Understanding the doublings
If you seek to please 90% of your potential customers, all you need to do is the usual thing.
To please half the remaining potential market, you're going to need to work at least twice as hard.
And to please the next half, twice as hard again. It's Zeno's paradox, an endless road to getting to the end.
So, a letter with a stamp gets you on time deliverability 90% of the time.
The paradox of popular
Most things are liked because they're popular.
I know that seems to be a redundancy, but it's worth decoding.
Pop music, for example, is a must-listen among certain populations because that's what "everyone else" is listening to, and being in sync is the primary benefit on offer.
The paradox, of course, is that you have to walk through a huge valley of unpopular before you arrive at the population that will embrace you because that's the thing to do.
What does branded look like?
The vast majority of products that are sold are treated as generic by just about everyone except the naive producer, who believes he has a brand of value.
A branded object or service has two components, one required, one desired:
1. Someone who isn't even using it can tell, from a distance, who made it. It appears that it could only be made by that producer (or it's an illegal knock off).
Ralph Lauren certainly got our attention when he started making his logo bigger and bigger, but we also see this in the shape of a Paloma Picasso pin, or the label on a pair of Tom's shoes, or the red soles of Louboutin or the sound of a Harley or the cadence of Sarah Kay or ...
The crowd, your work, and a choice
The crowd prefers sweets.
The crowd gets on its feet when your band plays the big hit, and sits down for the new songs.
The crowd will pay far more for a steak dinner than a vegetable one, regardless of cost or effort or value.
The crowd will always pick the movie over the book.
Software is testing
Writing the first draft of a computer program is easy. It's the testing that separates the professional from a mere hack. Test and then, of course, make it better.
The same thing is true with:
Restaurant recipes
Essays
Three elements to go beyond hourly freelancing
Hourly freelancing generally involves finding a task that many people can do, and doing it slighly better or slightly cheaper (or slightly more conveniently) than others can. It's not a bad gig, but with some planning, you can do better.
Start by focusing on three things (and a bonus):
1. An audience (organizations or individuals) that has money to invest in having you solve their problem
2. An audience that realizes it has a problem that needs to be solved
Shopping
We've been doing it all our lives, and it's easy to misunderstand. Shopping feels like the method we use to get the things we need.
Except...
Except more than a billion people on earth have never once gone shopping. Never once set out with money in their pockets to see what's new, to experience the feeling of, "maybe I'll buy that," or, "I wonder how that will look on me..."
Shopping is an entertaining act, distinct from buying.
"I'll take care of it"
There are endless opportunities for people and organizations that can reliably and fairly take a problem off our hands.
"I'll take care of it," and I'll do it well, at least as well as you can, for a price that won't make you feel stupid. "I'll take care of it," and I won't come back to you when things go sideways, I won't ask for a bigger budget or more time, either. I won't have excuses ready to go, I won't stumble over the details, I won't point fingers. I'll merely take care of it.
It's not easy, but it's worth a lot.
You have no credibility (yet)
You believe you have a great idea, a hit record, a press release worth running, a company worth funding. You know that the customer should use your limited-offer discount code, that the sponsor should run an ad, that the admissions office should let you in. You know that the fast-growing company should hire you, and you're ready to throw your (excellent) resume over the transom.
This is insufficient.
Your belief, even your proof, is insufficient for you to get the attention, the trust and the action you seek.
When everyone has access, no one does. The people you most want to reach are likely to be the very people that are the most difficult to reach.
Hello, London
I recently realized that I haven't been to the UK to give a public seminar in a very long time.
It looks like I may be able to remedy that situation on November 3, 2015. I have no idea how many people might want to come, though, which makes it tricky to book the right venue.
If you're interested, would you fill out this quick form for me? I'll post details of the event in a few weeks.
Thanks.
When did you give up?
The bureaucracy is no longer your enemy. The bureaucracy is you.
And it's easy to blame your boss, or the dolt who set up all these systems, or the one who depersonalizes everything. The policies and the oversight and the structure almost force you to merely show up. And to leave as early as you can.
But the thing is, the next job, like the last one, is going to be like this. If this is the job you're seeking, if this is the level of responsibility you take, perhaps it's not just your boss.
How long ago did you decide to settle for this? How long ago did you start building the cocoon that insulates you from the work you do all day?
Serving size
In our culture, our instinct is to fill the bowl.
We get used to having a coffee that nearly reaches the rim, or a level of debt that's just below our credit limit.
If you want to do less of something, then, get a smaller bowl. It's the simplest possible hack, but it truly works.
And if you want to do more of something, the path is just as obvious.
Rejection-seeking as a form of hiding
When you get rejected, you're off the hook. No promises need to be kept, no vulnerability felt down the road. When you are rejected, you don't have to show up, to listen or to care.
All you have to do is make promises far bigger than people are prepared to believe about you. Or try to be accepted by people who are in no mood (or have no experience) trusting people like you or promises like this.
Seeking out ways to get rejected is a sport unto itself. It's tempting, but it's not clear that it's a productive thing to become skilled at.
Far more frightening (and more powerful) to earn a reputation instead of merely asserting one.
Pathfinding
Some simple arithmetic will show you how much time you're spending on finding the path:
[The amount of time it took you to do it last time] minus [the amount of time it will take you next time]
If you come up with something close to zero, then you're running the path, doing it consistently and spending almost no time at all finding a path. You've already found one.
On the other hand, if the first time it took you to write that novel was 8 years, and retyping it would take five days, you're spending virtually all of your time finding out where you're going, not actually typing. Which is why writing novels is more difficult than commuting to work.
About to be
The only way to become the writer who has written a book is to write one.
The only way to become the runner who has just finished a run it to go running.
You might dread the writing or the running or the leading, but it's the key step on the road to becoming.
If it's easier, remind yourself what you're about to be.
Quantum content and blurred lines
Twenty years ago, cookbooks were cookbooks. Almanacs were almanacs. There were no thrillers that were also coming-of-age diet books.
Twenty years ago, jazz was jazz and polka was polka. Jazz polka wasn't really a thing.
The reason is simple: The publisher of the work needed to get it to the store, the store needed to put it on a shelf and the consumer had to find it. Most of the time, publishers would push back (hard) on creators to make sure that the thing they created fit into a category. No category, no shelf space. No shelf space, no sale.
In our long tail, self published, digital world, there is of course infinite shelf space. And there is no retailer that needs to be sold, because since there's no shelf space issue, they will carry everything.
Light on your feet
To walk lightly through the world, with confidence and energy, is far more compelling than plodding along, worn down by the weight on your shoulders. When we are light on our feet we make better decisions, bring joy to those around us and find the flexibility to do good work.
There are two ways to achieve this.
The first is take the weight away. To refuse to do work that's important. To not care about the outcome. Whatever.
The second is to eagerly embrace the weight of our commitment but to commit to being light, regardless. This is the surgeon who can enjoy doing brain surgery, not because surgery isn't important, but because it is.
Centered and complete
These are not the conditions for creativity.
Creative people ship remarkable work because they seek to complete something, to heal something, to change something for the better. To move from where they are now to a more centered, more complete place.
You don't get creative once everything is okay. In fact, we are creative because everything isn't okay (yet).
The last minute
I'm not good at the last minute. It's really fraught with risk and extra expense. I'm much better doing things the first minute instead.
On that topic: If you're hoping for copies of my latest book, What To Do When It's Your Turn, delivered in time for holiday gift giving, you'll need to order it by the end of day tomorrow. Thanks for sharing it.
Expecting the unexpected
Are you doing your work for an ordered market? A region where there is stability and rules and predictable outcomes? Some examples: selling to people who have purchased before, entering a market with established competitors, contributing to a media ecosystem that works in mostly predictable ways...
The alternative are blue sky arenas where unpredictability is the rule, not the exception.
Most of us don't live and work on the frontier, and we plan our lives accordingly.
Life on the frontier brings its own rewards (and risks) but there's never an advantage in imagining that it's stable. It's hard to be surprised if you establish up front that you're likely to be surprised.
