" part of it, but if you’re acting like an entrepreneur, you don’t feel like you’re taking a huge risk. Risks are what happens at a casino, where you have little control over the outcome. People acting like entrepreneurs, however, feel as though the four most important elements of their work (see above) are well within their control.

If you’re hoping someone can hand you a Dummies guide, giving you the quick steps, the guaranteed method, the way to turn this process into a job--well, you’ve just announced that you don’t feel like acting like an entrepreneur.

But before you walk away from it, give it a try. Entrepreneurial behavior isn't about scale, it's about a desire for a certain kind of journey.

            

What sort of performance?

It's not unusual for something to be positioned as the high performance alternative. The car that can go 0 to 60 in three seconds, the corkscrew that's five times faster, the punch press that's incredibly efficient...

The thing is, though, that the high performance vs. low performance debate misses something. High at what?

That corkscrew that's optimized for speed is more expensive, more difficult to operate and requires more maintenance.

That car that goes so fast is also more difficult to drive, harder to park and generally a pain in the neck to live with.

You may find that a low-performance alternative is exactly what you need to actually get your work done. Which is the highest performance you can hope for.

            

Your theory

Of course, you have one. We all do. A theory about everything.

You're waiting for 7:20 train into the city. Your theory is that every day, the train comes and brings you to work. Today, the train doesn't come. That's because it's Sunday, and the train doesn't run on the same schedule. Oh. So you've learned something, and now you have a new theory, which is that the train comes at 7:20 on weekdays only. And you'll keep working with that theory, and most of the time, it'll help you get what you want.

And you have a theory that putting a card into the ATM delivers money.

And you have a theory that smiling at a stranger increases the chances that you'll have a good interaction.

And on and on.

Many theories, proposals about what might work in the future.

We can fall into a few traps with our theories about humans:

We can come to believe that they are ironclad guarantees, not merely our best guess about the future. 
We can refuse to understand the mechanics behind a theory and instead accept the word of an authority figure. If we fail to do the math on our own, we lose agency and the ability to develop an even more nuanced understanding of how the world works.
We can become superstitious, ignoring evidence that runs counter to our theory and instead doubling down on random causes and their unrelated effects.
We can hesitate to verbalize our theories, afraid to share them with others, particularly those we deem as higher in authority or status.
We can go to our jobs and do all four of these things at once. 

[PS The Marketing Seminar is accepting new signups right now.]

            

Why we don't have nice things

The creation of worthwhile work is a duet. The creator has to do her part, but so does the customer.

One of the best airport restaurants I've ever encountered breaks my first rule of airport eating. The sushi bar at gate 30 of Narita airport is a special place (though I wish they didn't serve tuna).

The rice is extraordinary. The nori is crisp. The service is efficient but friendly. They have wonderful vegan rolls, flavorful shiso, and yes, it's hard to believe but true: real wasabi, grated to order. My guess is that the very best sushi restaurant in your town doesn't serve real wasabi. But I digress.

When I was there a few months ago, I apologized to the entire staff. I apologized to them on behalf of every traveler (many, if not most, from my country) that was dredging this extraordinary product in soy sauce, bathing it from top to bottom in the style created to mask the flavor of generations-worth of mediocre, lazily-created sushi. The Japanese equivalent of putting ketchup on your food in a fine restaurant.

I could only imagine how much it hurt for the caring artisans to watch their creation get wrecked by diners too oblivious to see what had been created for them.

And one day, I'm guessing, a new layer of management will wonder why they even bother. So they'll cut a few corners and few will notice. The race to the bottom.

Every once in awhile, someone steps up and makes something better. Much better. When it happens, it's up to us to stand up and notice it. Which means buying it and consuming it with the very same care that it was created with.

Movies, writing, sushi, safety ladders, high-powered magnets, saxophones... it doesn't matter. Every creator that desires to fly higher needs an audience willing to cheer them on and go for the ride as well. That's our part of the deal.

            

"We don't do rabbits"

One thing that's often taught in amateur internet marketing school is the idea of keyword stuffing.

List every possible thing that someone might want you to do on your website, so if they type that in, they'll find you.

It's an echo of something that freelancers and small businesses have been doing forever, "what do you need?" as an answer to the question, "what do you do?"

I was at the vet a few years ago, and he was busy trying to fix a rabbit. He's a good vet, but how many rabbits does he actually get to treat? I think everyone would have been happier if he had announced that the client should have taken her pet to a rabbit specialist.

You might be as well.

Good referrals are smarter than mediocre, distracting work.

Own your work. No need to do someone else's.