Why Try To Get Out Of Your Box, When You Can Use What's In It?
There’s one way to make the journey a little easier.
To make pitching easier. To make the project easier. To make the meaningful work easier.
The key is to expect surprises.
Surprising challenges and hiccups. Surprising speed humps and pitfalls. Surprising failures and obstacles.
The more we can expect the surprises, the faster we can move beyond them.
The less we expect, the more we get stuck.
And stuck is no good.
Stay Positive & It Won’t Make It Easy, But It Will Make It Easier
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Really, let’s see the endless list.
The list of what can make your brand better than the others?
The list of what you’re afraid of?
The list of what your target cares about?
When you truly work on the endless list, you’ll discover it’s not really endless at all.
Not only that, you’ll discover the innovations that can make your brand better, you’ll realize the fears you have weren’t many after all, and you’ll realize you don’t know as much about your target as you thought.
It’s an exercise that works on literally anything.
If you’re stuck. Write down your endless list.
It’s the quickest (but emotionally laborious) way to get to the edges of innovation, improvement and release.
Stay Positive & Get Unstuck
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HT to Seth Godin for this idea.
Will you still care about what you’re working on in three weeks?
What about the grudge you just started holding?
Or the news you’re paying attention to?
What will matter in three weeks?
The three week test is a great evaluation of work worth doing and energy worth giving. It’s also a great way to determine what to let go of or what distractions to let pass you by.
Stay Positive & If You Really Wanted, What Will Matter In 30 Weeks?
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The problems you still have. The items left on your to-do list. The challenges that haven’t been completed yet.
Certainly they’re the most difficult ones.
On our wait for a shortcut or some easy solve to the problem, to-do or challenge, they build up.
But if we see this early on, we can make the choice to let the problem, to-do or challenge go. No hard feelings, no shame, no disappointment. We know it was getting too daunting and we weren’t up for it – no problem, because there are other problems waiting to be solved. Time to move on.
We can also make the choice to put in the effort, the emotional labor, the focus and energy needed to solve, check off and complete. Better to make that decision early on than wait for a shortcut to appear.
Either decision becomes infinitely easier when we 1. accept that shortcuts rarely spontaneously arrive and 2. choose to draw on our willpower to either lean in or back out.
Stay Positive & Choose Early
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A culture of work and business success will lose its momentum if there aren’t a series of reminders of what it stands for. Reminders for people who have heard them before. Reminders for the newbies involved in your mission. Reminders of what you stand for and where you’re going.
A culture of work and business success will lose its momentum if there aren’t any celebrations around what it stands for. Celebrations when milestones related to the mission are reached. Celebrations when someone exudes company values. Celebrations around company-specific holidays.
A culture of work and business success will lose its momentum if it doesn’t lead by example. Actively and ongoingly making actions that align with it’s mission. Actively and ongoingly supporting efforts that resonate with its core values. You get the idea here.
A successful culture of work and business needs all three.
Stay Positive & Carry On With Your Trifecta
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We might not have to wait for videos to buffer so much anymore, but we shouldn’t forget the lesson doing so taught us.
To account for the buffer time.
In setting up the video chat and running into tech issues. In driving to your destination and not being surprised when there’s an accident that slows it up. When out on a date and running into an old friend on the street who you want to catch up with.
When you account for a little extra time in any endeavor, you undoubtedly remove the amount of stress and frustration you’ll feel along the way as you inevitably experience, hurtles, setbacks, distractions, etc.,
It’s incredible the difference in levels of stress one experiences between buffering that is anticipated or accounted for against one that is a surprise and unwanted.
Help yourself out and account for the buffering.
Stay Positive & It’s All Good (After We Realign Our Expectations)
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You can likely riff your top three competitors.
But what about the 25th?
50th?
100th?
It’s quite incredible how one can learn something from a competitor that, at face value, might be so removed from your geography or your line of service or your customer base.
Sure, study up and learn how to have an advantage over your main three.
But don’t stop sourcing improvements there.
The winners will be the ones who keep learning what they can from all who they can – even if it’s learning what not to do.
Stay Positive & Be A Winner
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