Business

The Overlooked Variable Of “Show and Tell”

Garth Beyer

It’s easy to show and tell.

You can give any person a red dipping bird and have them place it in a position for all to see and begin telling about it. Not only will they show and tell about the red dipping bird, but they will do it perfectly.

“It is a red plastic bird that for some reason dips forward and puts its beak into a glass of water “emulates the movement” and dips back and continuous going back and forth. You can purchase them in all different sizes, colors and with goofy extras like flamboyantly colored feathers or an old Abe Lincoln hat.”

Done. They showed and told.

But there’s a flaw.

It’s boring.

Everyone who’s seen one knows this. Everyone who owns one, probably laughed at the flamboyant feather color comment but still thought the presentation was dull. Everyone else who were shown and told to, they could get up and do the same exact thing.

Show and tell, which is ultimately done in k-5 grade levels, can set incredible examples and offer intelligent insight into creativity – if done right. There’s a often an overlooked variable to show and tell that can make the experiences result artistic, unique and altogether attention-informative (Information people actually want to pay attention to). Simply showing and telling doesn’t do this. Doing it the old school way is bland and banal.

The correct format is to figure out THEN show and tell.

Figure Out THEN Show & Tell

Having to figure something out taps potential on the shoulder and tells it to get to work. In the case of the red dipping bird and according to How Stuff Works, The Dipping Bird (also called the Drinking Bird or the Dunking Bird) is a popular novelty item or toy in the United States and other countries.

A Dippy Bird has the following parts:

  • Two equal-sized, hollow glass bulbs
  • A long glass tube that connects the bulbs
  • Fuzzy, water-absorbent material covering the head
  • Two plastic legs with a pivot connection
  • Methylene chloride in the abdomen. Methylene chloride is an industrial paint stripper and solvent (one thing that dissolves easily in methylene chloride is caffeine, so you can use methylene chloride to decaffeinate things). Methylene chloride helps makes a Dippy Bird work because it evaporates very easily — it boils at just 100 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius).

To operate the Dippy Bird, you get its head wet. As the water evaporates, fluid moves up into the head, causing the bird to become top-heavy and dip forward. Once the bird dips forward, fluid moves back into the abdomen, causing the bird to become bottom-heavy and tip up.

Here is how a Dippy Bird works:

  1. When water evaporates from the fuzz on the Dippy Bird’s head, the head is cooled.
  2. The temperature decrease in the head condenses the methylene chloride vapor, decreasing the vapor pressure in the head relative to the vapor pressure in the abdomen.
  3. The greater vapor pressure in the abdomen forces fluid up through the neck and into the head.
  4. As fluid enters the head, it makes the Dippy Bird top-heavy.
  5. The bird tips. Liquid travels to the head. The bottom of the tube is no longer submerged in liquid.
  6. Vapor bubbles travel through the tube and into the head. Liquid drains from the head, displaced by the bubbles.
  7. Fluid drains back into the abdomen, making the bird bottom-heavy.
  8. The bird tips back up.

Show And Tell No More

Rhetorical questions :

Which show and tell of the red dipping bird did you like more?

Which one did you learn more from?

Which one was presented in an interesting way?

Which description do you think there was plenty of effort behind?

Figuring It Out

We are doing the world a great injustice when we don’t incorporate this critical variable to the Show and Tell process we teach our youngest students. What makes matters worse is that more than three quarters of adults still follow the same routine system of show and tell that they were taught as kids.

The variable of “figuring out” how something works, what something is, or why it does a particular thing is essential to producing real results. Results that are human, that are original, and that are backed with experience. These are the results that create profit.

The market used to be in the pocket of those who could show and tell well, even more so to those who mastered it. Now it goes to those who figure it out, who provide content and experience it, who make sure that what they are showing and telling is their art, their invention and their creation.

 

Stay Positive & You Have Some Figuring Out To Do

Garth E. Beyer

The 6 Questions Every Business Needs To Answer Before Startup

Garth Beyer

1. What problem does your business solve?

If there isn’t a problem your business will solve, than it will be the problem and be dissolved. Elaborate on paper what your product/service is meant to help, improve or assist. The more important attribute to the question is understanding that you need to solve what is causing the problem, not just solve the problem. While many will make money by solving a problem, companies can make even more by preventing the problem because they will always need to be kept stable in order to keep the problem from occurring. If you are only trying to solve the problems as they arrive, you will go extinct when the source of the problem does.

2. Is the problem ready to be solved?

For years the advancements made in technology were held back because the human race wasn’t capable of making that big of a jump. Is it too early for your business? Are people searching for answers to their problem, or did you find the answer before they want it? For example, in a classroom setting, a teacher can teach a 4th grader trigonometry, but they don’t need it for another seven years. Evaluate your niche audience to ensure that the size reaches the tipping point in which they want their problem to be solved.

3. How is your solution unique?

Despite the emphasis on making businesses which offer unique ways to solve problems, the world of entrepreneurs are still falling short on making their signature solution. Being different from any other competitor or being a new problem solver is not acceptable. How are you taking it further and creating something full of passion and character that is still different from other options. Don’t just be different, be better.

4. How will your solution be profitable?

Every business seeks profit. Although, different business creators have different definitions for “profit”. Define your profit, whether it is simply customer satisfaction, personal achievement, monetary amounts or something entirely different. Develope insight into how your “profit” will continue to grow and what will need to be done in order to meet the goals you set.

5. How will your solution be sustainable?

People spend countless amounts of dollars to maintain their hobbies. The same is done with people and their business’s. Coincidentally, it is the group of hobbyists and entrepreneurs who create a hobby or business that becomes self sustaining which introduces the largest of profits and becomes subject to the longest life span. What are you going to do to implement longevity into your business? (If creating a business selling crystal balls, you can skip this step)

6. Are you passionate about the idea?

Are you?

 

Stay Positive & Turn Your Answers Into Actions

Garth E. Beyer

The Business Sport Of Soreness

Garth Beyer

Business is a lot like sports.

When you play a sport for the first time, you get sore, but through the soreness your muscles and body improve and grow in order for you to play the sport better. After a good few months of playing and practicing, your body no longer gets sore. Then what? The average activist would go on playing the sport only to find that they are making little improvement in their physique and skills. The intelligent activist would switch up the training routine whether it is by doing a different kind of sport (preferred) or merely working directly on separate strengths necessary for the sport. If you are not feeling the soreness, something is wrong. That means you are in your comfort zone, that you have plateaued and will develop very small improvements, if any.

In businesses, the soreness is called failure, often created from mistakes which were made because you are training and practicing. If you are not feeling any businesses soreness, then you are either not training hard enough or you need to change your routine to succeed any further. Don’t let your body or your business plateau, avoid habitual “sport” strategies.

In the Business Sport of Soreness competitors die standing still.

Stay Positive & Be The Winner, Not competitor

Garth E. Beyer

Alarm Marketing

Garth Beyer
You Prospects Lose If They Snooze Too

A New “Prospect”ive On The Alarm

An alarm, if unique enough, can wake up any person every single day. But very few alarms are capable of that. After using the same alarm over and over the person will begin sleeping through it. The alarms that work wake a person instantly causing them to be mentally alert. The first thought they have is why the alarm went off.

This is your best window of opportunity as a Marker to communicate to your client. The content you deliver will be the decision maker whether the alarm get’s snoozed or even worse, unplugged. Look at it this way, if you knew that you were going to Paris tomorrow, you’re not going to hit the snooze button because you are too far excited. As a Marketer, your product or service you signify has to have the same effect.

Now, it is not so much what you have to give, it is what your prospects get to do, get to have, and get to feel. Those three variables are what your alarm has to communicate. They don’t care what you are offering, they care about the by-products they receive in addition to their package. The only people who I know that wake up simply to get what people have to give are ebayers, and what you are offering better not be applicable to ebay. If you don’t have a good enough reason for waking them up, it’s back to sleep for the prospect and back where you started for you.

Alarms are risky, but if you don’t take the risk of the prospect hitting the snooze button then you don’t “risk” them not hitting it either. This generation is all about quickness, impulse, convenience and accessibility. That means the alarm needs to be instant, jolting, and precise. There is no time for a 2 minute elevator speech or a half-page bio of your service/product. If you can’t pass the alarm test and gain enough interest for them to wake up and act, change the ringer.

If you can’t connect with your prospect even with a change of alarm then use a back up plan and issue an alarm with the first thing most people do in your niche audience. Is the first thing they do after waking up is check their email? Do they go to Starbucks? Do they read a specific blog or online content in the morning? Get in those places and insert the alarm. Be the first thing that makes their day full of excitement and worth it.

Alarm Marketing is a new outlook at the fast-paced lifestyle of the current and future prospects. It limits the time frame that advertising and PR needs to be invested and applies the 80/20 rule more so than is advised. It implies that you, as a Marketer, have about a 4 hour time bracket each day to be the answer of a prospects problem and be the reason why waking up was easy. It also incorporates the frequent change of tactics to keep prospects appealed and coming back.

Don’t Think The Prospects Alarm Is The Only One

You know what rhymes with the “ring” of an alarm, the “cha-ching” of  money being handed over to you. As @ClemensRettich puts it “Biz needs to hear the ring of the cash register as an alarm: time to wake up and follow through”. The alarm of the “cash register” means your work has just begun. You have to follow-up and give even more than what was expected. Their purchase and investment is your alarm and there is no snooze button on it. Either you act immediately or you lose your prospects future business. Clemens continues to add that “Biz fall asleep after the cash register rings. Too bad, because retention and referrals are where the value is”. With that, I will add that you can’t run a successful business if you are solely based on getting new customers because you didn’t wake up to your alarm. Business advancement as well as monetary accumulation is the sole result of recurring, reliable and committed prospects.

Stay Positive & I Resisted All This Time But… “You Snooze, You Lose”

Garth E. Beyer

The One Quality You Need To Be A Successful Expert

Garth Beyer
Muse + Quality = Success

Doctors, fitness trainers, entrepreneurs, marketers, writers, you name it, they all have a similar problem when they become experts on their muse. The problem is that the more you know, the more exposed you are to the harms, negatives and possible downfalls of the topic. This happens as a result of learning all you can about your muse in combination with that fact that in order to be successful in any work place, you need to know as many failures as possible and how to solve them. I am going to give you a few examples of what happens when these muse workers don’t maintain this one quality they need and see if you can guess what the quality is.

  • A doctor begins seeing a small rash on his arm and diagnosis it as skin cancer.
  • A personal trainer assesses her leg soreness and comes to the conclusion that she has severe shin splints.
  • An entrepreneur knows the expected outcome of a plan so she doesn’t follow through.

The trend with these examples – and you can find the same trend in any expert field – is that they let their knowledge, fears and expectations combine to assume a terrible outcome. A regular person, having little knowledge about playing doctor just thinks they have a rash that will go away in a few days if they take care of it. It does. A person going to the gym for the first time and upon exiting, realizes that their legs are sore. They will shrug, call it a good workout and go ice them without the thought of any terrible condition. It never turns out to be. An entrepreneur upon his first time creating a business, follows through with the plan and the outcome turned out successful, against what other “experts” thought.

The fact is that as you gain knowledge about your muse, you gain power over the outcome and in order to have a positive outcome, you have to maintain a positive attitude. The one quality you need to be a successful expert is to Stay Positive (sound familiar?). You can’t let what you now know, limit yourself. The rules, the outcomes, the results are all based on your attitude.

The more you know, the more you have to fear.

Stay Positive & Become An Expert In That First

Garth E. Beyer

The Flaw Of Succeeding

Garth Beyer

Just because you succeed, does not make you successful.

Agreeably, you learn so much from failure if you choose to view it as progress and not a setback. Admittadly, success hardly teaches you anything. In fact, you learn very little from success because what got you there were the lessons you learned from failure. 

What defines you as a successful person when you succeed is not the completed task, it is when you learn as much from it as you do from failure.

The prevention of this learning is due to the idea that success is a place that you can stop at. When you succeed, you feel you have arrived. But in reality, success is a journey and the only way to become successful is to learn as much as possible on that journey. You have the power and responsibility (insert Spiderman cliché’ here) to learn from your successes as much, if not more than your failures.

Two weeks ago I interviewed for a new job position. The day after the interview, I got the job. Woohoo! While discussing the position and signing papers, I was asked if I had any questions about the new job. What I then did was ask my boss and supervisor what they thought I could do to improve my interview skills.

What? I already got the job, who cares! Right?

Wrong.

 If I asked you if you could be more successful than you are now? You would doubtlessly say yes. The only way to do that is to improve in every factor of your life. Sure I nailed the interview with the hammer of confidence and got the job but that does not mean I couldn’t learn more from it. So I asked them what the highlights and downturns were of my interview. I succeeded in getting the job, but that does not mean I reached my destination. It does not mean I learned all I needed.

Since there is always room for improvement, there is always room for more success. And if you are not going to learn from failures because you succeed in something, force yourself to learn everything you can about your success and how to succeed further, because you can, because you deserve to, because success is a journey and not a destination.

Stay Positive & Succeed As If You Failed

Garth E. Beyer

The “Let-Someone-Else-Do-It” Attitude

Garth Beyer

How often have you muttered under the earshot of others that “If you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself”?

Unfortunately, you hear that a lot more than “If you want something done right, ask someone who is a professional at it to do it”. Of course though, you, I, we, are all only human and humans take extreme pride in their ego and are ignorant that they cannot do everything to perfection. As a result, help is never asked for.

Now, it’s not so much a matter that other people can’t do something right, but more of a matter that you can do it better. Or can you?

Today I have asked a new good friend Hulbert Lee who wrote the eBook “How To Focus Better” to write a guest post. Without further ado, – Enter Hulbert –

The Value of Asking People for Help

One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned from starting an online business is not being afraid to ask others for help. I think when people first start out, they have a tendency of wanting to do everything themselves. Either they have grown up and have adopted that sense of “do-it-yourself” mentality or they’re simply just afraid to ask.

For me, I’ve always kind of adopted an attitude that I can do anything I want just as good as anyone else out there as long as I put in the time and effort to do it. This is a good mentality to have if you’re trying to build on one skill, but it can also have its downfalls if you’re trying to do too many things at once.

For example, when I started an online business specifically to help people focus better, I was told to create a product, create a website, get people to the website, and then market the product for the people to buy.

So I spent a few months researching and writing an e-book. After that was done, I remember spending months trying to experiment with designing my website or trying to write copy for my sales page. I spent a lot of money on software and books to learn all of this. But in the end, it just caused a lot of stress and wasted time.

It came down to the point where I realized that I was a writer — not a designer, not a copywriter.

So when I let these realizations go, I began to look for people who were experienced in these areas.

I remember when I first hired my designer to design the e-book layout (which was still in black-and-white document text back then) I was blown away by her results. Just the design made what could have been a bland text turn into something colorful and exciting to read.

I know not everyone will have the budget to hire a designer, but if you constantly seek help out there on the vast Web, sometimes you’ll get lucky.

Like when I was looking for someone to write my sales page copy, I remember digging through the forum pages, and surprisingly enough, found someone who was offering to do a free sales copy. I figured he was probably just starting out and trying to earn credibility as a copywriter.

I jumped on the opportunity and emailed him, and within only about 50 minutes, he had sent me a fresh, new copy for my sales page — all for free. Ever since then, my conversion rates have gone up for my business.

So my advice here for people, who want to succeed in the online world of business, is to always continue to ask people for help. There’s a good chance that another person, who is more experienced and talented than you, will be more than willing to help you out and offer you valuable feedback that will drive your business in the right direction and to where you want it to go.

By Hulbert Lee

After reading Hulbert’s post, I was reminded of the one great attribute that I love about the online community. You can ALWAYS find someone to help you if you search hard enough. It never hurts to do a little research to find who are professionals on the topic you need assistance on and ask them for their help.

Personally, I have even emailed Seth Godin whom I talked to before to write me a letter of recommendation. This was, of course, before he released his eBook Stop Stealing Dreams and if you have read it, you know why he did not write me one. This action made me realize why you don’t ask for help – you don’t like to take a risk. You risk getting rejected, you risk getting told your idea is unworthy of someone else’s attention (especially a professionals).

You need to know that this is not how the online community works. For example, Hulbert searched for experts that knew how to write and knew about “focusing” to read and write a testimonial for his eBook. Hulbert told me that 20% of those he asked, read and wrote a testimonial. Well, you know how they say 20% of the people have 80% of the money and success. Those people who fall under Hulberts 20% category know the power of, not only giving, but also how important it is for others to ask for help which is a main reason they choose to read and write a testimonial for him. As a result, the 20% of people are no doubt well on their way to success (whatever success means to them). The other 80% missed the opportunity to give, to connect, to learn the lesson and benefits of asking and giving help. What they, and you need to know is that when asking for help, people will not criticize you, they will help you.

All you have to do is take the risk.

 

Stay Positive and Use Your Ingenuity To Seek Assistance

Garth E. Beyer

I now call Hulbert a friend and surely he calls me one as well. It is the simple act of asking for help that will propel you to the direction of the success you want.