There are two kinds of people in this world. Those that show up to be seen, and those that show up to see others.
In his book “High Performance Habits“, author Brendon Burchard puts it this way:
“There are two types of people. One walks into the room and announces, ‘Here I am!’ The other walks in and says, ‘Oh, there you are!”
Which type do you want to be?
A few weeks ago, “SeekLifeMastery” posted a fantastic thread on Twitter with the “100 books you need to read before you die“. As I went through it, I found that it was indeed an excellent list, and one that I need to work on quite a bit as I’ve only read about 25 of the books so far.
As a bonus, since most are business books, the vast majority of them can be found on Blinkist. While I’ll certainly read the full copies of many of them, I suspect I’ll “blink” quite a few as well.
The list is a little hard to follow on Twitter, so I’ll lay it all out here in a clean list.
How many have you read so far?
In his book “Ego Is the Enemy“, author Ryan Holiday spends a good deal of time essentially breaking down the Dunning-Krueger Effect and how overconfidence can be a bad thing.
Confidence, in and of itself, is valuable to have. When you become overconfident and your ego creeps in, it can often inhibit your growth. If you’re able to maintain an uninflated, unexaggerated understanding of your true abilities, you’ll be much more likely to succeed – because you’ll be prepared to put in the hard work.
As Holiday says:
“The pretense of knowledge is our most dangerous vice, because it prevents us from getting any better.”
Or dropping back to Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus:
“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows”
Being confident in what you know is a great thing, and can be essential in many roles. If you need to convince your boss or a potential client of a particular path to take, you need to be confident in what you’re saying. However, growing that confidence to the point of ego will limit your growth, and over time that confidence will have less of a foundation of truth behind it.
Stay confident, but stay curious.
In an episode of the Cortex podcast (#122: State of the Apps 2022), one of the hosts expressed his desire (and near achievement) to “filter the entirety of my internetting through RSS“. As that’s something I’m chasing as well, I thought it was an interesting statement and something worth unpacking a bit.
First, some of you may be confused by what he even means. RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”) is a means in which to get feeds of data from websites. Not algorithmically-sorted feeds like on Facebook, but just a raw feed of information. In most cases, this is blog posts. If you sign up for an RSS feed from a blog you get every post of theirs. It’s fantastic.
This is something I’ve been writing about for nearly 14 years, and my RSS reader is still something that I use every single day. When I talk about things like controlling your inputs, this is a huge one. Rather than letting social media dictate what I see through a never-ending list of content, I can get updates from precisely the sources I want — no more, and no less.
In the past few years, I’ve been working to make my RSS feeds more personal — fewer companies and more humans. It’s been excellent.
The main problem, of course, is that most of the people that I want to keep in touch with (friends and family, particularly) don’t have a feed to follow. You may be one of them. If someone only uses social media to post, then I can’t subscribe to them via RSS. I still hop on social media a good bit, but ideally I’ll be escaping it more and more.
I still fully believe that more people should be blogging (the POSSE concept is perfect) simply for the fact that they can better own their content. However, regardless how easy it might be to set up a blog, publishing on social media will likely always be easier, and that’s where most people will default.
I still have a dream of someday having the “entirely of my internetting” filtered through RSS, but it’s unlikely to get 100% there. For now, I’ll keep pushing forward and keep moving more of it over a little bit at a time.
If you have a desire to get a blog going for yourself, reach out to me and I’ll be happy to get you pointed in the right direction.
This is something I’m generally pretty good about, but I need to make sure I stay focused on it. Particularly in the world of marketing, there are acronyms everywhere that you look. While I use them frequently and know what most of them mean, those that I interact with may or may not. Whatever your world looks like, taking the time to expand acronyms on first use is a wise thing to do.
In some cases, it takes a bit more than just expanding them. If I’m talking about web design and mention CSS, I could expand it the first time by saying “CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)”. For someone that wasn’t familiar with CSS, does “Cascading Style Sheets” really help? Probably not. Really, I should say something like:
“… when you’re using CSS (“Cascading Style Sheets”, which is code that adds fonts, color and other design elements to a page) it is essential to …“
If you’re ever sharing with a group, whether it’s in a lecture, video, blog post, or otherwise, I encourage you to expand every acronym the first time you use it because you never know what it’s in the head of everyone else that’s watching.
I’ve made no secret of how much I hate interruption-based marketing.
TV and radio ads are ok, because I accept them as part of the deal. The same with podcast ads; I can choose to pay for the premium ad-free version, or I can choose to listen to the ones with ads. It’s my decision, and I’ll live with the consequences.
Beyond that you find things like cold calls, cold emails, and cold messages on sites like LinkedIn, and I have no patience for any of those. If your marketing relies on interrupting my day to pitch your offer, you’ve already lost. And no, I generally won’t be too polite.
In a recent post, Seth Godin put it well when comparing Marketing vs Promotion, as they’re not the same thing.
Marketing is creating the conditions for a story to spread so you can help people get to where they hope to go. Marketing is work that matters for people who care, a chance to create products and services that lead to change.
As Seth said, marketing is work. It’s not easy, but it’s tremendously valuable.
He ends with:
If you have to interrupt, trick or coerce people to get the word out, you might be doing too much promotion and not enough marketing.
David Meerman Scott says that you can either Bug, Beg, Bug, or Earn your way to attention. Go earn it.
In the past few weeks, Seth Godin (with the help of hundreds of volunteers) has released “The Carbon Almanac“, a massive book full of facts about climate change. Their goal was to create “a source of reliable and easily understandable knowledge on climate change…that you can share to create meaningful impact.”
Regardless your stance on climate change, their approach to this almanac was fantastic. Rather than giving theories and ideas and opinions about what’s happening, they stuck to the facts to a very deep degree.
For example, here is an article about “Food Insecurity”, explaining how a 1 degree rise in mean temperature could cause a 10 percent drop in crop yields.
The article itself is very beneficial, but that tiny “067” in the corner is gold. By visiting their website and keying in that number, you can find details and links to the exact sources where that information was found (here is that page if you’re curious).
It’s a fantastic resource and I encourage you to check it out. You can find it at most major book retailers, or order it directly on their site.
I heard the title of this post on a recent episode of “The Long and The Short Of It”, and I’ve been pondering it ever since then. Here is the full text of what Pete said on the show:
It was in the health and fitness space, there was a strength coach that I follow that said something like, “The best coach in the world probably has less than a thousand Instagram followers.” And that really resonated with me for many, many reasons. But just that, if you’re the best strength coach in the world, you’re probably not spending your time scrolling social media because you’re reaching the people that you need to reach in other ways.
When I first heard it, I completely agreed. His logic made sense. However, I think there are some amazing coaches and thinkers that have huge social media followings without spending time on it. If your ideas are solid, they’ll spread on their own.
I think a great example is Seth Godin. He’s famously not on social media, other than a Twitter account that auto-posts his latest blog entries. It follows two people and never interacts in any way. By all measures it’s a “bad” Twitter account. Despite all of that, he has 785,000 followers on there.
Ultimately, I agree with the premise of what Pete said. A great coach isn’t spending time scrolling social media, but rather they’re learning and teaching and working to become better.
That said, if they’re indeed a great coach then they likely have amazing insights to share, and many likely have huge followings with just a modest amount of effort.
Last year I binged through the show “The 100” and had the same experience that many others had — it was fantastic at the beginning, but faded as the seasons wore on. There are different theories as to what happened, but I think the lack of constraints hurt them.
Having constraints can be a wonderful thing, as I shared a few years ago regarding the original icons on the Macintosh. Forcing yourself to stay within boundaries can be a challenge, but can often lead to amazing things.
If you’ve not seen the show, it’s set a hundred years after a nuclear apocalypse wipes out the earth. Fortunately, many humans survived aboard a giant spacecraft. At some point, they want to test to see if the earth was habitable or not, so they sent down 100 juvenile delinquents to see if they would survive or not.
Here’s their original trailer from a decade ago:
Having that happen for real seems wildly unlikely, but entirely reasonable. With our known universe, based on Earth, they didn’t do anything for the first few seasons that was impossible. It’s all very improbable, certainly, but they stuck with the constraint of “follow the allowed structure of our world”.
As time went on, though, the writers decided that reality was too tight of a constraint so they ventured way out with weird portals (through both space and time) and other things that were wildly unrealistic. They made for pretty good television, but I much preferred those that were locked into some degree of realism.
It’s not an uncommon direction for a show to take, but I think The 100 would have been far better served if they had faced their constraints head-on and worked through them.
Semi-related is this quote from Ryan Holiday in “The Obstacle Is the Way“. His words were intended for obstacles that we face in our life, but I think it holds true with this as well:
“The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.”
What obstacles have you faced that have been worth fighting through rather than going around them?
There are times when you need to do something quickly. If your car is on the last drop of gas, you can’t mess around finding a deal to save 3 cents. If a pipe burst in your house and you can’t get it to stop, spending the next two hours getting the best rate from a plumber seems like a bad idea.
There are other times when it feels like you need to “do something”, but leaving well enough alone is likely a better move. We see a lot of bad legislation passed in the US because of this idea, and I talked about that here.
Lastly, there are times when you need to do something, but there is no rush. An example might be some of our clients that need a new website, but they are able to take the time to shop around and find the team with the best fit for them. Those kinds of deals tend to work out well for us, but really it’s the client in control because they don’t have to rush to make a decision.
A huge place where the “no rush” comes into play is with investing. Warren Buffett has said many times that he’s not really a brilliant investor, just a cautious one. His top goal is to avoid making big mistakes, and waiting patiently is a great way to do that. In his words:
“If you feel like you have to invest every day, you’re going to make a lot of mistakes. It isn’t that kind of a business. You have to wait for the fat pitch.”
A similar example is from years ago when we were ready to buy our first house and we negotiated with our landlord to move us to month-to-month with him. As a result, we were able to take our time and wait for the perfect house. No deadline, no pressure, just waiting for the right house to come along.
It’s not always possible to put yourself in a situation that allows patience, but it’s a good thing to strive toward if you can.