In his book The War of Art author Steven Pressfield describes the well known adversary of anyone who’s attempted to accomplish something significant, Resistance. That old devil that wants us to do anything but what we should be doing, our work. We organize sock drawers, shuffle papers, fiddle around on some random website, all the while kidding ourselves that we’re accomplishing something, but the truth is we’re giving into resistance, and we know it.
Lot’s of people think they’re paid for the number of hours they’re ‘on the clock’ each day. These folks are always bragging about their long hours as though this legitimizes the value they’re bringing to the company.
Whenever we say something like, “I really like Bob. He’s friendly and intelligent. The world would be a better place if there were more people like him.” What we’re actually saying is, “Bob really likes me. He thinks I’m friendly and intelligent. He thinks the world of me.”
Ever since Seth Godin went off on non-profits a few days ago I can’t get them off my mind. I worked for a non-profit for four wonderful years so these organizations are very near and dear to my heart. In my time there one thing really stuck out to me: the challenge of starting a non-profit is that most people don’t realize what they’re signing up for.
The number of twitter followers you have no longer counts for much. There was a day when having 500, 1000, or 10,000 followers was impressive. It meant a huge number of people had opted into communicating with you because they liked you, your message, or your product. However, between spam accounts and auto-follow practices it’s easier than ever to get a huge ‘following’ of thousands of people who aren’t listening to you.
One of the major mistakes companies run into as they dip their toe in the social media space is utilizing broadcast style advertising. In other words they take the advertising model of t.v. or radio, where the idea is to barrage people with messages about your company or offering, and begin mucking up their blogs or other sites with the same marketing style content. Below is an example of someone who is using the broadcast model on twitter.
Most things worth doing take longer than we wish, but rarely as long as our worst fears tell us they will.
Thanks to Tim Ferriss I recently took some time to reflect on a thought provoking question he asks in his book: if you had $100 million in the bank what would a normal day look like for you? Note the word normal. The question isn’t “if you had an unlimited amount of money and only 24 hours left to live what’s the most insane thing would you do?!” While that question would definitely yield some interesting answers, I don’t think it get’s to the heart of the issue like the first question does. The beauty is that it forces you to think through what you actually want out of life when money isn’t on the table, in other words what would you do for free?
Whether we admit it or not we all love a good story don’t we? Plot and intrigue simply get us going as a species. It’s almost as though by hearing others tell stories it helps us process our own, and for that reason alone we love them: we can’t stop hearing them and we can’t stop telling them. This is why the companies we love to buy from, the companies with huge followings and passionate fan bases, are doing so much more than selling widget ‘X’ at a fair price. They’re telling us a story that we resonate with, something with plot and sizzle. Remember those L.L. Bean Catalogs you used to thumb through as a kid? Those were telling millions of people a story they wanted to hear. A story about walks in crisp winter snow with the family or fireside chats with our significant other, all made possible by high quality fleece and Egyptian cotton.
Every yes, is a no to someone else. The problem is that for many of us, this never crosses our minds. Our boss asks us to stay late at the office for something pressing and we quickly respond with a yes, not thinking about the fact that we just told our family no. We’re working on an important report that needs to be completed today when we hear our email alert go off. We open our laptop and take a peek at our inbox, the email is marked urgent! We drop the report and say yes to the email. We walk outside to go for a jog when our neighbor spots us across the lawn and hollers our name. It’s been awhile since we’ve chatted so we proceed to do just that for the next 45 minutes, effectively saying no to our new workout routine.