I don’t want to be upset

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I share a lot on here about controlling our own emotions, with things like noticing the ability for some people to have a good day. Not everyone is capable of that, so it’s worth pointing out when we see it.

Related is the ability to control your emotions, even in the face of challenges. In Liz Wiseman’s book “Multipliers“, she shares a brief story of a man who is questioned why he wasn’t upset after a bad encounter and his response was simply “I don’t want to be”. Here’s the full quote from the book:

Ignoring a negative situation typically requires an active choice. This is how Glenn Pethel, a sage education leader from Georgia, has learned to manage through frequent brushes with uncooperative colleagues. After these contentious encounters, his close associates would ask him why he wasn’t upset. Pethel, who speaks with a gentle, southern charm, would reply, “Because I don’t want to be. Something caused this person to behave this way, and it wasn’t necessarily me. Do I like it? No. But it’s not going to dip from my bucket.”

It’s much easier said than done, but it’s in our control. In the example above, Pethel had the opportunity (and the expectation) to be upset, and he simply chose not to.

The more you let others dictate your emotions, the worse things tend to be. It’s not easy to do, but if you simply decide not to get upset you’re 90% of the way there.

Customers make a list of brands before they research, and most of them buy from that list

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It’s well-established that most customers make a list of vendors and do some degree of research before they make a purchase, so the traditional best practices make sense: have quality content, answer questions, and be a guide as customers are doing their research.

However, prior to that research, 80-90% of customers have a short list of vendors in mind already, and 90% of those people end up purchasing from one of those vendors! In short, if you’re not in your buyer’s mind before they start their research, you have no chance with more than 75% of your potential customers. You can find some detail on that in this great article from the Harvard Business Review.

So how do you get into their mind before the research? Spend time in the same places as them online.

Rand Fishkin recently put out a great (short!) video that walks through this, and you can check it out here.

Ultimately, you need to be present on podcasts that they listen to, on social media sites they frequent, in videos that they may want to watch, in blog posts that provide information, and in email newsletters that they consume.

The best part about this kind of work is that it’s a win-win-win:

  • You show up where they already are.
  • You’ve providing content and value to help them for the decision ahead.
  • Large Language Models (like ChatGPT) will eat up that content of yours and make it more likely that you’ll show up there too!

So much of marketing these days involves simply staying top of mind. When a customer is making a list of vendors like yours to consider, make sure you’re already one that they’ve thought of before or else you’ll never even have a chance.

Don’t market more, matter more

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As a marketing guy, I certainly appreciate the value in great marketing. However, too many people work on their “marketing” when they should be focused on their “mattering”.

In a recent podcast from Jay Acunzo, guest Laura Gassner Otting shared this awesome little quote:

“Don’t market more matter more, because when you matter more, you need to hustle for their attention less.”

It reminds me of something that Seth Godin said years ago:

“The people you most want to engage with don’t want to be hustled“

Hustle is a good thing in baseball, but it’s not good in marketing. You should certainly invest time and money into your marketing, but make sure that your company ultimately matters to those you wish to serve.

Check out Jay’s full podcast for more.

The Sunday Summary: Good days, AI prep, and forgetting in order to learn more

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In an effort to help me keep up with everything I post each week, here is my latest “Sunday Summary” of my posts from the week.

Mon, March 17: The ability to have a good day is my favorite attitude in others
We all have some good days and some bad days, but some people tend to have more good days than others and it’s often more of a case of perspective than anything.

Tue, March 18: You train an animal, you teach a person
“If you’re not spending 90% of your time teaching, you’re not doing your job.”

Wed, March 19: Are you eagerly sending business to your competitors?
If you’re well-positioned then you shouldn’t be getting too many ill-fitting leads in the first place, but when you do you should be quick to recognize them and pass them along to another company that is better equipped to handle that kind of opportunity.

Thu, March 20: Google only uses 20% of your links
“Google only counts your best links, so getting more links is usually a waste. I think that Google only uses 20% of your links.”

Fri, March 21: Using AI to prepare for meetings
I used this prompt: “Here is a list of people attending a meeting with me in a few days. Look at their names and companies and find any news items or recent events for each person or company.“

Sat, March 22: Memory is impossible without forgetting
“What is memory without forgetting? It’s impossible. To have proper memory function, you have to have forgetting.”

I hope you found some value in this. If you ever have questions, ideas, or disagreements regarding anything I write, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Memory is impossible without forgetting

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It’s something I’ve not really thought about before, but the ability to hold memories is essentially impossible without forgetting. From a great post on Medium, Hallel shares some interesting thoughts on how forgetting helps with memory.

In short, they say:

“Your brain forgets unimportant details and retains what you present to it as important.”

Remembering what color shirt the bank teller was wearing last week is of no value, so your brain does a good job for forgetting it for you.

Further, they quite Oliver Hardt who says:

“What is memory without forgetting? It’s impossible. To have proper memory function, you have to have forgetting.”

Never forgetting is a problem

There are a few rare people in the world that can remember literally every detail of their lives. It’s an amazing gift, but it’s also a curse. They can put themselves back into any moment from their lives, but that means that they can’t shake any horrible memories that they’d like to suppress (such as the death of a loved one). This article from the BBC in 2016 digs into that quite a bit more.

How to remember

While forgetting can be a good thing, we’ve all faced many times where we forgot something that we specifically wanted to remember. There are no perfect solutions, but there are two things that can help.

The first is to set up memory palaces (or use similar memory techniques) to put things into your brain in a way that you’re more likely to remember. This takes some work, but can be a great way to get your brain to remember things that might have otherwise slipped out.

On top of that you can layer tools like Anki to resurface old memories at the right time. I’ve been using it daily for years and it’s an amazing (and simple) bit of technology that really makes a difference.

In the end, both of those systems require that you are intentional about wanting to remember something, which is the key to all of those. Your brain is going to forget things, by design, so you need to do a bit of intentional work to keep the right stuff in there.

Using AI to prepare for meetings

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I recently came across an interesting AI prompt that I’ll likely start using every Friday as I look forward to the week ahead.

David Cummings recently posted about some new AI use cases and they were all very insightful, but one I’ll be using a lot. He said:

Preparing for a Board Meeting
Last week, I attended a board meeting with 30 other board members. Prior to the meeting, we received a PDF containing the board agenda, a list of attendees, and governance items. I uploaded this PDF to ChatGPT and Grok, asking each tool to extract all the names and companies listed, then search the web for two to three news items or recent events about each person or company. Within a couple of minutes, they generated a bullet-point list of all the attendees, their companies, and relevant recent news. As a result, I entered the board meeting much better prepared, with a variety of topics to discuss during our dinner session.

I tried it for an upcoming meeting and the results were amazing!

I used this prompt: “Here is a list of people attending a meeting with me in a few days. Look at their names and companies and find any news items or recent events for each person or company.“

Below that, I simply pasted the list of people attending, copied directly out of my calendar. It was an ugly looking list, like this:

to: “[email protected]” <[email protected]>, Ron Jones <[email protected]>, “Johnson, Steven A.” <[email protected]> … (with a bunch more)

It had perhaps 20 names in the list, each with the formatting slightly different, and it parsed through and gave me a great list. For example, one person attending the meeting is with the Credit Union of Georgia, and it pulled this based solely on her email address (as part of the larger list that ChatGPT provided):

16 of the attendees had info similar to that, and there were just four that it couldn’t find any info for (and those were just free email accounts like “[email protected]”).

Do this weekly?

Now I’m considering doing this weekly as part of my weekly preview. I looked ahead at next week and gave it five names and email addresses of people I’d be meeting with, and it gave a great list of insights with links to details on the stories that mattered for each organization.

It’s imperfect, for sure, and the output should always be verified since AI models are known for sometimes making things up, but it’s a great start. If I see an interesting item about someone I’ll be seeing soon, I can click the link to verify and learn more.

Give it a try for yourself. Head over to ChatGPT (or the AI tool you prefer) and try that prompt with a few names and emails and see what happens.

Google only uses 20% of your links

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When Google first came on the scene back in 1998, their big innovation that changed the world was simply looking at website links. If a site had more links pointing toward it, then Google gave it more credit and it ranked higher. It was a simple but brilliant insight that made Google search far better than any of their competitors.

As a result, though, companies quickly started trying to game the system and get more links pointing to their site. I’ve shared thoughts on links going back almost 17 years (like this), but things have changed a lot since then.

In a recent episode of the Duct Tape Marketing show, they had Bruce Clay (the “Father of Search Engine Optimization”) on to discuss the state of SEO and AI here in 2025. Bruce had a lot of great insights, but one thing really stood out to me. To paraphrase what he said:

“Google only counts your best links, so getting more links is usually a waste. I think that Google only uses 20% of your links.”

These are merely guesses from Bruce, but I suspect that Bruce would be able to guess that type of thing more accurately than virtually anyone.

The lesson is pretty simple — don’t waste your time building links. Our agency had a service to help clients gain links a long time ago, but we stopped that practice many years back. Producing great content is always one of the best things you can do, and spending time to be where your clients are (often on social media) should be right up there as well.

As for link building, it’s time to give that up and focus on what really matters. Check out that full podcast episode for more.

Are you eagerly sending business to your competitors?

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The title of this post might seem a little odd, but if your company has solid positioning then you should be turning away many of your leads. If your ideal customer is “anyone”, then who are you really trying to serve?

If you’re well-positioned then you shouldn’t be getting too many ill-fitting leads in the first place, but when you do you should be quick to recognize them and pass them along to another company that is better equipped to handle that kind of opportunity. I’m good friends with most of our business “rivals”, and we pass potential clients to one another frequently in an effort to find the best solution for them.

This came up in a fantastic podcast episode where Stephen Houraghan interviewed Seth Godin about the state of marketing today, during which he unpacked this very idea. You can watch the full interview right here:

This reminds me of a story from years ago when I met an insurance agent that sold literally every kind of insurance, so I had no idea what he really was an expert in. If I had a specific need, he was never going to be the ideal answer. His audience was literally everyone so he was the perfect fit for no one.

None of us are going to be truly eager to turn down business, but if you have a clear position it should make it very easy to send business to your competitors. As a result, when the right opportunity comes along they’ll know that you’re the perfect fit for them.

You train an animal, you teach a person

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With the rise of AI and robotics, the need to “train” a person is fading quickly. Jobs that can be easily trained are quickly being replaced by machines, while jobs that require deeper insights and skill continue to grow.

Sol Price, the founder of Price Club (which became Costco) said it simply:

“You train an animal, you teach a person”

Or as Seth Godin said in his book “Linchpin”:

“There are no longer any great jobs where someone else tells you precisely what to do.”

Related is a quote from Jim Sinegal, one of the other cofounders of Costco, who said:

“If you’re not spending 90% of your time teaching, you’re not doing your job.”

Training is what we needed in the last century, but things are very different today. A few years ago, Seth wrote and shared a long post about the purpose of school and how things need to change. For decades, the purpose of school was to train obedience so that students would become good factory workers. That worked well for that stated purpose, but it’s no longer the goal. Training students to be obedient is training them for jobs that no longer exist.

Seth also did a TEDx talk years ago with some great examples from the post, which you can watch here:

If you feel like you have to “train” your employees, you have roles that aren’t going to be around much longer.

The ability to have a good day is my favorite attitude in others

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We all have some good days and some bad days, but some people tend to have more good days than others and it’s often more of a case of perspective than anything.

Much of that kind of attitude comes down to having a stoic mindset, knowing that you’re in control of your attitude. If you always find ways to blame others, you give yourself a reason to be angry and it’s easy to run with it. We all know people like this, who have a sour attitude but brush it off by blaming their woes on others. It’s hard to be around them very long.

As I saw in a post on Reddit a while back, “one of my favorite things about my wife is her ability to have a good day“. Simple, yet powerful.

Last fall when I discussed the attributes of various people, the ability to maintain a positive outlook was on all of their lists.

  • Ben Wilson included “joyful” and “grateful”.
  • Benjamin Franklin listed “tranquility”.
  • John Wooden said “enthusiasm”, “self control” and “poise”.

We’re all going to have some bad days, and that’s just unavoidable, but there are things you can do to help.

First, realize that complaining and blaming others will rarely help the situation. If you’re stuck in a traffic jam, honking and yelling at other drivers isn’t going to help.

Second, do your best to avoid those situations. I look at destinations in advance to spot potential issues, time-shift efforts to earlier when possible, and try to be consistent about throwing jackets on my calendar to allow some buffer.

Things can (and will) go sideways from time to time, but more often than not they’ll go smoothly and that’ll make you a much better person to be around.