Seth Godin's Blog, page 77

How much does a ton weigh?

It's not unusual to describe a heavy object in tonnage.

But no one has any idea how much a ton is, really. Is 250 tons a lot? How much?

250 tons is 500,000 pounds. About the weight of 8 houses. Or the weight of 100,000 bricks.

Which is a solid stack of bricks 10 x 10 by 1,000 bricks high. 

It would take you more than 2 months, working 24 hours a day, a brick a minute, to unload that many bricks.

Facts are facts, but images resonate.

            

Toward dumber

If you want to reach more people, if you're measuring audience size, then the mantra of the last twenty years has been simple: make it dumber.

Use clickbait headlines. Short sentences. Obvious ideas. Little nuance. Don't make people uncomfortable or ask them to stretch. Remind them that they were right all along. Generate a smile or a bit of indignation. Most of all, dumb it down.

And it works.

For a while.

And then someone comes along who figures out how to take your version of dumbness and go further than you were willing to go. Until everything becomes the National Enquirer.

While this downward cycle of dumb continues to be passed from hand to hand, a few people headed in the other direction. Measuring not the size of the audience, but their engagement, their commitment and the change that was possible.

This is an upward cycle, a slow one, a journey worth going on.

Dumber is an intentional act, a selfish trade for mass. It requires us to hold something back, to avoid creating any discomfort, to fail to teach. Dumber always works in the short run, but not in the long run.

Don't confuse dumber with simpler. Simpler removes the unnecessary and creates a better outcome as a result. But dumber does little but create noise.

Everyone owns a media company now. Even media companies. And with that ownership comes a choice, a choice about the people we serve, the words we use and the change we seek to make.

It's only a race to the bottom if we let it be one.

            

The express and the local

Express trains run less often, make fewer stops, and if they're going where you're going, get you there faster.

The local train is, of course, the opposite.

Some people hop on the first train that comes. A local in the hand is worth the extra time, they say, because you're never quite sure when the express is going to get there.

On the other hand, there's a cost to investing in the thing that pays off in the long run.

Now that you see that, you're probably going to notice it in 100 areas of your life.

The local requires less commitment, feels less risky, doesn't demand a point of view. The express, on the other hand, always looks like a better idea after you've embraced it and gotten to where you meant to go.

Express or local?

            

Gaztelugatxe

There's an island off the coast of Spain that houses a church. The church has 230 steps to the top, and it's said that it's worth the climb.

What a great expression. Gaztelugatxe can now mean, "it's a lot of effort, but worth it."

The opposite of fast and easy but worthless.

(Click for the pronunciation of this Basque word...)

            

The ethics of FTD

When you order flowers online, they're usually delivered by a local florist.

Which means the florist has a dilemma:

He can deliver his very best effort and the most beautiful flowers he has in stock, even though the sender will never know his identity or buy from him again.

Or he can use up the damaged stock and the fading flowers, confident that the sender will never know his identity or buy from him again.

You can average up or average down.

You can hide or you can show pride.

It turns out that the florist who doesn't use up the damaged stock and the fading flowers never seems to have trouble affording better stuff.

            

In search of enrollment

Back in the day, hitchhikers held cardboard signs with their desired destination city clearly written out. After all, if you're headed to New York, it doesn't make sense to pick up someone headed for Denver (it's a bad idea for the driver and the passenger).

If you've got people on your bus who are headed somewhere you have no intention of going, today might be a good day for them to get off the bus.

            

Strength through peace

Anticipating doom is brutal. And anticipating brutality is even worse.

It creates an enormous amount of emotional overhead. It makes it difficult to invest, hard to make long-term plans. And it fills us with dread, short circuiting our creativity.

Peace has a dividend. Economic peace, political peace, interpersonal peace. It gives us room to dream, to get restless and to make things even better.

We don't need other people to lose in order for us to win. And keeping score is overrated.

Most of all, it's worth investing in peace of mind. The dividends are huge, and the journey (the way each of us spend our days) matters. 

That's one of the primary benefits of enlightened leadership. It creates a safe space to do important work.

            

Permission abused is permission lost

It doesn't matter what your privacy policy says, it doesn't matter when your quarterly results are due and it doesn't matter what the database is telling you...

If someone doesn't want to hear from you anymore, you've lost the ability to reach them.

Yes, you can go back to trying to interrupt them, but of course, that's getting more and more expensive.

Permission is valuable and permission is fragile.

            

The two fears of voluntary education

Voluntary education is different from compulsory, the kind we grew up with.

When you're the victim/beneficiary of compulsory education, it happens to you. You have little choice. Perhaps you choose to open your mind and do the work, but either way, here it is.

Now that we're adults, though, we have choice. Endless choice. Most people choose to learn as little as possible, while a few dive in and find more insight, wisdom and opportunity than they could ever expect. Why do so many people hold back?

"This might not work"



The truth is that you don't need a license, experience or skill to run a course online. You can post videos, write blog posts and generally just show up and announce you're teaching something.



As a result, there's a lot of reason for the buyer to beware. The student who spends time and money on a course that doesn't work feels stupid, even stupider than they did before they began. Hopes aren't realized and the disappointment in being ripped off is real.



The second reason is a bit more surprising...




"This might work"



This is real, it's disappointing, and it's also the biggest reason people hesitate. We hesitate precisely because the course might deliver what it promises. Because a new experience, a workshop, an event might show you something you can't unsee. It might lead to forward motion, to new opportunities and to change.



But change brings risk and risk brings fear. Those new horizons, those new opportunities, those new skills--they might not be as comfortable as what you've got going on right now.

And so the challenge. We choose not to learn because it's either going to fail (embarrassing and expensive) or it's going to work (frightening). We get ourselves stuck between a rock and a hard place of inaction.

The door is open to be heroic. To go on the journey from a place of fear. Not to wait for the fear to go away before you begin, but instead to begin precisely because there is fear.

Those that have successfully come before us have figured out how to make this leap. To feel (and embrace) these fears, not to deny them, and to dig in because and despite.

[As you might have guessed, I see this firsthand when I talk about the two workshops I run. Workshops that actually do what they promise. Tomorrow, Friday the 14th, is the last day for first priority applications for the altMBA fall session.  And the Marketing Seminar has just about a week before we close the doors for the last scheduled session.]

The biggest hesitation is the fear of an open door.

The biggest challenge is the question we ask ourselves: Then what will I do?

That's why we're so eager to tweak the little things. Because the little things give us a little more of the same thing that we're already used to.

Hope to see you leap. Because it might work.

            

In search of the minimum viable audience

Of course everyone wants to reach the maximum audience. To be seen by millions, to maximize return on investment, to have a huge impact.

And so we fall all over ourselves to dumb it down, average it out, pleasing everyone and anyone.

You can see the problem.

When you seek to engage with everyone, you rarely delight anyone. And if you're not the irreplaceable, essential, one-of-a-kind changemaker, you never get a chance to engage with the market.

The solution is simple but counterintuitive: Stake out the smallest market you can imagine. The smallest market that can sustain you, the smallest market you can adequately serve. This goes against everything you learned in capitalism school, but in fact, it's the simplest way to matter.

When you have your eyes firmly focused on the minimum viable audience, you will double down on all the changes you seek to make. Your quality, your story and your impact will all get better.

And then, ironically enough, the word will spread.

Focusing on the MVA is a key part of what we teach in The Marketing Seminar.  (Look for the purple circle).

It's easy to talk about in the abstract, but difficult to put into practice. Just about every brand you care about, just about every organization that matters to you--this is how they got there. By focusing on just a few and ignoring the non-believers, the uninvolved and the average.