I don’t know you, but I know all of you

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If I walk up to a random person, I don’t know much about what they think or how they act. I likely wouldn’t be able to immediately determine who they voted for in the last election, what their favorite color is, or which baseball team they root hardest for.

However, if I was in a room with 100 random people, I could do a lot better on my guessing. Around 50 people would have voted for Joe Biden, around 25 would say that blue is their favorite color, and the vast majority (around here) would say that they root for the Atlanta Braves.

It’s the same with your marketing. Watching the behavior of a single person on your website could be very interesting, but it likely won’t help with decisions. On the other hand, if you look at the data from your last 10,000 visitors, you’re likely to get a very clear picture.

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Arthur Conan Doyle famously said:

“You can, for example, never foretell what any man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician.”

This is why we work hard to monitor various marketing tools to get a good idea of how people are using a particular website or social media platform. Tools like scorecards and heatmaps can tell us a lot about how the typical user is interacting with a site, and we can make informed decisions based on that.

If someone has a specific problem interacting with something that we’ve built, we certainly want to unpack that, but our main goal is to make sure everyone is able to make the best use of whatever we put out into the world.

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Oppositional energy is a cheap shortcut

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If you’re doing Pilates, oppositional energy is a great thing. In a post about it, Jen Micoleau explains an example like this:

Stretch your legs away from your pelvis. At the same time, imagine your pelvis pulling away from your legs. You are creating opposition. The muscles along the bones lengthen. The pelvis stabilizes. The joints open and decompress. You are simultaneously creating stretch and strength.

I’m not here to talk about Pilates, though, as oppositional energy can also be used on a larger scale. As Seth Godin puts it, oppositional energy is often used to divide us mentally. It can be great for sports team, but ugly for almost anything else:

Oppositional energy is easy to create and spread. Once you pick a ‘they’, then it’s simply a matter of doing the opposite of whatever ‘they’ recommend. It’s a lazy shortcut, one that divides, demonizes and causes us to suspend our instincts toward better.

We see this a lot in politics, where the primary goal of a group is simply to “beat the republicans” or “stop the dems”, and this is part of the reason we see so few purple people in the world. Being “purple” takes effort and discernment, whereas picking a “they” you can always fight against is much easier.

“They”

Once you have a “they”, you can start lumping everyone together as something like a “libtard” or a “teabagger”. THEY are all the same, right? Another way to express being purple is if you can hold a degree of integrated complexity — the idea that most problems aren’t clear cut and can be quite nuanced.

Shankar Vedantam uses the example of immigration; if you don’t go deep to one side or the other, and rather just carry a nuanced view in the middle, both sides will consider you to be disloyal. It’s a tough place to live, but I think it’s something we should all work toward.

Watch out for that oppositional energy and save your effort for a real conversation instead.

How much are you willing to share?

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We’ve hosted a monthly Meetup for over 10 years now, and it’s been a fascinating experience. Much of what we discuss is around the world of WordPress, the community there is amazing. When asked to describe the Meetup, I tell people “The group is full of our competitors, but we share all of our secrets with them, and they all share theirs back, and we all leave the event smarter than when we entered.“

In many communities, that might be crazy, like I shared last year in my comparison of friendly versus ruthless rivalries. For whatever reason, anyone I meet from the WordPress community immediately falls into the “friendly” category, whereas many other marketing folks make sure it’s clear that they’re “ruthless”.

The Go-Giver

In recently re-reading the book “The Go-Giver“, the author shares a few insights that tie into this nicely. The first is a rather simple statement:

“Actually, successful people do this all the time. Typically, the more successful they are, the more willing they are to share their secrets with others.”

The second deals more with human nature. Years ago, I had a friend that got into car accidents quite frequently and blamed “all of these crazy drivers”. You won’t be surprised to know that they were actually the cause of most of them. The world is what you see it to be. From the book:

Go looking for people to take advantage of you, and they generally will. See the world as a dog-eat-dog place, and you’ll always find a bigger dog looking at you as if you’re his next meal. Go looking for the best in people, and you’ll be amazed at how much talent, ingenuity, empathy and goodwill you’ll find. Ultimately, the world treats you more or less the way you expect to be treated.

There’s certainly a degree of giving and sharing that can lead to being taken advantage of, but that degree is far beyond what most of us are willing to do.

Share more.

The public to public bridge?

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About a year ago, I shared some great thoughts from David Perell about the concept of the public to private bridge. In short, the idea there is to use public channels like social media to drive people back to private assets you fully control (like your blog and email list). Given the volatility of social media, this is something that essentially every content creator should be doing.

However, rather than the “public to private” bridge, I often see a “public to public” bridge, which is where people encourage their users to follow them on a different public platform. For example, here was a tweet that I recently came across:

I’ve seen similar posts on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc, and I’m sure you have too. It’s not a horrible thing to do, but ties more into vanity than actual engagement. It may be anecdotal, but people that frequently post these kinds of messages also tend not be very active in their own comments.

To quote a podcast title from GaryVee, “Reply to EVERY Comment You Get Until The End of Time“. You may grow to a point where it’s impossible to keep up (like he is now), but for the rest of us it’s not a big deal to continue the conversation with those that are engaging with you.

Public –> Public

Back to the “public to public bridge”, I see two problems with that approach:

  1. You’re talking to people that are already following you on a platform that they clearly use (because they saw your message). You win! They’re following and reading your stuff, so why push them elsewhere? Engage where you are.
  2. You’re likely not driving anyone to your private platform, or in many cases, you might not even have a private platform at all.

If you want to use your public platform to drive people to another public platform of yours, that’s certainly your right. From my perspective, though, you’re either reading this on my self-hosted blog, through my email list, or you’re reading it on a platform where you already follow me. If you want to join my email list, please do, but the fact that you’re reading this is already a win and I’ll take it.

It’s not moral to steal people’s attention

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In a recent episode of his Akimbo podcast, Seth Godin dropped a rather profound statement in the middle of talking, but I wanted to pause for a minute and unpack it. He simply said:

‘It’s not moral to steal people’s attention”

I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment of it, but I think it can go a few ways.

When you say “steal” attention, it makes me think of spam. Marketers can call them “cold emails” or “cold calls”, but those are just nice words to say they’re spamming. I’m not always the most polite to people that contact me that way.

However, you also have situations where companies are fighting for your attention in a way that is a bit more acceptable, like TV or radio ads. If I’m watching traditional TV (or non-ad-free Hulu), I expect commercials. I don’t like them, but I know it’s part of the deal — they’re providing content to me, and I’m paying for it with the commercials. It’s unattractive, but completely acceptable.

Stealing

The difference with cold emails spam is that you’re getting nothing in return. They’re stealing your attention to try to sell their products, with nothing in return. It’s “just one email”, but if everyone behaved that way we’d descend into chaos.

Proper marketing is about earning attention. Create content that is beneficial and worth sharing. Do work that people talk about. Don’t steal the attention of others — earn it.

Pushing for “always” to achieve “usually”

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About a year ago, I mentioned a friend that was able to work out 3x weekly, which is something I struggle with. If I aim to work out three times in a week, it quickly slips to maybe once or twice. Instead, I plan to work out every day, and that filters down to “most days”, which is really what I’m after.

I’ve found that taking this approach is helpful in other areas as well.

“Weekly” calls

I have a good friend that I met during my time in the altMBA, and we like to chat frequently to help push one another forward. For a while, we tried to meet “fairly often”, but it would slip to months between calls. We changed it to a weekly call every Monday, and that’s worked perfectly.

It’s not that we talk every week. In fact, we rarely ever get two in a row. Instead, it becomes a couple times a month, which is perfect! By aiming for a weekly call, with the caveat that either of us can cancel if a client or other priority comes up, it’s led to a very solid cadence for us.

Blogging?

In theory, this is my plan with blogging too. My thought was to aim for “every day” and be happy with “a few times a week”, but I’ve generally been able to keep the pace of daily blogging going for almost two years straight (minus a brief break for COVID). I think the difference there is that I’m able to batch my posts ahead of time, which you can’t do with phone calls or exercise.

Now that I’ve seen how well the “push for always to achieve usually” has worked, I’m looking for other areas in my life where I can implement this. A few areas I’m working on:

  • Reaching out to old friends and connections. It’s on my list every day, but only happens a few times a week.
  • The same with reading. I have a goal to read from a book (or Blinkist) every day, but it doesn’t always happen.

I’m working to find more areas to add to this, so we’ll see where it goes. The only downside I’m seeing so far is that my daily list of tasks is getting a bit long, causing me to skip a few things more often. Maybe that’s ok, as it’ll keep me well-rounded while still working to keep fit, connected, and well-read, but we’ll see. I fear that over time, the longer daily list could become tiring, so I’ll have to work to keep it in check.

Do you have any always –> usually types of things that you do?

The world is far better than you think

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People often wish to “go back to a better time”, or reminisce about their childhood when “the world was a safer place”. It may have felt that way, but it’s almost entirely untrue.

That’s not to say that things can’t be better — the world today is still a mess, but it’s the safest and healthiest that it’s ever been. I’ll be pulling some quotes from Hans Rosling’s book “Factfulness“, and this one is a great place to start:

“Remember: things can be bad, and getting better.”

You can point to many bad things in the world today, and you wouldn’t be wrong, but most “bad things” are wildly better today than any time in history.

Murder rates in the US have crept up lately to roughly 15 deaths per 100,000 residents in the last few years, but that’s still just half the rate it was in the 90’s (such as 28 per 100,000 in 1993).

Reports of missing children are down 40 percent since 1997.

Across the world, poverty rates are at all time-lows, more people are educated and vaccinated than any time before, and all is trending in the right direction.

Even school shootings are down from where they were in the 90’s. From 1993-2000, there were 276 children killed in schools. In the past eight years (2015-2022), it’s been around 210. If you factor in the much greater population of students these days, the numbers are even more skewed. Certainly any number greater than zero is entirely unacceptable, and I’m in favor of making changes to our gun laws, but this also isn’t a new thing.

I’m sure you’ve seen memes like this, which sound great but are factually very inaccurate.

“The News”

Ultimately, this comes back to natural human fears, combined with the clickbait stories that so many news organizations push. Here are two more quotes from Rosling’s book to help frame this:

“here’s the paradox: the image of a dangerous world has never been broadcast more effectively than it is now, while the world has never been less violent and more safe.”

“When things are getting better we often don’t hear about them. This gives us a systematically too-negative impression of the world around us, which is very stressful.”

And this isn’t just a feeling that a few people have. He’s run studies on this, interviewing many people, with the conclusion that you might expect:

“Every group of people I ask thinks the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless—in short, more dramatic—than it really is.”

Your kids are safer than you ever were

We hear the same when talking about our kids. “When I was their age, I played outside and didn’t have to worry about being kidnapped, but it’s just not safe today“. The truth is, it’s much more safe today.

In his book “How to Live Dangerously“, author Warwick Cairns did the math on child abductions. Here’s a stunning quote from the book:

If for some strange reason you WANTED your child to be kidnapped by a stranger, how long would you have to keep them outside, unattended, for this to be statistically likely to happen? 750,000 years.

As a parent, I’m not suggesting you just let your kids run free, and I am still very cautious with my children. Bad things certainly happen, and none of us want to see anything like that happen to our kids. I get it. Taking precautions and being safe is always a good idea.

At the end of the day, though, there are two things you can do:

  1. Be thankful to be living in 2022 and not in 1993 or 1957 or 1800. We’re all better in virtually every aspect of life compared to any time in the past. The media is going to promote every horrible story they can find to help get viewers. Those stories are generally true, and indeed awful, but way less frequent than you’re led to believe.
  2. We’re nowhere near finished. There are still millions in poverty, there are thousands of murders every year, and there is a lot of work to be done. Dig and help fight the good to fight to make things even better for our kids.

Be happy at where we are, but never be satisfied with our progress.

Try to see the future

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I enjoy looking ahead at the future. I like to think about what advances are coming with the next round of mobile devices, or try to see how life might be in 20 years if electric vehicles keep improving. Some of my guesses are right, some are wrong, but it’s fun to try.

When it comes to business, though, seeing the future is essential. You still might miss some, but taking some shots is worthwhile in the hopes that you might hit some.

Famous basketball coach John Wooden said “When opportunity comes, it’s too late to prepare“. In his case, he was referring to game situations that you needed to be prepared for, but I see this in our company quite a bit as well.

In Business

If a new prospect approaches us with an idea that we’re not prepared to handle, we generally need to turn it down. Sometimes that’s an intentional “no that leads to a yes“, but sometimes it’s something we should have been able to handle so we need to work harder to be prepared for when the next opportunity comes along.

Related is the idea that if you can see the profitability of an opportunity, it’s probably too late to seize it. Think of things like Bitcoin or NFTs; by the time most people heard about them, it was too late to really cash in. Sure, there’s still some money to be made, but people that were early in Bitcoin made multi-million percent interest on their initial investment. If you wait until an idea is proven to be profitable, you can do alright but you’ve missed the big gains that were once possible.

Pizza for Bitcoin

The fun example of that is the “Bitcoin Pizza Guy” who spent 10,000 bitcoin for a few pizzas back in 2010. The value of those Bitcoin back then was around $40, and even after the recent drop in Bitcoin value it’s still worth $245,000,000 today.

We’re all too late for that opportunity, but I’ll keep making predictions and taking shots, and hopefully some of them will work out in great ways.

What are some things you see coming in the next few years?

“No” is great, but what’s your “yes”?

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I’ve talked a few times on here about how powerful the word “no” can be.

“No” can be helpful in sales, but most times you say no in your life, it’s because you’re wanting something bigger and need to have a “yes” somewhere behind it that you can point to. In a TED talk some years ago, Justine Musk explain why “behind every no is a deeper yes to what you really want”.

In his book “The Practice“, Seth Godin summarized Justine’s talk with…

Justine Musk goes the other way on “no”, and points out that to be able to say no with consistency and generosity, you must have something to say “yes” to.

“No” can be a powerful thing, and if you’re super clear on the “yes” behind it, the power gets even greater.

There’s always a level of indecision

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Decision making can be a tough thing, particularly when there is a lot on the line. I’ve talked before about how no decision can be 100%, and some quotes I found from Annie Duke (in her book “Thinking In Bets“) helped to reinforce that.

First, she goes back to the idea that a decision is separate from the outcome. They’re related, for sure, but a great decision doesn’t guarantee a great outcome.

“What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of “I’m not sure.”

Later in the book she takes it further, with a thought that really can apply to business too. When you make a decision for your company, you’re really making a bet on the future and how that decision will impact it.

“Over time, those world-class poker players taught me to understand what a bet really is: a decision about an uncertain future. The implications of treating decisions as bets made it possible for me to find learning opportunities in uncertain environments. Treating decisions as bets, I discovered, helped me avoid common decision traps, learn from results in a more rational way, and keep emotions out of the process as much as possible.”

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You can never be sure of the decision you make and the outcome may not go the way you want, but if you analyze properly and bet carefully, you’ll win more than you lose.