I’ve made the mistake a few times of talking about being confident. It’s never taken very well.
The solution was and is simple. I shut my mouth and let my work speak instead. The solution solves a lot of other issues as well. Instead of saying a task done one way is better than another. Just do it. Show it. Prove it.
Instead of delegating difficult work or simply assigning something you can do better to someone else, switch it up. Take on the work that matters and hand over the work that doesn’t speak much for you.
Do it your way when work is assigned to you. If you’re concerned that your way will be too off what is expected, make both creations and see which sells better. The best way to let your work speak for itself, after all, is to put it side-by-side with a second option.
It’s just a fact people will listen to your work more than they will listen to you talk about it.
Stay Positive & Accept It And Leverage The Knowledge
Photo credit to friend, Kirby Wright, whose work speaks for him
It doesn’t need to be how you starved for years before people bought some of your art.
It doesn’t need to be how you read thousands and thousands of books as a child before you realized you were a writer.
It doesn’t need to be who your family is connected to.
You know these stories because of their popularity. They were once rare, which made them famous stories at the time. Now a starving artist is expected, writers are expected to read a lot, and if you have a lot of money, people first wonder who you’re related to, not how you did it.
These don’t make for good stories anymore, so why try replicating them?
By all means, learn from the already-accomplished, have idols, imitate morning habits if you want to, but make your success story your own.
Stay Positive & Tell A Story No One Has Told Before
People (you?) are amazing. The ideas some come up with and share with me, they are truly remarkable. Consistently the thinker of the great idea wants to see it to fruition, but doesn’t have the time, resources, money, etc,.
Instead of just starting small (or just starting. period), instead of sharing their idea with someone who might partner with them, instead of starting a blog and writing about their idea to become an expert and build their brand for when they can see the idea through, they forfeit their idea for fear of it being stolen. That is the biggest concern of those with a great idea. “What if someone steals it?”
Newsflash: You can’t own an idea. Even if you copyright or trademark, neither can save your idea, they can only preserve the expression of your idea. This form or protection requires you to act on your idea. (Even then, I have a few words about that.)
The best way to resolve the concern and to shun the pirates?
Create something they can’t duplicate the same way. Work so hard and so fast to turn your great idea into reality that the competition can’t keep up. Be so remarkable that even if someone tried duplicating your product or service, everyone would know their product or service is not your product or service.
You can leverage the pirates by giving them something they can steal and encouraging them to (think music industry). You can nurture the pirates (start a blog you share your ideas on for them to feed off). Or you can outperform them (actually create that great idea).
Perhaps your partners, your employees, your teammates don’t need gold stars. Maybe they don’t need the bonus incentive to do extra work. It’s possible the reward system is a band-aid to a larger problem, not the solution to it.
There’s a few things I know for a fact when it comes to getting others to go the extra mile, take on more work, create something remarkable in addition to their job description.
1) Praise. I don’t need to show you the statistics of those who would rather receive less pay if it meant more recognition. And there is this. Endorsed by the one and only. I give email shoutouts to my team of writers when one of them does something way in advance or something remarkable and unasked. Everyone sees who the shoutout is for and why.
2) Passion. As manager or whatever similar title you hold, it falls under your job description to encourage your team to work with passion. If they are assigned a task that doesn’t suit them (and you should know without them mentioning it), then work out a different way to frame the objective to ignite the fire in their belly. You achieve this by acting on fact number three.
3) Connection. You must connect with each individual to learn what encourages them to go past all expectations. Every one is different and to treat them or reward them all the same is a tragedy. You wouldn’t treat all your customers the same, why would you your team?
The question isn’t what can you reward them with for working extra. The question is how can you get to know them better to learn what drives them to do more.
Often times, simply by connecting, it is reward in and of itself.
Stay Positive & Toss The Gold Stickers And Bonuses, Your Team Deserves More
“If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.” – Algernon
The Importance of Being Earnest is by far my favorite play. I’ve read it twice and quoted from it multiple times over in my writing. (Also bias in the sense Oscar Wilde is my favorite poet.) I was finally fortunate enough to see a live rendition of it last night, and the show reminded me what makes a play or any artform remarkable.
People never talk about perfection and if they do, they are lying.
From a three hour-long play, only two actors made one mistake each. They merely started a word and, half-way through, restarted the word. There was a millisecond moment they questioned whether the word they were saying was the right word or not.
Again, over the span of three hours and thousands of words, only two moments reminded the audience the actors are human, and those two moments make all the difference in a remarkable show and an unremarkable one.
Jugglers, Actors, Humans
The reason jugglers attract such a crowd is they are in a constant state of risk. Even the most professional jugglers in the world still drop what they are juggling. If jugglers were perfect, no one would be impressed. The same goes for a playwright. The same goes for any form of art.
Slight noticeable errors are what we all relate to; it’s part of being human. When a minimal error is made during an act, it reminds the audience just how difficult, incredible and remarkable the art you’re doing is. As Earnest would suggest, it is mixing pleasure and science.
If anything were perfect entertainment (pleasure), it would go without being talked about. People talk about great experiences, sure, but never perfect ones and if they do, they are lying. (Consider giving them dental floss and reminding them lying through their teeth doesn’t count as flossing.) When an error is made, science complements pleasure.
The universal relation of humans is we may all strive for perfection, but we will never reach it. Any reminder of this concept, say, a slip of a word during a three hour-long play is what makes art of any kind, remarkable.
Stay Positive & Do Something Remarkable, Anything Except Perfection
Asking what someone wants to be when they grow up is stopping the ball short. Same goes for the person who asks herself what she should really be doing with her life. If I ask you to tell me a color and you say “green,” that’s not enough either.
What kind of firefighter? What type of entrepreneur? What shade of green?
When Steve Wozniak decided to develop a computer (along with Steve Jobs), do you think he just thought to himself he was going to become a computer developer or did he think he was going to become the riskiest computer developer? the best computer developer? the most design-in-mind computer developer?
Think Seth Godin thought he would be just another marketer? Think Adam Levine thought he would be just another lead singer? Le Corbusier, David Meerman Scott, Zig Ziglar – they didn’t just think they would fill a spot in the world, they decided they would make a spot by doing things differently than anyone before them.*
When we decide what we’re going to do with our lives (for the time being, until we decide something new [and that’s okay too]), we have a chance early on to decide to do something difficult, to trailblaze, to do something in a way no one has thought of doing it before. Don’t become just another ______ (fill in the blank).
If you thought it took long to figure out what you were truly passionate about, imagine how long it takes to turn that passion into something different, unique, remarkable.
Stay Positive & Better Get Going
*Certainly they leveraged themselves by doing what those in the field they were interested in had done before, but they also improved, added, and twisted the techniques into their own.
Here’s a piece of advice you won’t buy (until you finish reading the post): don’t be the agency with the most accounts, don’t be the client service team with the most clients, don’t be the business that tries to appeal to the masses.
If you’re shooting for success, whether it’s in entrepreneurship or freelance, you have two options. You can be the best in terms of producing a select few outstanding accounts/clients/products or you can be the best in terms of producing the most accounts/clients/products.
With the latter, you sacrifice a lot. You take on clients who don’t have high expectations of themselves. You end up running client services for clients you don’t care about. You create products without any heart, without a story worth buying.
With the former, quite plainly, you get to practice your best. Now, I can’t express enough how important it is to define success for yourself. Even if it’s an assorted list of things, feelings or goals. You don’t need some four paragraph structured mission statement. Life isn’t cut and dry enough for that to work anyway. To define success is to understand what being the best really means.
Success – or growth of that matter – are not always by the numbers. Think of yourself as a publisher. Do you take on 5,000 novels a year, pushing them out the door as quickly as possible? Or do you get picky and cater to the 100 novels that are sure bestsellers?
This example is about to get interesting, so keep up.
Perhaps you’re going into PR. Are PR agencies looking to hire as many aspiring specialists as possible to build the agency up? Or are they going to seek the few specialists who actually represent their title of “special”its? Let’s flip this around now.
You’re looking for a job in PR. Are you going to shotgun your résumé to all the big agencies that run through new interns like a laundry list? Or are you going to seek the small agency that pours every drop of their heart into the work they do (after all, they have the time since they aren’t trying to baby an intern a week)?
