GarthBox

It’s easy to blame the industry when things are down and to celebrate it when they are up.

It makes a great argument when you’re talking about a new idea.

“Well, it worked in X industry. It could work in ours.”

It makes a great argument when you’re trying to destroy a new idea, too.

The thing about the industry is that it’s made up of people. Plural.

There is no single person in charge. No dedicated lead. No one person designing where the industry goes, how it floes or what it shows.

It’s worth reconsidering how you do “industry research,” because it can often be either misleading or not informative enough to make a decision that will matter to the people in it.

 

Stay Positive & Better To Do “People Research”

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It’s infinitely smoother to move forward in life if you treat different people differently.

Despite us all having shared attributes that move us (love, belonging, safety, etc.), the moment we step outside, we’re different from others walking beside us.

The best way to begin treating different people differently is to draw a bell curve.

Place the person or group you’re working with on the far right, then fill out the type of person or group that fits the middle and the other side of the curve.

Everything is perception, and we have to stop acting like everyone fits in the bell of the curve.

Every year it becomes less of a mountain and more of a small hill, anyway.

 

Stay Positive & Goodbye Bell, Hello People

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Most stickiness sucks.

Gum on your shoe.

Not moving up at work.

Deciding between movies with friends or date night with your siggo.

As often as I write about avoiding getting stuck, there is one stuck that’s a good sign.

It’s the creative sort of stuck. After hours of concepting, thinking of ideas, and struggling to improve them you get stuck.

That’s a healthy stuck because it doesn’t mean you’re stuck; it means that you’ve made it through the hell of all the bad ideas, the easy swings, the cliches and everything anyone would expect you to come up with.

This is the stuck that when you notice it, it should be fuel to go beyond it.

After this kind of stuck, it’s all up from there.

 

Stay Positive & Go Ahead, Get Stuck, But Then Keep Going

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Repeating yourself isn’t always helpful.

It’s not that they didn’t listen, it’s that they didn’t hear you … really hear you.

The best thing you can do is to say what you said differently.

To empathize. To switch from what you want them to hear to how they’ll actually understand you. To putting their shoes on for a moment.

And if roles reversed, the best phrase you can speak is “Can you say that in a different way?”

Hearing and understanding are two different actions, and repeating might help with one, but not so much the other.

 

Stay Positive & Said Differently, Ask More Questions

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For any sort of marketing to work, there needs to be tension.

Consider any story you’ve remembered throughout the years from Peter Pan and Star Wars to family memories and your greatest educational triumphs–there was conflict happening in each.

The problem with a lot of advertising is it tries to get to happily ever after right away.

The irony is that for people to seek out a solution, you have to put the problem in the spotlight.

Parking assist doesn’t really matter to you or I until we’re faced with parking in a tight space. Here’s an ad that shows the problem. Far more effective than showing a car parking for you.

Consider where the conflict is in your marketing material, your brand story, your financials.

There is conflict, right?

 

Stay Positive & Now Leverage It

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It’s time to mail a letter to yourself. Two letters, in fact.

One is going to contain a poor review of your gift, product, service–whatever you offer.

And you’re going to write it.

Then write another letter to yourself.

This one will contain a positive review of your gift, product, service–whatever you offer.

Mail them to yourself and when they arrive, ask yourself, “Which letter is more right?”

Heck, you probably won’t have to send the letters. You’ll know once you write them.

The next big task is to decide which you’re going to focus your time on.

Appealing more to the positive review or making up the faults of the poor review?

 

Stay Positive & The Least Right Answer Is Both

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A lot of us are constantly exhaling.

We preach, teach and guide.

We lead, create and supply.

We give. A lot.

What it takes many mistakes and exhaustive days recouping to learn is that to exhale as much as we do, we must, at frequent times, inhale.

We need that time to gather ourselves, be in the moment and meditate.

We need to breathe, feel and see … really, see.

There’s not a deep enough breath we can take to do all we want to do on a constant and endless basis. We’re kidding ourselves if we think there is.

Note, that it’s not about limitations at all.

It’s about our work manifesting and taking on a life of its own.

 

Stay Positive & Breathe Out, Breathe In

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