Keep It Tight

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I’ve shared before that I tend to use as few words as possible when writing or speaking. It was something that I tried for a while to “fix” before I realized that it was already a pretty good thing.

Fewer words doesn’t mean that something needs to be thin, just that you can remove the excess bloat. While most of my posts on here are under 300 words (this one is just 207 words), I have some that are much longer (Roam Research at 2,038 words and the Digital Efficiency Framework at 2,976 words).

In her book “Everybody Writes“, author Ann Handley puts it like this:

“Brevity doesn’t mean bare bones or stripped down. Take as long as you need to tell the story. (The length of content is dictated by the kind of content you’re creating.) The notion of brevity has more to do with cutting fat, bloat, and things that indulge the writer and don’t respect the reader’s time. Keep it tight.”

Mark Twain summarized in fewer words than that:

“Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”

Take as long as you need to get your thoughts across, but the more junk you can trim out, the better.

Does your team know when to break the rules?

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You’ve been there before. You’re trying to return a product to a store, but the employee isn’t able to help you. You can tell that they want to help you, but your return is one day outside of the return window, and they’ll get in trouble if they allow it.

Rules are there for a reason, but giving your employees the power to break them can lead to amazing things.

In “Leaders Eat Last“, Simon Sinek puts it this way:

“And that’s what trust is. We don’t just trust people to obey the rules, we also trust that they know when to break them.”

If you’re not sure how to encourage people to break the rules, then make it easy for them.

At Zappos, employees are told they can do whatever is needed to make things right (free exchanges, expedited shipping, etc).

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At the Ritz-Carlton, all employees are empowered to spend up to $2,000 to solve any issue that a guest has. They don’t need permission or guidelines, they can simply do what’s needed. In their case, the $2,000 isn’t about trying to go right up to the limit, but to make sure they feel free to take care of a $100 problem quickly to keep everything running smoothly.

Sticking with it

The first thought many people have when they hear these about these kinds of policies is that people will take advantage of them — and they’re right. There are undoubtedly people that will seek out this kind of treatment and wring it for all they can.

It’s a fine line between doing more and getting taken advantage of, but I’d rather err on the side of generosity.

B2B isn’t really a thing

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Our marketing agency focuses on serving “B2B service-based companies”, and it’s worked out very well for us. However, “B2B” (business-to-business) isn’t really a thing.

For example, we work with a logistics company, but we’ve never spoken with “the company” — we talk to people like Geri and Wade.

We work with a land planning company, but we’ve never started a call with “so how are you doing today, land planning company?” We talk to Kristian and David.

Companies will never seek you out

Where this matters is when you work to frame up the buyer personas for your company. You might want to work with Starbucks one day, but “Starbucks” isn’t ever going to call. However, with the right angle, you might get their VP of Marketing to chat with you at some point. That’s who you should be trying to appeal to.

Trying to appeal to “Starbucks” will never work, but if you can address the pain points that their individual staff members are facing, you might have a chance to move things forward.

In her book “Everybody Writes“, author Ann Hadley simple says:

“no business truly sells to another business; we all sell to people.”

B2B

We certainly work best with companies that have a B2B focus, but at the end of the day we’re really working to reach the humans at those companies, so that we can help them reach the right humans for their own growth.

Go headlong into difficulties

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Facing a challenge is rarely a fun thing to do, but it’s also the place where you can grow the most. By seeing where your shortcomings are, it gives you a much better picture of where you need to put in the work.

For example, Michael Jordan failed to make the varsity basketball team during his sophomore year of high school, and “used this perceived slight as motivation to work his butt off to improve” (via Tim Ott).

We’ve seen the opposite with professional athletes many times as well, when they had an easy ride to the pros and couldn’t handle it because they had never been forced to work through hard times.

Becoming

In her book “Mindset” author Carol Dweck offers a quick thought to help push this forward.

Her first is that she simply says “becoming is better than being“. There is always room to improve in anything you do, so being happy on the journey (versus waiting until you “arrive”) will make you much happier in life.

Skillful frustrations

Really, though, a quote from the great Bruce Lee sums up this idea. Bruce said:

“People have to go through skillful frustrations, otherwise they have no incentive to develop their own means and ways of coping with the world.”

“Skillful frustrations” is a such a great way to put it. Working through those frustrations may be difficult at the time, but are often a great push to make you a better person.

Popular doesn’t always mean good

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Last year, Seth Godin was interviewed on Guy Kawasaki’s podcast and spent a while talking about the difference between something being “popular” and being “good”. Seth simply said:

The problem is this: somewhere along the way, someone said “popular” and “good” are related. They’re not!

If you take a moment to look around, you’ll see this manifest in many different areas.

  • You have stories like “Fifty Shades of Grey” that are very popular, but generally seen as not being very good.
  • Or you could look at the Avada theme for WordPress; it’s by far the best-selling theme of all time, but it’s not particularly good.

It’s easy to find popular things that we don’t think are very good, but the magic is in the opposite idea.

Good and unpopular

Looking at the other way, we likely have things in our life that we consider to be very good, but aren’t very popular. For me, that brings to mind tools such as Roam Research, and entertainment offerings like Google Stadia. Neither has proven to be popular by most standards, but I find both to be incredibly good.

Or we could look at a tool such as Anki, which I’ve used daily for years (and I think most people should as well), but it’s not very “popular” by any definition.

I’m curious to hear about something you’ve discovered that is very good but not (yet?) popular. Share in the comments here, or wherever you found this post.

The best people ask the toughest questions

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I’ve talked a good bit over the last few weeks about learning to ask better questions, and I’ve seen two people in particular that consistently do a fantastic job of it.

Todd

I was on a “book club” call with Todd Stanton a few weeks ago, and we were very fortunate to have the author of the book on the call with us. As the author was explaining an idea from the book, Todd said “I agree with your previous point, but not this one. Why do you believe that angle to be true?“.

He wasn’t being rude or pedantic — it was a fantastic question that caused all of us to stop and think and it led to some great conversation.

Evan

The other that comes to mind is Evan Chasteen, who replies to many of my LinkedIn posts (and many other posts too) with questions that cause me to re-think my premise. It’s fantastic.

With many people on LinkedIn, when I view their activity I quickly filter to just “posts”, because their comments are generally just short praises (“Congratulations!” or “Great post!”). Those aren’t bad, as giving praise is a great thing, but as a third-party to the conversation it doesn’t do much for me.

Evan doesn’t comment like that, so I often just search to see what he’s saying on other random posts. In one recent comment he left on a post of mine, he essentially said “I’m not sure I agree with that, and here’s why…“, which led to some great discussion.

Like Todd, I am 100% convinced that Evan does this for the purpose of pushing the conversation forward to help us all learn, and not just to be contrarian.

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By asking questions that are both tough and fair, these guys make every conversation that they’re a part of better for everyone involved.

Curiosity can vanquish boredom

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It’s amazing that in our world where we literally have millions of pieces of entertainment at our fingertips (movies, songs, videos, etc) that we can become bored, but happens to all of us.

According to Nir Eyal in his book “Indistractable“, the solution is simple:

“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

If you can follow the example a 4-year-old and just keep asking “why?”, boredom will vanish. This idea has lead to many posts of mine over the years. For example, years ago I couldn’t understand why DPI settings on an image would make a difference, so I asked why, dug in, and shared the results.

I’ve searched recently for “Why does Major League Baseball wants bigger bases?” (player safety and offensive output), “Why are gas prices are so high?” (somewhat difficult to separate facts from politics), and “Why should I self-host Google Fonts?” (due to some privacy issues). The importance level varies, but I find it fun to go down those trails.

While most of those “why” questions are things you can research and find on your own, you can even do some of this with others to dig to the heart of their questions. If you’re trying to unpack the answer to a behavior, asking the five whys can be a fantastic way to get to the heart of the matter.

Randomness doesn’t mean equal distribution

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This quote came up in my notes a few days ago, and it felt similar to a post I had recently written about how infinite numbers don’t include everything.

If you have a system that generates random output, there is no guarantee that the results will be perfectly distributed. If you output something random 1,000,000 times, things should end up pretty close but you never know for sure.

In the early days of the iPod, many users were convinced that the “shuffle” feature wasn’t really shuffling properly because certain songs would come up multiple times when others hadn’t been played once yet. The New York Times ran an excellent article about it, and Seth Godin summarized it in “All Marketers are Liars” like this:

The article was about people who were convinced that they shuffle feature on their iPods was broken. They were certain their iPods favored some songs over others. But randomness doesn’t necessarily dictate that the songs be distributed evenly.

In a way, this links back to the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, which ties into why people think that Facebook and Google are listening to them. They’re not, but when “random” ads seem to show a close resemblance to something you recently said out loud, it sure feels like they were listening.

Remove the winners

The solution for this is to remove each item after it’s shown up. In the case of the iPod, that would mean that the shuffle feature would only shuffle songs that hadn’t already been played.

Not long ago, the spouse of a coworker was in a drawing at work where they drew two random names to give out prizes — and she won both drawings. The company remedied that, but the preventative solution would have been to remove her name for the second drawing after she won the first one.

In most cases, though, it doesn’t really matter. Enjoy those songs a second time and know that it doesn’t necessarily mean that the shuffle wasn’t random.

Write first, fix later

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I’ve talked a good bit about the idea of writer’s block, and how a blank page can be a tough thing to get past. However, if you can just get a smidge of an idea started, that’s often all you’ll need to get the full concept written out.

When you get it all written it might be kind of a mess, but that’s ok. Having a draft that needs to be tightened up is far better than stressing about a blank page.

In her book “Everybody Writes“, author Ann Hadley shared a very simple quote from writing teacher Don Murray:

“The draft needs fixing, but first it needs writing.”

I do everything I can to help keep a fresh supply of loose ideas on hand. I read as much as I can, listen to podcasts, and just try to treat the world like a big “blog walk“. The more I have, the easier it is to write those first few sentences. Once I get just a little bit of a start, it all rolls from there.

Race to the bottom or race to the top

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If you have a product or service that you’re trying to sell, you can go one of two places:

You can race to the bottom, and always be a few cents cheaper than your competition.

Or, you can choose to race to the top and always be working to make your product and experience better than it was yesterday.

Commodities

The pushback that I often hear on this is “that’s great, but my product is a commodity and price is the only difference”. That might be how you see it, but that isn’t how it needs to be.

  • You can make a cup of coffee for a few cents, but millions pay Starbucks $5 each for them.
  • You can have a glass of water for essentially nothing, yet nearly 500 billion bottles are sold each year for hundreds of times more than it would cost you at home.

Coffee and water are commodities until they’re not.

Funeral Homes

I was listening to a show a few years ago where a funeral home director was lamenting that his business was too commoditized and his only option was to compete on price. The host then brought up a hypothetical situation of Disney joining the funeral home business. What would happen then?

Well, they sure wouldn’t try to compete on price. They’d make sure that every event was powerful, memorable, and special to all involved, and those that wanted that kind of treatment would be willing to pay a lot more. Suddenly it was no longer a commodity.

If you want to race to the bottom, no one is going to stop you. As Seth Godin has said many times over the years, the problem with a race to the bottom is that you just might win.

Go race to the top.