Success

What Does Your Business Obituary Read?

What Does Your Business Obituary Read?

Garth Beyer

The Economist ends their magazines with an obituary, sometimes of famous people, other times of someone very few people know. They’re a nobody to most, but even nobodies have stories. When you read one, it’s incredible how the writer knew so much about the person. When you think hard on it, you realize the obituary was written long before the person’s death or at least a reporter kept a tally on the person’s life so they had everything to write it when it was near the time for them to kick the bucket.

Most celebrities, political figures, and all-around famous folk. All of their obituaries are drafted.

Yours? Mine? Likely not yet, anyway.

This concept had me thinking. What about your business obituary. Have you thought that far out about it? What will its legacy be? What will people say its story was? Is what you’re doing worth remembering years later? Are you keeping track of the little moments that have made your business great?

The Economist writers don’t follow people around and make their life into a grand story; the people are living a grand story and the reporters are merely telling it.

This begs the big question: what does the draft of your business obituary look like right now?

Is it worth one?

 

Stay Positive & It’s Interesting When Your Both The Subject And The Reporter

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The Truth About Great Advice

Garth Beyer

You won’t be motivated by it. In fact, you’ll likely want to run the other way.

A mentor of mine recently reminded me that “you can get your story, you can get the sources you need for it if you make enough calls; as long as you put the effort in, you will get what you need.”

Essentially, as long as you try, and keep trying, and never stop trying, you’ll succeed.

Not very motivating is it? But it’s true. It works. It’s sound advice.

 

Stay Positive & Will You Take It?

What Do You Have?

What Do You Have?

Garth Beyer

Blackhawks Fans

Clients? Members? Customers? Friends? Bypassers? Fans? Impulse buyers?

The people you interact with for business success. What do you refer to them as?

The answer gives me insight into your business model. Changing the answer, then, means changing your business model, and, by extension, your level of success. Chris Brogan has friends. Seth Godin has members. Edelman has clients. The Blackhawks have fans.

 

Stay Positive & People Foremost Love Being Friends And Members

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Changing The Way You Succeed

Changing The Way You Succeed

Garth Beyer

Work Hard Work Harder

Three out of five times I chat with my mom, she reminds me, “we all have the same 24 hours.”

Think about the vast difference in difference you make compared to anyone else, using the same 24 hours. How little you accomplish compared to some, but how much you accomplish compared to others. Alas. All still with only 24 hours.

A friend of mine asked me to partake in a 21-day challenge of waking up at 4:30 a.m. each weekday. My main issue with it is the hour and a half I would gain isn’t very scalable. (Currently I wake up at 6:00 a.m. each day.)

I say it’s not scalable because most of us can do what we currently do in 10 hours, in eight. And for those who put in 15 hours of work, will more meaningful work get done if you clock in two hours earlier or stay two hours later?

What would you think of a 21-day challenge of cutting the work day two hours shorter, or three, or five? How would you do things differently? Give this a try before you go extending your workday. Even if you jump back to your regular schedule or try the 21-day challenge of waking up at 4:30 a.m., you’ll have changed the way you succeed.

 

Stay Positive & Reimagine The Work Week, Now, Not Just The Days

Garth E. Beyer

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The Quicker You Decide…

The Quicker You Decide…

Garth Beyer

Decide

the more time you will have.

The quicker you decide on a theme, the more time you will have to create article topics for it.

The quicker you decide on a name, the more time you will have to brand it.

The quicker you decide on a goal, the more time you have to work toward it.

And my personal favorite,

The quicker you decide, the more time you have to either roll in the success of the decision or the more time you will have to learn from the failure of it.

 

Stay Positive & What’s Taking You So Long?

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How To Not Burn Yourself Out (It’s Ironic)

Garth Beyer

Overworked

Spending hours on Pinterest or skipping lunch to continue working on your business plan is exhausting. To be an expert in social media, undo, marketing, guitar, writing greeting cards, anything, it takes tons of time.

Over and over I’ve watched others burn out from spending hours upon hours on something.

I’ve seen friends spend days learning cool Twitter marketing skills just to burn out and scrap their campaign idea.  Others have exhausted themselves from writing for 4 hours straight or playing a video game for 8 hours non-stop. (Ask anyone in my family or my close friends, I’m quite notorious for burning myself out too, and it’s taken a number of years to write this post with pure confidence.)

The best way I’ve learned to not burn myself out is to do a little bit of everything. To be a social media expert, don’t spend all your hours trying to leverage Twitter. Do something with Twitter once a day and move on to doing something with all the other social media outlets. Instead of going all in, go in on all.

It’s not about knowing a little bit about everything anymore. Now it’s about learning a little bit about everything continuously over a period of time until you’re an expert on a lot of things.

This also means to go out and run in the rain, to cook yourself a damn good meal, to email a family member you haven’t spoken to in a while. Everything in moderation.

 

Stay Positive & Emphasis On The Everything

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An Ounce Of Truth

Garth Beyer

Little ideas are the key to success.

This may be just an ounce of truth, but 15 more ounces and you have a pound.

For the heck of it, here’s 28 ounces, 25 more, and 5 more. That’s more than three pounds of truth.

 

Stay Positive & It’s The Little Things, Always Has Been