Knowing

A Different Kind Of Plan B

Garth Beyer

Off The Path Plan B

Working on every project like you would a jigsaw puzzle is essential if you want it to be a success. Lean the box against the wall and start putting all the pieces together, regularly looking at what the final product is supposed to be. But work projects (and life!) aren’t that simple.

You can plan everything out. You can have the perfect strategy. You can create a system that will get you from start to finish. But – and this is a big but because it’s always existent – things won’t go as planned, as strategized, as systemized.

Tactics will change. People will let you down. You will take an unexpected and uncontrolled turn toward the unknown.

Knowing your plan and visualizing the final puzzle, final product, final campaign has it’s value, but knowing what you will do when the plan doesn’t go as planned – that’s what proves a person is in it for the long run versus only if things go the way they planned.

 

Stay Positive & Yes, You Can Plan For Your Plan Not To Work

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Problem With Many Marketers’ Mindsets

Garth Beyer

Marketers Mindset

As marketers, we often have a big ego when it comes to our industry. We see things. We notice trends. We can (or at lest we often always try to) answer why? Why X appeals to target Y. Why a restaurant would have revolving doors. Why a business is using a particular hashtag.

It should go without saying that we often know what’s best. After all, we’ve studied the industry for years, read thousands of articles, talked to hundreds of people to know why things are they way they are. Yet, this mindset gets marketers in trouble over and over again.

We think if a particular ad appeals to us, it will also appeal to our target audience. (We have high standards, you know? So if it works on us, won’t it work on anyone? Heh.) Our mindset can be simplified to we know what’s best for others based on our own reactions of an ad or PR strategy. All the while, we forget that we are not the target market.

The best way to break the mold is to see every opportunity as an opportunity to learn, not to prove or show we’re right. Michael E. Gerber wrote it perfectly,

“Contrary to popular belief, my experience has shown me that the people who are exceptionally good in business aren’t so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.”

As long as we retain the mindset of wanting to know more, needing to know, being humble enough to know that we don’t know it all, we can evade the mental trap so many marketers are caught by.

 

Stay Positive & Now You Know

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Short Stack Opportunity

Garth Beyer

Short Stack Eats

Breakfast joint Short Stack Eats in Madison has a weekly blind special. If you ask them what’s in it, they charge you $12.95. If you order on good faith, it’s only $6.95.

The real perk of going to Short Stack Eats is if you ask once, you can always be braver next time since the special changes each week.

Think about that for a moment.

Is it an opportunity or a risk? Will we be braver next week? Can we change the way we see something from risk to opportunity?

We can certainly afford the risk of a breakfast, but if we have the mindset of risk instead of opportunity about something as simple as breakfast, do we wear those glasses when we look at larger decisions regarding entrepreneurship, leadership or creativity?

Can we afford to have that mindset?

Thing is, with decisions that matter, we can’t pay extra to know whether something will work for us or not. We may not have the chance to be braver next week in the same capacity. And in the real world if we end up getting something we don’t like, it’s not as easy to find someone else who will take it off our plate (pun intended).

Seems to me the only way to look at big decisions and blind specials is as opportunities.

 

Stay Positive & Be Brave

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How Do YOU Know?

Garth Beyer

Whether you’re the one asking or being asked, the answer has little to do with the mind.

You can analyze, strategize, and organize a project so that the results you want are surely the results you will get. But you never actually know.

Boy asks girl what her favorite color is. Girl says purple. Five years (or five months, or five minutes later – it doesn’t really matter) go by. Girl asks the boy what her favorite color is. Boy says purple. Girl frowns. “It’s blue,” she says.

Everything is networking and networking involves connecting with people and people change their minds more often than their clothes. What needs to be understood, though, is that despite these changes (e.g., fear based step-backs, road block detours, juxtaposed worldviews, popped filter bubbles.) the results aimed for can still be attained.

When you are at the phase of “how do YOU know,” you are immediately the authority, the leader, the one looked up to.

Truly, what they want to know is if they can trust you. If they can benefit from following you. And if you answer with “I just do,” you’re answering with your heart, not your mind.

And THAT is how you know.

 

Stay Positive & If You Don’t Feel It In Your Gut, Aim For Different Results

Garth E. Beyer