Expectations Have More Weight Than Promises

Garth Beyer

Weighing Expectation & Promise

I caught this article on Atlantic this morning. It’s all about making promises. Essentially, when you break a promise, you hurt feelings and disappoint the person(s) you made a promise to.

Obvious.

However, when you exceed a promise, when you go above and beyond what you promise you will do, it’s not much more rewarding than simply meeting the promise.

The research behind it makes me skeptical of businesses making promise’s to their customers and clients. If a PR agency promises they can increase a Twitter following by 500 in a week, and end up increasing it by 1,200, the client merely sees that the agency do what it promises, not that it can do more than it promises. There’s no guarantee they can do that again next week.

Alas, we arrive at the scale, weighing promises against expectations.*

Perhaps it’s not just safer to say “this is what you can expect” instead of “this is what we can promise,” but it’s more beneficial, rewarding, and likely to result in a remarkable experience.

The motto goes “exceed expectations.” You never hear, “exceed promises.”

 

Stay Positive & What Do You Expect?

*Dan Ariely touches on this in his book predictably irrational and his blog.

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Feedback Frequency

Garth Beyer

Here’s a tip you can keep in consideration next time you’re self-evaluating yourself after just starting a new project or venture.

Feedback

If you’re just starting out, trying something for the first time, if you really are a noob, then be sure to take the learning curve into account when you self-evaluate.

Critiques, improvements, self-assessments are simply a distraction when you’re first learning something. It’s a distraction because it takes real effort, focus and energy to assess yourself; attention and spirit better put toward playful progress.

In other words, when you’re told to “play around first,” take it seriously. The playing, that is. Instead of so much feedback, why not seek out the feedbag?

 

Stay Positive & You Don’t Always Need Feedback To Advance

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Unnoticed Celebrities

Unnoticed Celebrities

Garth Beyer

I'm A Celebrity, Go Away

You’re one of them. Me too.

What does the noticed celebrity artist have that you don’t?

You may say “a following” or “venture capital” but both are snub excuses because you have the same resources that any celebrity has or had at one point to build a tribe and acquire funding.

Drake needed Lil Wayne to lift him up. What’s stopping you from reaching out, asking for help, finding a mentor?

All of these businesses needed capital. What’s stopping you from making pitches, asking for sponsorships, finding a partner?

How you become a celebrity, an expert, an artist isn’t that difficult to figure out. Following through with all the hows is the difficult part.

 

Stay Positive & Just Like Them, You Can Do It

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Just One Thing I Love About The Web


					

				Garth Beyer			

			


			

			
Endless Staircase, Fear


Anything is possible.


From backpacking in an inhabited (by humans) jungle for two weeks to breaking a world record, we can find blogs and YouTube videos to prove they’re possible. Didn’t think a certain web design or mouse contraption could be developed? The Internet tells us otherwise.


It’s a brilliant, but scary thing.


While it shows us the endless possibilities of anything and everything, it also pulls the curtain from which we so often hide behind.


We can’t use “it’s never been done” as an excuse anymore. In fact, we can’t really believe in impossible anymore either. As cliché as it is, the web is proving that if you can imagine it, you can make it happen. Scarily, it reminds us that if we don’t make it happen, someone will.


The world and the web is a scary place. I guess that’s what I love about it.


 


Stay Positive & Run At Fear, Not Away


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Keep It Short


					

				Garth Beyer			

			


			

			
People connect on vulnerable terms. Progress is most effectively made in short bursts. Keeping it short is taking away the fluff, the cushion, the safety net. Short is hard work. Hard work is valuable work. And valuable work is always the result of people becoming vulnerable.


 


Stay Positive & Worth Watching… don’t worry, it’s short.

					

	
	



			
				



	
Where The Real Analysis Needs To Take Place

	

		
Where The Real Analysis Needs To Take Place


					

				Garth Beyer			

			


			

			
All Signs Point To


After someone makes a transaction, makes their purchase, opens the book, follows through with your call to action, it’s all tweaking at that point for you.


If you see most people don’t read blog posts longer than 2,000 words, that’s easy to tweak. If few people opened up your press release, the title is easy to tweak. If no one is sharing your YouTube video, making the share button more visible is easy to tweak.


The place analysis is most important is in the conversations leading up to the transaction. How did they get to your blog in the first place? How is their email on your list to begin with? Why would people want to share the video anyway?


No transaction is as simple as “this for that” anymore. There are conversations going on before every transaction. Conversations customers have with themselves. Conversations they have with you. Conversations they have with their friends.


Maybe the focus needs to be less on tweaking and more on reaching the right people to begin with.


If you don’t analyze the conversations before a transaction, you’ll be at the mercy of always tweaking, always making adjustments.


 


Stay Positive & Hard To Move In The Right Direction When You’re Moving In All Directions


Photo credit to my awesome friend Krista Ledbetter

					

	
	



			
				



	
	

		
“Put Dog Shit In A Tube And I’ll Try It”


					

				Garth Beyer			

			


			

			
Words from a work colleague after my boss brought back tubed meat and tuna from Switzerland. (Yes, we joked about using it as toothpaste.)


Everything about the tubed food seemed and looked disgusting. I use past tense because they finished the tubes. Nothing new to talk about or cringe from now.


However, a bit of wisdom that managed to squeeze itself out of the tubed food talk is this: why is book cover design so lucrative if we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover?


Answer: Because we do anyway.


Apparently if you put dog shit in a tube and make it look presentable by design, my coworker will try it. It’s the truth, really. To some people canned tuna doesn’t make sense, but tubed tuna does. Consider yogurt and gogurt. Consider toothpaste in bottle verses in a container you dip your brush in. Design matters.


The first step in design (or for any effort to impact people) is to know your audience.


The first thing to know about your audience is they will judge a book by its cover; that’s how you get people to try something, consider a service, open a book, read your blog.


My one defense to this truth and favorite aspect of design is you often get more than one chance to make a good first impression. If the book cover doesn’t engage readers to open it up, then redesign the cover. That simple and most people won’t notice.


And my last design tip. Don’t forget the weird. Because there are weird people who will eat tuna out of a tube, and, yes, as disgusting as it is, there are people who could be persuaded to purchase dog shit in a tube. Maybe not eat it, but at least purchase it.


 


Stay Positive & It’s Actually Sounding Like A Pretty Good Gag Gift To Me


HT to Chip Kidd for being an idol.