GarthBox

You take them both. They’re not given.

 

Stay Positive & Now Figure Out What You’re Really Afraid Of

Attention and care are the two measurements that matter most on social.

Number of views and click-throughs mean nothing if the user doesn’t hang around. When a user watches all five minutes of your video or explores your site for 3 minutes, that’s valuable, that signifies you have their attention and they are invested.

Number of likes or favorites means nothing. When someone comments or shares your post it shows 1) that they care about your content and 2) they want others to know that they care about it.

Those are the measurements that matter, the ones that are both quantitative and qualitative.

 

Stay Positive & Don’t Get Lost In Vanity Metrics

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Learning can be easy a lot of the time.

Reading helpful content is harmless to you. No one’s died from the spike in dopamine from a business seminar. And listening to podcasts as you lay down in your bed, what’s safer than that?

The truth about learning, though, is to be the best at your practice, to be an artist, you need a balance of safe learning and hard learning (otherwise referred to as learning the hard way).

It’s okay to get hurt. To feel bad when you fail. To get embarrassed.

Rocky could train with just a rope and a bag for a fight, but what sets him apart and puts him ahead of the competition is that he has taken hits in the ring, in home, and on the street.

The truth about learning is you become successful by doing it the easy way and the hard way.

The trouble comes when you try to replace the hard way for an easy one. You shortchange yourself when you do this.

 

Stay Positive & Maybe Being Hard On Yourself Is A Critical Part Of Learning, Maybe

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If you’re like me, numbers don’t really move you.

I’m skeptical of statistics and research and data because it’s often easy for researchers to go into data and pull out the numbers that support their theory and ignore the digits that don’t.

It’s funny how I grew up loving statistics until I realized how bogus a lot of them are. Yet, that might be because I haven’t quite perfected how to use them to tell a story. I’m working on it by tackling the setbacks.

The first setback is there’s too many numbers that mean nothing. I wrote about football the other day and how there are so many meaningless statistics shared during a game.

I think of the number of shark attacks there are each year or the % you can elongate your life by drinking a cup of olive oil a day.

We can combat this setback by choosing one piece of data that supports a universal truth. “96 percent of statistics are made up.” That is statistic that’s funny for two reasons, it fits the story I’m telling in this blog post and it’s a universal truth.

The second setback is working to make the numbers as fun as the story. We have to stop telling ourselves and others how not fun data is.

Visually speaking, data can be incredible. Consider all the infographics you’re awed by. Or consider all the fun you can have creating an infographic by doing the digging to show how effective infographics are to brand awareness.

Before we can tell a compelling story with numbers, we have to tell ourselves a story about how numbers can impact our work in a positive way.

 

Stay Positive & Slowly But Surely, We’ll Be Fluent In Data Storytelling

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Short stories don’t move us, short books do.

It’s tough for a short story, a blog post, a tweet to move people.

I’ve wondered why I haven’t been using Twitter and this is what I’ve come up with.

I’ve never been transformed by a tweet. Never been spurred into action or motivated to change my world view from 140 characters.

Multiply 140 a few dozen times and maybe that has got me to think a bit, but not as much as 50 pages of a book or (what feels like 50 pages) of a long blogpost from a friend.

There’s a vast difference between too short, good enough and too long. Yes, of course there are outliers but decide now if that’s what you want to achieve or not. If your hope isn’t to be an outlier, but to give the world something special then don’t live your life dreaming of the grand novel you want to write.

Write a short book that people can pick up and read in an hour or two, maybe even read in the bookstore without purchasing it. After all, the point of writing is to tell a story that changes the way readers see the world, right?

Making money from a book is aiming to be an outlier.

 

Stay Positive & Go Write Something Special, You’ll Feel Good (And So Will The Reader)

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We’re served numerous statistics everywhere we look.

Sorry.

What I meant to type is we’re served numerous statistics that have virtually nothing to do with our day, our job or the people we’re marketing to.

Football, a perfect example, is packed with statistics. Does it matter how many yards the tight end has run in his career if the only goal is to defeat the team he’s versing in the moment?

Does the unemployment rate in Minneapolis matter if you’re searching for a job in Austin?

We are in fact endowed with a plethora of statistics, the challenge is to focus on the data that matters and ignore the rest.

 

Stay Positive & Study The Right Data