GarthBox

If your guests aren’t leaving five star reviews – make changes until they are.

If you’re not getting as many people signed up for your class, newsletter, workshop, conference, whatever – make changes until you do.

If you’re not happy with the answer to “what am I doing this for?” … you guessed it – make changes until you are.

Stay Positive & Dissatisfaction Is Fuel (And It’s Just A Simple Question To Find It)

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Is it important enough work that you’ll put your own wallet on the line?

Is it important enough work that it’s okay if someone else gets the credit?

Is it important enough work that you will lose sleep just thinking about it?

Important work takes a lot out of us. We put our resources, our status and our health on the line for things that matter.

If we’re not, it might not be the work we should be doing.

Stay Positive & Invest Wisely

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There’s a really simple gauge to determine whether or not you should invest your time with someone.

Are they curious?

Curious people inevitably have all the other qualities that are worth being inspired by.

Worth checking: Are you the curious one in your friend’s group? They’ll be better because of it.

Stay Positive & Curiosity Connects

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Innovative ideas used to come from taking two seemingly disparate things and finding a way to combine them.

That, of course, was the old economy.

Now innovative ideas come from taking two seemingly disparate tribes and finding ways to connect them.

The beauty of this new economy of innovative ideas is that once you have one, you can keep finding more ways to connect them.

There’s not much more you can do after you combine peanut butter with jelly.

But there’s plenty more you can do when you connect a driver and a passenger or a supplier and a distributor or a person with a problem and a person with their solution.

Stay Positive & Innovations Really Are Endless

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If your website is a headache to journey through, they’ll find another way to get what they want. (Hint: it’s likely with a competitor)

If your parking fee is absurd, they’ll find another more cost-effective way to park.

Two takeaways.

The first is that your job is two-fold: make it as easy for your customer as possible and make it as valuable for them (read: they should feel like they got more than they paid for, be it with their time, money or attention).

The second is that those that are smart enough to find an alternative around you are also the ones that will share that alternative with others.

The last thing you want is word of mouth working against you.

That means you don’t go keeping things status quo when someone finds an alternative (faster and/or cheaper) path.

Stay Positive & Find Ways To Make It Easier + More Valuable, Always

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By all means, plan for success.

But don’t stop planning there.

The adage “failure to plan is planning to fail” holds weight, but it’s missing a piece: planning for failure can minimize the hurt the same way planning for success can elevate it.

What does your team communicate when the power goes out? What design shows up when your website goes down? What’s your back up plan if you get stuck in traffic and miss your meeting? What’s the plan if you get sick next week?

Thinking through what you’ll do if things (or you!) are down and out achieves two meaningful results.

The first is it decreases your own stress and frustration levels. You’ll be able to approach the situation with a much more level head. Of course it sucks to be sick, but you save all your files to the server so your coworker can easily keep things moving while you recover.

The second is that it ensures that you receive grace by those for whom your down and out situation impact. When you can respond to someone with empathy about how the ferris wheel is temporarily out of order, you can actually make a fan out of them rather than leave them frustrated.

Stay Positive & Flip The Impact Of Down Time

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Misery loves company. Misery loves to sulk. Misery also loves to fuel you for the better if you choose it to.

Seth Godin once wrote about an agonist, which is a person that provokes your best work, often by forcing the not-best work to happen. They bring about the agony of rejection or candor to you. Of course, they don’t do it to berate you into nonexistence; they do it to push you to the next level.

The nice thing about an agonist is that anyone can be one without updating their LinkedIn profile to it.

Every rejection letter you get, the author could be the agonist. Every editor of your work. Any Google review can be.

An Agonist is a title you give to someone.

Stay Positive & Find Your Fuel

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