Life Lesson

There’s a difference to you on whether a task or email or call is unread versus unresponded.

But to the person who sent the note, there is no difference.

Even before opening the note, empathy comes from understanding how the sender of the note sees it.

The ball is in your court. It doesn’t matter in what state or condition it is.

Stay Positive & Zero Inbox Is The Goal (Because Empathy Is)

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The race to be the fastest or the cheapest is a race to the bottom. When you win, you lose.

But that doesn’t mean fast and cheap isn’t important.

It’s more of a value-add than it is the key differentiator.

Which means you still need the differentiator.

The non-commodity element. The piece that others aren’t willing to invest in. The care for customization, perhaps. Something.

Stay Positive & See You At The Top

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There are a number of things that are fun to do again and again.

And then there are a number of things that aren’t.

When was the last time you went through your onboarding process to see what you may be unknowingly asking a potential employee to fill out more than once?

When was the last time you signed up for your own newsletter, made a purchase and set out to make a second or third purchase to see what information you had to give more than once?

In real life, it feels pretty dumb to say hi to someone you already said hi to, but that’s because you know you’re doing it.

In the digital world, it’s a lot easier to say hi two, three or four times and not know you’re doing it. But you know who does? The person you’re supposed to be wooing. And to them, the repetition feels like you don’t care.

There’s no better time to sweep your systems than now. Show you care.

Stay Positive & Reduce The Repetition

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Right now, most have come to agreement that success can mean many different things to different people. It’s a generic term, specific only to the person using it.

Perfection, on the other hand, is still being treated like success was a number of years ago.

Perfection is oft thought of as polished, 100%, everything about it is right.

But that’s not the reality of the perfect world we live in.

Rather, something is perfect if that something works as intended.

A perfect message resonates, but that same message might have an odd color crop on it. It’s a blemish, but it doesn’t make the message imperfect. Why? Because the message resonates. It’s working as intended.

And how you intend for something to make an impact might be different than how someone else intends for that same thing to make an impact. Perfect, then, is a generic term, defined by the person using it.

Go ahead and be a perfectionist. We need more things that work as intended.

Stay Positive & You May Not Need As Much Polish As You Think

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It might be fair to say we often treat others better than we treat ourselves.

Be that true, it would then be fair to question how poorly we handle the conversations in our head if we meet every conversation with another as a confrontation in the real world.

If we let the outside critic fill us with frustration… If we let the real world disagreements boil our words until each is accompanied with an expletive… If we let our competitors’ triumphs egg us to move the line in our moral standards…

Then how bad are we treating ourselves?

You know– the critic inside your head, the disagreement with what your brain and heart are saying or the competition with yourself to be better than you were yesterday but not as great as you will be tomorrow?

Stay Positive & Time To Treat Yourself Better (So You Can Treat Others Better)

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One more thought came to mind about improving frequency of messages.

After improving your message, the next best move you can make is to remove those who have acted on your message so 1. you don’t waste your ad dollars or time and energy put toward your communications campaign and 2. so you don’t turn the person you’ve converted into one that won’t ever again.

It might take seeing a message about an upcoming concert three times to get a person to act, but once they do, it’s the most annoying experience (and again, a waste of resources) to be hit with another message encouraging one to do what one already has.

This is time consuming to do. It likely requires getting a few systems to talk with one another. It might even require some manual editing (for now).

But damn, is it worth it in regard to saved resources and a greater likelihood of creating a loyalist out of someone who has converted.

Stay Positive & Don’t Waste Awareness

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To improve frequency, you don’t need to send your message more times. Increased frequency isn’t the same as improved frequency.

Quite the opposite.

Improving frequency comes from creating more meaningful messages, better targeted, to create the change you want so you don’t need to repeat your message.

How many times do you need to show and tell something before they act on it isn’t the question to be asking.

How can we get our work to be strong enough that we can show it fewer times before they act on it?

Note: That doesn’t mean that the goal is 1 message. Frequency works, but for many brands, it can be drastically improved.

Stay Positive & Frequency The Better Way

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