Falsehoods, spin and legends can be tweaked and tested and changed to exactly match the dreams and desires of the people they’re aimed at.
This is why manipulative stories are so much stickier than what really happened.
What reality has in its favor is that it’s generally resilient. Gravity doesn’t care who believes in it. It’s still here.
Oh, did we just say that?
Every day is the same if you let it.
Of course, spiders, dogs and walruses prefer if the world doesn’t change. But humans are different. Change is fuel for growth and possibility.
It’s easy to lull ourselves into a media-fueled commercial stupor, digging an ever-deeper rut. Same job, same debt, same story, same drama, same …
But that’s a choice.
Tomorrow can be different in ways we’ve never even bothered to imagine.
[Simple hack: change things in your life to make things better for someone else. Generosity unlocks our passion.]
Successful organizations of just one or two freelancers have very high revenue per employee, effective labor utilization and few communications problems.
And significant organizations of a hundred or a thousand people also produce enormous amounts of revenue, profit and perhaps value.
In between, though, there’s a slog.
That’s because a successful tiny organization that adds people creates communication problems. Instead of each person knowing what to do, they need to meet about it. They also require people to support their people–HR, policies, etc.
The trough is characterized by nascent specialization, and if any specialist can’t deliver, the entire entity struggles, because there’s just one specialist for each category. Many mouths to feed, but fewer farmers per capita.
In that trough, many small businesses flounder.
They had the profit or the investment to grow, but they grew too much or didn’t grow enough. Either way, they’re caught in the trough.
The trick is to understand your industry well enough to know where the trough lies.
They will outlast you.
Why are some industries so irrational (when seen from the point of view of the customer)?
So many things about college, funerals, real estate, hotels, weddings and the contractor trade are frustrating and opaque to customers. It almost seems as though they’re organized with a long-term, industry-wide focus away from customer satisfaction.
No one chooses to regularly have a party as expensive, isolating or stressful as a wedding is. We don’t view the pricing or activities of a funeral as natural or affirming. If someone tried to build an institution like college today, there’s no way it would be structured the way it is now. If you think about the rituals of most of these industries, they don’t make sense.
That’s because customers come and customers go. Sometimes quite literally, but always.
As a result, the customer is often a first-timer, in need of indoctrination. And the customer has far less power, because they won’t be back again any time soon.
In some ways, the connecting power of the internet reinforces this imbalance, allowing industry forces to coordinate and coalesce. But in other ways, each of these industries is open to radical shift because customers can get smarter and coordinate on their part as well.
We get a huge benefit from making a simple commitment:
Don’t miss deadlines.
The benefit is that once we agree to the deadline, we don’t have to worry about it anymore. We don’t have to negotiate, come up with excuses or even stress about it.
It won’t ship when it’s perfect.
It will ship because we said it would.
Once this is clear, the quality of what we ship goes way up. Instead of spending time and energy looking for reasons, excuses or deniability, we simply do the work.
And over time, we get better at figuring out which deadlines to promise. Because if we promise, we ship.
The blog post I did a few hours ago was filled with broken links, the result of some weird sort of rift in the time-space continuum. Sorry for the hassle. It’s fixed now.
If you get this blog via email or some other form of intermediated transposition, you can always click on the name of the post to get to the original blog–that way you’ll always see my latest version, with typos fixed, links repaired and any other sort of mistake that I know about remedied.
Sorry to trouble you on a Sunday. Have a great day. And thanks for reading.
PS you can subscribe by email by clicking here.
My bookshelves are filled with books I’ve read once. But there are others that I come back to again and again. I hand them out like Halloween candy to colleagues, and often, they end up paying them forward as I did.
Authors and ideas for the long haul. Classics in our field, in fact. One is brand new, others I read decades ago. Tom and I have known each other for 39 years…
Every one of these authors is the real deal. They’ve done the work and they’ve shown up to make a difference. My life is better for knowing them as friends and colleagues.
I’m lucky to be able to share them with you.
The Art of Possibility by Roz Zander and Ben Zander
The Power of Regret by Dan Pink
Story Driven by Bernadette Jiwa
The Celebrity CEO by Ramon Ray
Body of Work by Pam Slim
Marketing Lessons From the Grateful Dead by David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
Ignore Everybody by Hugh Macleod
The asking price is true, but it’s also an illusion.
If you are offered a job and negotiate a raise of 10% over what was originally offered, that’s good, but it has nothing at all to do with what you’re actually worth.
If you buy a house for 15% over asking price, it doesn’t mean you overpaid.
The asking price is a signal, a way to message expectations and begin a negotiation. It’s simply a guess about the future, made by the person who goes first.
It can anchor our thinking, but if we’re not careful, it can be an anchor that also drags us down.
At first glance, it makes sense to avoid a crowded market. Better to sell your services or your products in a place where you’re the only one.
But crowded markets also have lots of customers.
A mutual understanding of what’s expected.
People ready to pay to solve their problems.
Word of mouth.
And competitors to learn from.
If you can enter a crowded market with a remarkable entry (worth talking about) and the resources to persist over time, it might be just the place.
Has this ever been done before?
Why not?
Did it work?
Why not?
If it’s new and useful, what problem is it solving?
Why has the audience rejected similar innovations in the past?
One day, this market will change. What will cause that change to happen?
