However, exceeding expectations doesn’t mean you have to blow someone’s mind. It can be about adding something little.
It can be a grocery bagger asking if there is anything else he can do for you.
It’s adding a pin, a mint, a random goonies playcard in one’s package like Johnny Cupcakes.
It’s giving someone access to a part of your site that they never knew about before they bought your book.
By all means, set out to give something remarkable to the world, but be open to the ways you can surprise someone with more. If you’re a funny brand, this might be the perfect opportunity to clear out your junk drawers. If you’re an author, maybe it’s worth sending a copy of the book that inspired you when you were little.
What more do you got is a rhetorical question.
The better one is will you give it or stay comfortable?
When you begin having more followers than you can handle, more orders than you can supply, more promises than you can keep up with, and you’re feeling the stress of it all – you’ve reached your chokepoint. It’s a positive thing to know where that point is for two reasons.
It’s a reminder that you can stop trying for quantity, and to start focusing on quality.
I’ve written multiple blog posts in one day. I’ve crashed more time’s I would like to admit. I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. I’ve learned from all of these moments.
There’s a reason I only write one post a day. There’s a reason I take a walk, do yoga or meditate each day. There’s a reason I stretch, before I take on a large workload. I’m not saying don’t make my same mistakes. I’m saying make sure you learn from your own chokepoint. The chokepoint is only a negative, detrimental phase if you stay there.
The chokepoint also reminds you that you’re human. When you recognize your chokepoint, your style of writing, interacting, working, changes. You think more on a personal level. By becoming more aware of how you spend your time, you also consider the time of your audience. By default, it will be easier for you to connect with people.
Stay Positive & Everyone Pushes Themselves Too Hard From Time To Time, It’s Okay
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.”
Second question: does everyone else know what you’re promising?
It’s easy to give yourself leeway or change your promise week to week if you answer yes to the first question and no to the second. It’s powerful, it’s real when you answer yes to both questions.
The only time to change your promise is when you make it bigger. When you do that, definitely don’t keep it to yourself.
Stay Positive & Make Bigger Promises, Proceed To Keep Them
Let me correct myself real quick: Fine print isn’t dying, but companies, businesses, non-profits who use it are. Death by Fine Print.
Fine print is like the Overly Attached Girlfriend meme, except, it’s not funny.
Fine print is a safety net, a terrible but acceptable excuse, a scapegoat to those who are building an emailing list of people whose expectations they know they cannot fill.
Fine print is like making a promise with your fingers crossed. Void, but only you know it.
If there’s fine print to any contract, any agreement, any deal, then there is a clear case of soon-to-be trust issues on the consumers end. Likely showcasing that the business is built on profiting from one-time consumers instead of repetitive investing tribe members.
Through the industrial revolution fine print was acceptable, in some cases, honestly necessary due to the risk of using machines rather than people to create what the economy and America needed. Businesses were not built on connections other than the ones you had to your right and left on the assembly line.
That has changed, yet, somehow, fine print is being used (poorly used) in the post-materialistic, post-industrialistic, economy that was built on peer-to-peer connections, not commercialism. And here is where the problem lies. Not really the problem for you or I (unless you’re still using fine print), but for businesses who think they can save their integrity with a tiny clause.
They can’t. Not when trust, connection, and interaction is what makes them money.
Stay Positive & I’m A Millennial And Still See The Value Of A Handshake
My co-worker dropped a great one liner the other week. She mentioned that you need to, “under promise and over deliver.”
I couldn’t have agreed more at the time. It encompasses a positive view of expectations. If you get someone to set low expectations and you proceed to blow them away, the person will be shocked, amazed, and grateful. In addition, by under promising, you are casting the safety net. If you can’t seem to deliver, it’s okay because you never promised that much to begin with.
– – – – –
Part of the statement here needs to be revoked. While I still hold to the attributes I’ve stated, I completely disagree with one part of the statement to under promise and over deliver.
Eliminate under to create the saying “promise and over deliver.”
If you need to under promise something, then it’s likely that it’s best you don’t promise anything to begin with. Promising something that you’re worried you can’t deliver, or fully deliver, is not a smart promise. Smart promises is what gets us places. Smart promises say exactly what you will do with the guarantee of it being completely done.
If you’re interested in progress though, if you want to move up the ladder, if you want the recognition and admiration from the people who you fulfill promises for, then you need to promise and over deliver.
Before any skepticism is launched, let me say without any wiggle room, that there is always a way to over deliver. It’s this performance of searching for a way to over deliver, and then following through with it that creates progress. Self delivered progress for you through over delivering on promises for them.
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
