Why Try To Get Out Of Your Box, When You Can Use What's In It?
The solution you’re after might not be found by moving places, but it sure works against mitigating frustration, alienating conflict and breaking a trend of a creative block while you explore or work toward a solution.
It can be as simple as finding a new room in the house, going for a walk around the block – changing your environment in one way or another.
Stay Positive & Change Your Place To Increase Your Pace
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There are the expected competitors; the three you mention all the time and try to be better than. You might even copy their ideas.
Then there’s the more obscure competitors; not directly in your category, but certainly influences it. These are the folks doing actually risky things.
The third set of competitors are the most often forgotten but ever growing and ever more important – people, also known as brands, also known as influencers.
Stay Positive & No Stone Unturned
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Moshpits are amazing. The community is great. Every one I’ve been in, the moshpit has stopped if someone falls. People all around them help the fallen get back up. Shoes and hats and phones that fall get returned. People who don’t feel like moshing get protected by those who can see they don’t want to mosh. It’s really magic.
But a moshpit might not be the way you want your audience to be acting.
When I was at a Bayside concert, people were moshing. If you don’t know Bayside, they are not a moshpit kind of band. Lead singer Anthony Raneri could have carried on performing and letting people mosh, but instead he stopped in the middle of the song and told people to stop. He did so with humility by pointing out how people were scaring him given that he is only 5 foot something.
People laughed and the mosh pit audience turned back to the audience that has been known to be the Bayside audience.
Bayside is really not just a band, it’s a brand. And as any brand does, they pick their audience and then that audience is the brand’s responsibility.
That day, perhaps there were a few people in the moshpit that turned into haters of Bayside. Certainly not enough to counter how much more support and loyalty every other fan felt for the band when it made it clear how their audience was to behave.
Stay Positive & To Mosh Or Not To Mosh (You Decide)
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Projecting your emotions on someone is much different than having empathy. Despite us both being human, how you will feel about something is almost always different than how someone else will feel about it.
Further projecting (taking a guess at how they’ll feel) is a little closer to empathy, but still misses the mark.
To truly be empathetic, you have to listen; to hear and feel the words and see the facial expressions of the person you wish to be empathetic with.
There’s nothing that will get you closer to pure empathy than to put yourself in a position that you truly see a person.
Stay Positive & You See?
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Uphold a culture of “no, but” instead of “yes, and.”
Declare there is no room for failure.
Restrict the available resources.
Work in the same spot. (Innovation dies when it stands still.)
Stick to the templates.
Stay Positive & Aim For The Opposite Of The Above
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There are many magical keys to writing better, but the best is to be quick.
And to be quick, you don’t need to dumb it down; you need to distill it.
It takes skill to distill, however.
Much more skill than it takes to write to someone as if they were stupid. (That’s just ignorant.)
Hemingwayapp.com is a fantastic place to put your work through the ringer.
After awhile, you won’t need it to make more of your words matter.
Stay Positive & Then Again, It’s Still Worth Spot Checking
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The relentless search for better is what truly defines an expert. (Thanks Seth Godin)
The way to build a community is to offer them what they already want and then keep working at ways to offer it better.
The best way to collect a series of remarkable Google reviews is to try treating the next guest better than you treated the one before.
The way to get bigger is to be better.
The brands that stand out are relentlessly working toward better.
Stay Positive & Are You?
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