Why Try To Get Out Of Your Box, When You Can Use What's In It?
People don’t buy a quarter-inch drill, they buy a quarter-inch hole.
It’s an interesting adage that is often either misinterpreted or forgotten altogether.
A better question (HT Clayton Christensen) that gets you to think more: What job is your customer/patient/client hiring you to do?
Stay Positive & It Starts With The Target, Not The Product
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What can you do before you’re asked?
What does your boss need before she sends you an email asking? What does the customer need before they send you a Facebook message complaining? What does your audience need before you wrap up your speech?
Empathize by thinking of what others need before they do, and then acting on it.
Stay Positive & Get Ahead By Feeling Ahead
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You don’t have enough time, money or knowledge as others.
Nor is it likely you have enough experience, bandwidth or connections.
That’s how everyone starts, though.
The paradox about enough is, if you wait until you have it, you’ll never have it.
Stay Positive & Onward Anyway
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The trouble with many creators is they apply the polish too early.
During layout, during planning stages, during the what-ifs of a project.
Polish is meant to coat a project once the big idea is realized.
Until then, all you’re doing is preventing an idea from becoming big.
Stay Positive & Polish Later
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There’s one pivotal way of thinking that sets one marketer far ahead of the others.
It’s difficult work, it’s emotionally intensive, it’s mentally laboring, but it’s vital if you’re going to create work that’s meaningful.
The greatest marketers embrace the fact no one they are seeking to influence thinks as they do.
You are not the target. The target doesn’t know what you know. They don’t work or think the same way you do. They’ve had different experiences that have led them to the present moment.
Stay Positive & The Answer Is To Empathize
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You have 24 hours to make an impact tomorrow.
Regardless of what you can’t control (the weather, your boss’s attitude, the ticking clock…), you have the ability to make do work that matters, interact with people in a way that livens their spirit, you can decide to only do what will make a difference.
Curiously, how is tomorrow any different from today?
Stay Positive & Why Wait?
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You know me to believe that the more difficult a task is, the more emotional labor it calls for, the more vulnerability it requires, the more it matters.
When a task is easy, not only is it low-value, it’s soon to be nonexistent.
In a world full of process-creators, short-cut developers and those who focus solely on the efficiency of a project, the easy tasks are the first to go, to be placed within a human-less process or to be cut entirely.
If you’re doing the work that only provides 20% of the results, you’re doing the wrong work.
Stay Positive & Easy Is Finite
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