Jared Dees's Blog: The Latest from Jared Dees, page 28
June 8, 2018
Social Media Goals
I’ve worked in digital marketing for about ten years now. Somehow I keep falling into the same temptation again and again.
When it comes to social media marketing, everyone wants to get more followers.
We compare ourselves to other influencers or other businesses similar to ours and we feel bad about how many more followers they have than we do.
We watch videos and webinars (sadly, I watched one yesterday) looking for the latest tactic to help us increase the number of people who follow us.
W...
June 7, 2018
Success = Change
Success is helping people make a change they seek to make.
That is how Seth Godin described success on a recent Entreleadership podcast.
The focus on change was my #1 takeaway from Godin’s Marketing Seminar last year.
The question he asks participants at the beginning of the course is:
What change are you seeking to make?
More specifically:
Who are you trying to change?
“Marketing makes change happen,” he said. “If there is no change, then it hasn’t worked.”
Success is not equivalent to sales...
June 6, 2018
Batching Your Work
I suffer from a problem that a lot of other artists and entrepreneurs deal with on a day to day basis. We have so many ideas and projects that we want to work on that we end up starting but not finishing many different projects at the same time.
As a results, we tend to get 90% of a project completed, but then get distracted by something new and more interesting. My Trello board with all of my projects and tasks right now has so many different projects that are very interesting to me.
Now tha...
June 5, 2018
How to Remember What You Read
I set a goal this year to read fifty books. I’m up to twenty-eight books and seven ahead of schedule. That is a lot of books and most of them are nonfiction.
Here is the challenge: reading more books means there is more to remember.
Since I have increased the number of books I read, I’ve seen or heard of other people I know reading the same books.
When those conversations occur, we get put to the test.
How much can we remember?
What were the biggest takeaways from reading the book months or e...
June 4, 2018
Lessons from the First 5k Run of the Year
I set a goal this year to run a 5k under 23:00.
My first 5k time this year was 24:57. I have a long way to go!
Here are a few lessons I learned from this year’s first race:
Don’t each anything for breakfast that will get stuck in your teeth (berries). Map out your route to the starting line before you leave. I mistakenly took the quickest route, but got stopped by the half-marathon route that was already in progress. Plan to get there at least 30 minutes before the race. Start with a pace gr...June 3, 2018
The One Non-negotiable in Urban Meyer’s Morning Routine
People seem to be enthralled by the morning routines of successful people.
When it comes to football, Coach Urban Meyer is as successful as it gets.
What is the one non-negotiable part of his morning routine?
He does a 30-minute personal Bible study at 6:00am every day.
He said on Lewis Howes’s podcast that if he misses this prayer time in the morning, he feels empty without it.
Every day he gets an email from Tim Kite with the day’s Bible study and he spends thirty minutes reading and prayin...
June 2, 2018
Interval Training: How to Get Faster at Anything
When I was a track coach, I designed most of my practices to focus on interval training. Instead of running the entire distance of the races my runners participated in, they would run only a fraction of those distances at speeds that would total a personal record.
The idea is that you train your body and your mind to run at a certain speed. If you run the full distance during practice, but your pace is slower than your personal record then you train your body and mind to run slower.
A 400m ru...
June 1, 2018
The Way History Should Be Written
I’m a big fan of historian David McCullough.
I admire his approach to writing.
I am inspired by his story of how he became a writer.
I will forever think of his voice when I think about the Civil War.
Most of all, I love the way he writes history.
Most of my experience with history, even as a history major in college, has been through either dull textbooks or primary source documents.
McCullough is able to transport a reader back in time. When you read his writing, you feel like you know the...
May 31, 2018
The Follow, Like, Like, Like Strategy: How to Get More Instagram Followers
Instagram seems to be rising in popularity and usage faster than any other social network right now.
For newcomers to the platform, it can be difficult to find new followers. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, which have share features that make it easy for your content to appear in the newsfeeds of influencers, Instagram only allows you to like or comment on posts. (Although it is now possible to share other people’s posts as an Instagram story.)
So, the only way for people to discover you within t...
May 30, 2018
Deliberate Practice for Writers
Angela Duckworth summarizes the basic requirements for deliberate practice (K. Anders Ericsson) as:
A clearly defined stretch goal Full concentration and effort Immediate and informative feedback Repetition with reflection and refinementAngela Duckworth, Grit
As a writer, I try to write every day.
How can I make these writing sessions deliberate practice?
A clearly defined stretch goal Productivity: Set a word-count goal for each hour or day. Track your word count in a spreadsheet. Track...
