GarthBox

Someone who rarely ever runs, gets up and makes it through a marathon. Sure, not in record time, but they make it despite the plethora of people telling them they wouldn’t be able to.

Same goes for someone who climbs the tallest mountain in Colorado without any practice (guilty) or who succeeds in NaNoWriMo without designing a storyline.

The average of your work doesn’t have to be the average of all the work you’re surrounded by. It could be better. You can be better. You can be the one that doesn’t meet the average, but increases it for yourself and all those around you.

 

Stay Positive & Time To Raise The Bar A Little More, Huh?

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Competition can piss you off enough to play harder, work smarter, and create better. But it can also have you race  in the wrong direction.

The problem with competition is that we often surrender our control to them.

We let their moves dictate our own.

We let their pace define our pace.

We let their add-ons precept our add-ons.

Which is your business going to be? Slightly better than the rest? Or totally different?

Only when you focus on one option do you get both.

 

Stay Positive & I’ll Let You Guess Which It Is

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Of course it’s plural. Never is there a single reason.

One reason isn’t convincing enough. So we add more. Often times the list is increasing before we start a project or volunteer for an assignment. We think, “If this doesn’t work, at least I have reasons why.”

Truth be told. Those who search for reasons to back off usually do.

Better to acknowledge the grasp for excuses and avoid them. What’s more, why not patch them up so you can’t use them?

 

Stay Positive & You Have Reasons To Keep Forward, Right?

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Great marketing comes from listening, analyzing and doing.

A business owner can riff about competitors and preach all the facts of her product…

But should she?

If a customer arrives in your store, do you yell about what makes you great or do you ask the customer to tell you more about why he is there?

You know the old practice of asking why again and again until you get to the source?

“Tell me more about…” is the same concept.

Rare is it that you ought to be the one telling them more.

 

Stay Positive & Let Your Product/Service Speak For You

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“What does success look like to you?”

Instead of looking to another brand or idol and trying to figure out how to replicate their model or life, what do you want to do differently on your journey? Factually, that business or famous person is inspirational purely because it/they can’t be replicated.

You create remarkability and differentiate yourself from your idols by the choices you make on your way to the top, not at it.

 

Stay Positive & There’s No Map To Significance, You Build It Along The Way

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There are bound to be outages in your business. Pits you or your team members will fall into. Mistakes that will–without a doubt–be made.

The two big questions are: Do you know what those are? Do you have an action plan ready for when they happen?

Your only bartender isn’t there 15 minutes after you’ve opened your doors, what do you do?

The servers for your mobile game go down, do you have a Facebook post ready?

Your largest shipment of a beverage to a new state gets stolen, what do you do?

Begin by drawing a line and documenting the most popular faults you can expect to happen and then go down the line noting the rarer situations that you don’t expect to happen, but could.

Now go through and make sure you have a plan in place for all the situations.

A crisis plan isn’t just for the big things like the death of a Founder or a building fire set by your own employee who was smoking inside the store; it’s a set of actions you’ll take for all the negative situations you could imagine (and some you can’t imagine) happening.

The frustration of going through the plan now isn’t as rough as the patch you’ll go through when a bad situation occurs and you don’t have a well-thought out response.

Don’t rely on any of your reactions to solve a problem. Have a response plan in place.

 

Stay Positive & There’s A BIG Difference Between Responding And Reacting

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There are too many choices and too little time.

What you do to help people decide is the most artistic thing you can do.

Too many businesses focus on adding more options and wasting more of the customer’s time.

 

Stay Positive & Put Your Effort Where It Matters

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