Life Lesson

Here’s the secret to disruption.

Keep doing what you’re doing so long as what you’re doing is for the target.

Those who make the meaningful impact show up again and again and take customers where they hope to go.

They don’t make cuts because of a bottom line or because they don’t want to do the emotional labor. They don’t switch the logo and revamp the website every other year. They don’t pay for a super bowl ad. They don’t pivot their marketing every time they have a bad sales weekend.

The successful disrupters almost do the opposite of what we think of when we think of disruption; they stick to their commitment to the people they sought to serve.

Stay Positive & Drip By Drip By Drip, Disruption Happens

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It’s worth a pause when you hear (or say yourself) that it’s a win-win situation.

Everyone loves winning, but at what cost? Empathy and connection?

And when will the feeling of winning fade? Will you still feel like it was a win-win five hours from now? Five weeks? Five years?

And who wins? You and another, surely, but is it the right people? The stakeholders? The customers? Your family?

Our win-win situations might not actually be the wins we set out to make.

Stay Positive & Worth A Double-Double Check

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Pain reminds you that you’re alive.

But so does friendship and love and camaraderie and compliments and a high five.

It can be great to be reminded we’re alive.

What if we helped others remember that today, too?

Stay Positive & Fist Bump

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There’s no quicker way to garner someone’s support than to have empathy.

There’s no smarter way to convince someone of a better way forward than first having empathy.

There’s no more strategic way to having someone buy into what you’re offering than show empathy.

There’s no better way to have a tribe follow you through a rough patch than to have empathy.

If you’re frustrated with your current situation, it could probably use more empathy.

Stay Positive & Toss A Little More In, Just Because

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In the pursuit of making a dollar, we can often enable a mix of people to dictate what our brand is, says and stands for.

No doubt we ought to be recognizing a problem and providing a solution – not forcing a solution on people who don’t have the problem.

But there’s still dissonance between what we want our brand to stand for and the people that kind of brand attracts.

Without a clear (and unwavering) idea of what we stand for and the people who will stand behind that, we can attract a lot of people who will test our willpower, who will verbally abuse the brand and who will make you question why you got into business in the first place.

It’s not always about awareness and it’s definitely not only about making a dollar. Each of those happen, however, when we know who we want to attract – and design for that in the first place.

Stay Positive & So, Again, Who Is It Attracting?

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There are a lot of tools to evaluate your marketing behavior as well as to gauge it against competitors.

One in particular I’ve come to appreciate is the before and after chart.

On one side of the page you list all the tactics, all the gifts, all the noise-making you’re doing before someone takes the action you want them to take.

On the other side of the page you list all the tactics, gifts and connection you’re making happen after someone takes the action.

More often than not, it’s lopsided.

And once you do this for your competitors, too, you’ll begin to see opportunity.

Stay Positive & Then Act On The Info

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Risk is tricky and we can be better at recognizing and handling it.

It’s tricky because we know that if something is risky enough, then we won’t do it.

It’s a great cop-out method for not losing all of our money or being heart broken, but it’s also a cop-out method for not doing meaningful work or not helping others achieve what they dream for themselves.

The bigger we make the task appear, the more risk we feel and so we become paralyzed to action.

The reality, of course, is that what we think is a risk, often isn’t.

We don’t risk much when we publish a post on our blog or when we meet friends for coffee to discuss a passion of ours even if it feels risky.

We don’t risk much when we put fingers to a keyboard and write the report we should have written last week.

There’s not much risk in having empathy for someone and taking a selfless action off that empathy to help them move forward.

There is, however, the feeling of risk.

But that feeling isn’t a good indication of actual risk. It’s a cheat to back off from doing meaningful work.

It’s time we stop confusing the feeling of risk with actual risk.

Stay Positive & Keep On

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