GarthBox

As often as I don’t care to imagine a negative outcome, let’s do it as an exercise.

Let’s say your idea is pitched with 19 other ideas. Only five get chosen. For the 15 who don’t get chosen, they have three options.

1. Run. Give up. Throw in the towel.
2. Figure out how to support the five who got chosen.
3. Choose yourself. Go make it happen without a voted approval.

Which do you choose?

If you guessed a combination of two and three, then you’re on point. The thinking that you can only choose one is often what leads entrepreneurs to choose the first option. They don’t realize the potential of themselves or those around them.

As ol’ Zig said, you’ll have everything you want once you help enough other people get what they want.

 

Stay Positive & Sometimes Choosing Yourself Means Choosing Others

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The less you’re attached, the more likely you’ll switch, and the more you’ll experience.

This is every marketer’s challenge: to convey a remarkable experience that doesn’t die down.

Dyson makes pulling out the vacuum an enjoyable task. Every. Damn. Time.

Flipping through songs on your iPod never gets boring.

Having a dedicated mug to yourself makes drinking beer (any beer) more fun.

So much is marketed as a one-and-done product, an item of instant gratification, a service of use or lose, and all to the dismay of the maker when she sees customers changing their minds, upgrading, and converting to her competitors.

However, it’s not always a matter of an inferior product or service. More often, it’s that we’re not telling the story right. We’re putting too much emphasis on the “try this” part than we are on the “every time you use it you will feel ____” part.

A remarkable product makes a customer feel like they are part of the change, and, that alone will halt them from trying something else.

 

Stay Positive & Does Your Customer Know What Change They’re Part Of?

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We’re supposed to be living in a connected world, right?

This is, after all, the connection economy.

I wonder, then, how many people you reached out to form a connection with yesterday?

How many virtual handshakes? How many gifts of your time did you give to someone new?

The only way to go up is to help (and be helped) by others.

I’d say it’s time to start connecting more. Wouldn’t you?

 

Stay Positive & It Starts And Ends With A Connection

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Your imagination isn’t something that’s simply unlocked and then your drowning in remarkable ideas.

It’s not a condition in which a task becomes easy to accomplish or, by sitting there and thinking, you’ll eventually find a new way of doing a job better.

Your imagination is a series small gifts that get opened as a reward of taking an action.

Once you begin to write a few sentences of a novel, your imagination rewards you with an extremely exciting sentence.

Once you begin DIYing a project, that’s when you begin to notice the ways you can deviate from the Pinterest guide you have open and really make it your own.

Consider that your imagination runs on a reward system–the more times you reach for the crayon, the more color your life gets filled with, but you have to reach, you have to take action.

 

Stay Positive & Waiting For Inspiration Is Worthless

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There’s an expression in the construction world of measure twice, cut once.

If you fail to double up on accuracy, you’re often cutting more wood, wasting time and resources.

Same goes for social metrics, KPIs and ROIs.

Usually in our haste to discover whether our hypothesis is correct, we miss a variable or read a measurement incorrectly.

Thinking “if something is wrong, someone else will catch it,” isn’t a valid reason for not measuring twice.

 

Stay Positive & Haste Makes Waste Too

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Credibility requires hustle.

Hustle to round the ponies before you round the stallions.

The problem is that many stay rounding the ponies. They get stuck.

If you want to write for a major publication or open your own studio or start your own restaurant, start by writing for smaller publications, training at multiple studios and hosting as many dinners as possible.

People get stuck earning credibility because it’s easy, you get comfortable, you can be a leader in a small market, and that feels good. If that’s what you want, great.

But remember what you were trying to gain some credibility for in the first place.

 

Stay Positive & You Can’t Get Stuck If You Hustle

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If you’re reading this, you’re full of ideas, you’re a freelancer or entrepreneur, you’re wanting to take risks to be a better you.

I can tell you now, you’re going to face a lot of resistance, especially from people you care about.

While my first piece of advice is to keep your projects to yourself, to prove yourself right and make it happen without telling 100 people that you’re going to make it happen; that’s not always easy.

There comes a time when you need to tell family and friends about your endeavor. You need to pitch to investors. You need to tell your colleagues that you’re taking initiative to do the thing you’ve always been talking about doing. With that, you’ll ignite a lot of fear points.

That’s why it pays to consider what they are going to be afraid of? Are they going to be afraid for your security? Afraid of their friends you’ll be competing with? Afraid you’ll fail because they don’t want to see you hurt?

I’ve learned that one of the best ways to start telling anyone about your idea is to begin with addressing their fears. Personally, for my discussions/pitches/introductions, I start with “Here’s what I want to do. Here’s why it might not work.” And then I address the reality of each of those points. Have you?

 

Stay Positive & Speak To Fears And You’ll Speak To What They Want To Know

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