My mom dislikes her birthday. She doesn’t like celebrating it, she doesn’t even look forward to it. The same goes for Mothers day. I usually have to remind her that it’s around the corner. And it’s because of this, through her, that I’ve learned how to be one of the best marketers at my age.
If birthdays are days you’re meant to celebrate being alive. What are you to do the other 364 days of the year? If Mothers day is the day you’re meant to celebrate all that your mother has done and continues to do (let’s face it, they are always putting up with your crap whether you’re delivering it or not). What are you doing the other 364 days of the year?
What about the thank you letter you write to your new boss for hiring you. Or your friend who you treat to dinner after they lend you some money for your project that turns out to be a success. Or your dad who lets you reel in the big fish. Or the random stranger who does a good deed.
If there is one thing Mothers day should remind you of, it is the importance of celebrating it and every other event the other 364 days of the year as well. Sure, it’s okay to do a little extra on these days – it’s hard not to when it’s such a heavy tradition. Saying every day is Mothers day is a bit overkill when we have so many people to celebrate being in our lives.
As it goes with your mom or your customer, your appreciation when it’s least expected is often the most effective.
Thank you mom for giving me the foundation to be everything I could and for filling in the holes that I miss. You’re the best. Miss you.
Stay Positive & Live As If There Was No Calendar To Tell You The Significance Of The Day
Making art, as opposed to having made art, is what everyone wants. The making of art is what catches the eye, draws people in, and fascinates the audience you never knew you had until you made yourself vulnerable.
I just watched a Cadillac commercial. As opposed to only showing the car speeding on roads with a beautiful background of wheat fields, blue-grey skies, and a sunset; I saw the crew, the camera set-up on the vehicle, and the helicopter used to record scenes from above.
Does it make me want to buy a Cadillac? No. But it makes me appreciate them more, it made me write about them, it satisfied a curiosity that I never knew I had (to know how they record all of these slick car advertisements).
This isn’t new, but how you deliver is one of the largest aspects of this artistic revolution.
Stay Positive & You’re Not The Only One To Enjoy Making Your Art
There are a lot of people who I want to say “You do not pass Go. You do not collect $200”
Specifically, the people who are shouting at Hasbro for getting rid of one of the monopoly pieces.
Haven’t heard of this yet? View this post and more importantly, read the comments!
My response?
People need to think long-term.
1. This is viral marketing at its finest. Now the newer generations know about monopoly. And nothing get’s adapters wanting to adapt more than seeing that change is ticking off the older generations.
2. Whichever piece goes will become rare. A selling point for previous holders and future Monopoly; you’ll have to pay more to get the game with the losing piece. Now Monopoly is appealing to collectors and fanatics.
3. Bringing sexy back.
Any kind of change has the chance of being a change for the better. I think Monopoly has great foresight. And come on, it’s Monopoly, it’s Hasbro. Do you really believe that they would make such a critically terrible decision such as this? Or are people (you?) looking at it in a different way?
Our world is plastered with statistics. Some good. Some bad. But all, relative, subjective, and never quite capturing the whole picture.
That’s a statistic though.
What we want is that bittersweet spot between the alphabet and the number system, between a statistic and the reality of it all. (The reality being that one can never simplify their lives down to fulfill one statistic.) What we want is trends.
Discovering trends creates a yin-yang vibe to creativity. Fifty percent of your mind thinks, “hey, similar ideas to this have worked in the past,” or “these numbers look offly familiar to the numbers in 1980, 1964, and 1952.” The other 50 percent of your mind is asking “what does this mean?”
You have a field covered with geese. The geese then take flight and you have a flock. The flock flies in a V formation, and now you have meaning.
Statistics alone make you think of all the goose poop on the ground. Put the statistics together and give them a kick, and you have a trend – something that works consistently and collectively. Then it is to each his own to derive meaning from it.
The meaning you come up with is what becomes invaluable to your readers and listeners.
Note though, that detailing the meaning alone in a book though, is pointless.
There’s a famous philosopher called Kierkegaard. He wrote an insanely long volume about the existence of God. In the end, he notes that all of what you have read is pointless, that nothing of it matters, but the journey was an important one for you to take to make that realization. This is the result of only writing about meaning. It’s a journey, yes, and maybe entertaining, but in the end, pointless.
It is the statistics and the trends that you put before the meaning which induce action. Without them there are no stepping-stones, only preaching to an audience who has no reason to believe you are credible enough to be preaching. Meaning alone is simply interesting.
Stay Positive & Use Statistics and Trends. Don’t Pull A Kierkegaard.
A few days ago I wrote a post that contained a riff on reading books over again, a book regurgitation of Krishnamurti’s Think On These Things and a description/explanation of the “Little Free Library”. Additionally, I would like to share these brain webs I created from the book in hopes it will spark a bit more of your curiosity. Even more so, I wanted to share it with the person that took the book from the Little Free Library the very next day I dropped it off. The reason I am pointing this person out is because I had put two of my business cards in the book as a bookmark in hopes that I would make a connection with another person that shares similar interests. Is it marketing if you are just using the fact that this is connection revolution in order to build a personally strong audience?
It’s been over a month and a half since I attended Seth Godin’s Pick Yourself event in Tribeca (NY). There’s a specific reason I waited so long to reflect on the event. I wanted to prove a point, not just about Seth Godin, but what any business must produce, whether in product or experience.
Simply put, it must be astonishingly remarkable, something so memorable it is still thought of and excites a person’s senses a month, five months or a year after the product is purchased or the service is used. Essentially, that is what Seth Godin’s Pick Yourself event manifested, so it is with easy honor that I will hit some points from it again along with my own curves and twists of ideas.
I had no inclination to write this so soon. I decided to after I created a new motto the other day, tweeted it and it got retweeted by a few people. It was just another tweet, another 140 characters that my mind spit out and that I needed to share.
My motto: Give yourself authority.
It was only after I expressed the motto on twitter that I was tapped by the memory of Seth Godin’s Pick Yourself event, which it’s theme was to not wait for someone to pick you, not wait for an authority to notice you, to get lucky; but to pick yourself, solve the problems yourself, find the opportunity yourself, to lead yourself and quite plainly, as my motto states, give yourself authority.
72 Steps To Starbucks Coffee
While in New York City every 72 steps, either if I turned left or right, I would be facing a Starbucks. In Manhattan alone, there are approximately 300 Starbucks stores. That means that out of all the registered Coffee Shops in New York, Starbucks consists of about 60% of them. In a city dominated by the outlier of the Coffee Industry, how can any other coffee shops even make it?
That’s a simple answer that you can come up with. The better question is how Starbucks was able to take a symbol from Moby Dick, use it as it’s logo, and create a brand – an understanding of when you see the symbol, you are going to smell the richest Coffee in town and get free Wi-Fi along with the absolute best customer service.
It’s A Revolution
The dictionary says that a revolution is a single turn of event. Our revolution, the one we don’t quite understand, the one we thought could be easily understood, the one that is making us question nearly everything, is not a single turn of event, it’s a million turns. This revolution is something that is a collective change in one sense, but deep down to it, it’s about the turn each one of us makes, a turn that may be different than the person next to us. While putting it in the most simple form, the revolution is about giving yourself authority, ridding yourself of the chains of tradition and following your passion to create art. Yet, to do each of these things is not something that we can do collectively, being collective is what got us in this grave. No. This must be done individually; each person must make the choice, must give themselves authority and use it. In its entirety, this revolution will turn Perfect into impossible
Instead Of Giving It Our All
Seth gave a long description about the industrial age and this new age of connection. The one take I want to share with you from the event is this.
“So one quick example, just to show you how deeply ingrained this is. If you don’t mind, raise your right hand just as high as you can. Okay, now raise it just a little higher.”
Instead of giving it our all the first time, we give enough and then a bit more when told to. Some people raised their hands 20% higher, others 5% higher when told to raise it a bit higher. In a room of about 200 people there was about 4,000% of potential not being used until told to. The way I see it, even if you gave 100% and raised your hand as high as possible the first time, you would still find a way to raise it higher.
I No Longer Market To You
I had no clue what real type of marketing I was doing on my website until I heard Seth Godin say this, “Because marketing has shifted from me marketing at you, to you marketing to each other.” So, when creating a product, running a business or writing a blog, you can provide all the strong content you would like, but unless you know what you want to do with your audience, your tribe, unless you know how to give them strategies to market to each other and other people that will join your tribe, you have nothing.
Juggling
Seth Godin also inspired me to write this post: The Juggler’s Perfection. On the note of Juggling, of doing what you love, of taking that risk…
“Is it worth getting arrested for?” – Seth Godin
Bluffs, Excuses and The Promise
You think you have a hundred reasons not do something, not to take leap, not to go out on your own or start your business or take a risk to achieve what you really want. Actually, you probably only have 15 to 20 excuses, or rather, they are bluffs. When you sit down, write the list of the 15 to 20 bluffs, and work through it, you will find that either you don’t have anything holding you back, or you just need to work out a way to get around one or two excuses (a lot easier than working around 20). What it comes down to, what it really comes down to is that you want a promise it will work. You want the paper to say, after you have crossed all your bluffs out, that it will work indefinitely.
There will never be a promise that it’s going to work. Once you realize that, you realize there’s no point in making a list, not because there’s no point in achieving your goal anymore, but because you realize that you are going to have to take a risk and that there isn’t a promise, you will say “something is better than nothing” and get on with it, ship the product or start the business. As humans, if we are not promised lobster (perfection), we would rather have crawfish (anything) than nothing at all. Once you realize there is no promise of perfection, no lobster, it makes doing the thing you made a list of bluffs for, all the more easy. You may even find that you like crawfish more than lobster.
A couple of sayings to use/share
Money is a weight you can run much faster without
You will be wrong a lot, but you will be right a lot too
All you need to care about is being human
The Two Achievements I Made After The Event
Seth made a simple, yet such an extremely interesting point about entrepreneurship and freelance. A freelancer gets paid when she ships, delivers the product, finishes. The entrepreneur gets paid while she sleeps. I am happy to say that, while I still do freelance writing, I have crafted a segment of it into a businesses in which I have hired two employees already! I now sleep easier (because I know I’m getting paid for it) and I have more time to do $100 an hour work that makes a much larger impact on the world – which leads me to…
The second achievement is nearly ready to be shipped. My 30,000 word manifest on what school is for: a view from an 18-year-old graduate who received his associates degree and plans to go back for a master’s degree. Not for the diploma, but for the information and experience being within the system will produce, in order to write a 90,000 word sequel upon graduation. The eBook, Start Schooling Dreams will be released at the beginning of August, 2012, completely free. More background information to come soon.
Stay Positive & Take The Authority, Make A Badge Even
