Aim to serve your past self

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If you run a business, there’s a good chance that your best customers are people that remind you of how you used to be.

As Rory Vaden put it:

You’re most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were.

It makes sense for a lot of us. We had a problem to overcome, found a great solution for it, and now offer that solution to others.

Because you had that same problem, you can clearly state the problem back to your audience, instantly giving you credibility with them even if you don’t propose the solution yet.

Because you faced that problem yourself and overcame it, your customer trusts that you know how to solve their problem. Embrace it.

Good decisions can have bad outcomes

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As humans, we too often judge the quality of a decision based on the outcome, when many other factors (often luck) play into it.

The “Resulting Fallacy” is a case where we create too tight a relationship between the quality of the outcome and the quality of the decision.

Or as poker player Annie Duke says:

Don’t be so hard on yourself when things go badly and don’t be so proud of yourself when they go well.

We see this a lot in sports. Should the runner try to steal second? If they’re fast and going against a catcher that rarely throws people out, it’s likely a good decision — even if they get thrown out. In hindsight they shouldn’t have done it, but at the time it was the the right decision to make.

The Seahawks made a good decision to pass

At the end of Super Bowl XLIX, the Seattle Seahawks threw a late interception that cost them the game. If you’ve not seen the play before, here it is:

It’s widely considered to be a “horrible decision”, but was it really? To recap the situation:

  • There were 26 seconds remaining
  • The Seahawks had one timeout
  • They were at New England’s one yard line
  • They were losing by four, so they couldn’t just kick a field goal

Given the time remaining, they couldn’t run the ball three straight times. To maximize their chances (assuming they don’t score on the first two tries), they’d need at least one pass. Passing first leaves the Patriots guessing about subsequent attempts, whereas a run on first down that failed would have essentially guaranteed a pass on second down.

To further the point, teams that season on the 1 yard line scored on 57.1% of their running plays and 57.4% of their passing plays, so a very tiny nod toward passing.

The counter is that they had Marshawn Lynch at running back, who had an incredible season, and seemingly could have picked up the yard. Everyone was likely expecting that, though, making it a bit tougher.

Here’s the big one, though — in the history of the NFL, passing plays from the 1-yard line are intercepted just 3.1% of the time.

Do-over

Obviously, if they could go back in time and choose a different play, the Seahawks would absolutely do that. At the time, though, they made a solid decision that just happened to not work out for them.

Such is life. Prepare the best you can and do the best you can, and see where the pieces lie. You’ll win some and lose some, but don’t beat yourself up if things go poorly. Learn from it, and come back with a bit more wisdom next time.

Plus, it probably won’t cost your team the Super Bowl.

My big reading shortcut

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Over the past year I’ve been trying to read a lot more. I’ve succeeded in reading quite a few books, but I’m also “semi-reading” quite a few more. Michael Simmons has coined this as Fractal Reading, and while I don’t follow his practice exactly, it’s pretty close.

Full books

First, there are some books that I simply know I want to read cover to cover. This includes things like Seth Godin’s new book The Practice, or the highly-acclaimed book Caste from Isabel Wilkerson. I buy the book on Amazon and read through it, taking notes along the way.

Other books

Blinkist

For most everything else, I start in Blinkist. Blinkist offers book summaries that are around 15 minutes each, giving a great overview of the book. As of now they have around 4,000 books in their system, and their subscription costs around $16/mo (after a free trial).

As I read through the book on Blinkist, I highlight any areas of interest. When I finish, I skim back through it again and copy my highlights and the “blink headings” into Roam Research.

This gives me a great overview of the book, and at this point I may decide to go read the full book. Either way, my next stop is over to Goodreads.

Goodreads

Among the other features that Goodreads has is a list of “quotes” (highlights) from other readers, sorted by the most highlighted items. This often gets some precise quotes and insights that Blinkist glossed over.

I copy those into Roam Research as well, and I now have a pretty good summary of the book, including quotes and references, and it’s only taken around 40 minutes.

Here’s a good example from “Growth IQ” that I recently read; you’ll notice the sections at the bottom for “Notes from Blinkist” and then “Notes from Goodreads”

Final steps

From here things can go a few directions:

  • I might be done. If it was just an ok book, then I’ve got my highlights and overview, I learned a little bit, and I’m done.
  • I might write about it. Many of the posts on this blog include notes and quotes from books, and many of those came out of this process.
  • I might read the full book. If I find myself wanting more, my next move is to purchase the full book and dive in there.

I tend to subscribe to the advice of “don’t finish bad books”, but I usually come at it from the opposite direction. By following this process first, I rarely find myself in the middle of a “bad book”, and I’m able to get the overall ideas and concepts from many more books this way but still go deep on a full book when I want to.

Personally, my goal each day is to “Blink” one book, and then spend some time (which varies wildly) reading from whatever full books I’m working on. I don’t always hit both, but I often do and it’s working out quite well.

If you need more insight and guidance on how to make this happen, I cover my book/reading techniques quite a bit in my course on Roam Research, so I encourage you to check it out.

Leadership isn’t about who goes first

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I consider Andy Stanley to be a leader in every sense of the word. If you’re not familiar with Andy, he’s the senior pastor of North Point Community Church, speaker, author, podcaster and much more. If you ask someone that knows Andy if they consider him a leader, they’ll almost certainly say yes.

Andy’s churches see weekly attendance of more than 40,000 people during non-COVID times, so you think he’d want to be a “leader” and reopen as soon as possible. You’d be wrong. They announced months ago that they’d be staying closed until at least the end of 2020, perhaps longer. In their eyes, the safety of their congregation comes first, and unnecessarily putting them at risk isn’t leadership of any kind.

They’re certainly doing a ton to support their congregation through virtual events, and much could be learned from that, but they don’t think that leadership means going first.

I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of businesses and organizations in your area that are doing the opposite. They’re “leading the way” to reopen or to host their event, even if it might not be a smart move. It’s a tricky thing to navigate, particularly for businesses, so I’m not sure what the right answer is. However, I don’t think that opening quickly necessarily equates to leadership.

Verizon is leading the way with 5G

5G is going to be great — someday. We’re still a long way from that. However, if you listen to some companies you’ll be led to believe that being first is all that matters.

Take Verizon in Atlanta, for example. On July 31, 2019, Verizon launched their first 5G towers in Atlanta. They’re first — they’re leaders!

That was more than 15 months ago. As of now, their true 5G covers about six square miles. Six. And that’s only on some streets, and only works if you’re outside. For comparison, the metro Atlanta area is considered to be 8,376 square miles, and the state of Georgia is 59,425 square miles. They cover 6.

6 vs 8,376 vs 59,425. It’s a joke. Are they leaders in 5G because they were first?

Side note: To help confuse you, Verizon has now renamed much of their old 4G network as kind of a fake 5G, like AT&T has done. When looking at this data, be sure to look at their coverage for “5G Ultra Wideband” to see what they really have.

Leaders can be first

This isn’t to say that being first means you’re not a leader. There are plenty of examples of leaders being trailblazers into a new industry or idea, and that should always be celebrated.

It just seems to be that being first to something is now being treated like a crown, while being first is only part of being a true leader.

Don’t propose on the first date

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Back in 1997, the show “Dharma & Greg” ran for five seasons on ABC. It was about a couple that decided to skip the messiness of dating and get married the same day they met. Here’s a clip from the first episode if you’ve not seen it before.

It was a great show, and a big reason why is because the concept is crazy. Who would get married on their first date? We all know that’s nuts, but businesses try to do it all the time. Donald Miller, the man behind Storybrand, sums it up nicely:

Would you propose on a first date? Of course not, but that’s how many businesses approach marketing.

The stages of a business relationship somewhat mirror those of a romantic relationship, with three basic steps:

1.    Curiosity
2.    Enlightenment
3.    Commitment

As Donald says, “people do not want to be enlightened about you (get to know you more) unless they are curious about you (you have something that can help them survive), and until they are enlightened about how you can help them survive, they will never commit.“

In business, there are a lot of ways to do this. A great message will help draw people in, ongoing information and “enlightenment” via email and social media will help grow the relationship, and hopefully at some point it will end with a commitment.

Businesses need sales, no doubt, but pushing for it too early can leave a bad impression on the other party and ruin any future chances you might have.

If you want to learn more about this, check out Donald’s book Business Made Simple, or reach out to us at GreenMellen and we can help you take the first steps.

Complex language vs credible intelligence

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In the book “Thinking, Fast and Slow“, author Daniel Kahneman offers this nugget of wisdom:

If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.

It seems almost counter-intuitive, but we’ve all seen it before. More often than not, when someone is spouting a bunch of “ten-dollar words”, they know the words but can’t speak much beyond them.

If you can indeed speak deeper into those words, you still might have a problem if people can’t understand what you’re saying, because they then won’t be able to appreciate your insights.

I think this is a reason that people like Seth Godin are so well-respected. He posts daily about incredibly insightful topics, but he writes in a way that everyone can understand the point he’s trying to make.

Maybe Kevin from the office was right when he said “why say lot word when few word do trick?” 🙂

How many shots did Michael Jordan miss?

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You’ve heard it said that “Michael Jordan has missed more shots than you’ve ever taken“. Similarly, many people reach their success by failing more times than you’ve tried.

The idea is pretty clear; most everyone that is a success has tried hard and failed many times, learned from each experience, and then eventually became great.

Seth Godin, now a famous author, once received 900 book rejections in a row.

Abraham Lincoln faced a variety of failed endeavors and elections before eventually becoming president.

And Michael Jordan famously went from being someone that didn’t make the varsity basketball team early in high school to becoming one of the greatest basketball players of all time. How’d he do it? He missed a LOT of shots.

Misses

In college at UNC, Jordan missed 719 shots during his games there. That was enough misses to get him to the pros, where he missed a total of 16,402 shots (including free throws) over his career. Toss in pre-season games, pre-game warmups, pick-ups games, plus all of high school, and that number is certainly well over 20,000.

Those misses aren’t the important ones, though. For a player of his caliber, he certainly took a lot more shots in practice than in games. Shooting nearly every day of his life, I think it’s fair to say he took 10x more shots in practice than in games, putting his miss total well above 200,000 shots.

Go fail!

Not really — this isn’t actually about just failing. It’d be easy to come up with a slew of horrible business ideas, or just start cold-calling the every number in your area to sell to them. That’s not failing, that’s just being dumb.

To fail successfully, you need to learn. When Jordan missed a shot, he picked up another sliver of knowledge about how he shot the ball, how he was defended, and a variety of other factors.

If you have something that you think is worthwhile though, give it a shot. Maybe you’ll succeed, maybe you’ll fail, but you’ll learn either way. Your chances of success next time will hinge on what you take away from the ones that don’t work out.

Priorities? Priority.

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When building websites, we help our clients determine what the main purpose of each page of the site is for. At times, it can be difficult to narrow down to a single goal. At rare times, it gets a out of control and “everything on the page is important”.

If everything on a page is important, then nothing stands out and it’s just hard to read. All bold, all large fonts, and all a huge mess.

Greg McKeown said it well in his book Essentialism:

The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities. Illogically, we reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality. Somehow we would now be able to have multiple “first” things.

For a page on a website, you need to find the goal for the page and have the content on the page work toward that goal.

Personally, though, I don’t follow that exactly and I tend to subscribe to the idea of the the “big three”:

  • Three big things you want to tackle this quarter, working toward your yearly goals.
  • Three big things you want to tackle this week, ideally with one or two of them working toward your quarterly big three.
  • Three big things you want to tackle today, ideally with one or two of them working toward your weekly big three.

However you sort it out, you can’t have unlimited priorities or nothing will get done. Figure out what’s important to you and make sure to intentionally devote time to taking care of those things.

One cockroach will ruin the whole bowl of cherries

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In reading “Thinking, Fast and Slow” I came across a quote from Paul Rozin, who was introduced as “an expert on disgust” (what a title!).

Paul pointed out that “a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.“

The same is true with your marketing. If all you put out is garbage and self-centered content, a “cherry” here or there isn’t going to help things.

Perhaps of bigger concern is that if you put out a lot of wonderful cherries and then mistaken drop a cockroach into the mix (such a a racial slur or indecent photo), the whole bowl of cherries can become worthless in an instant.

As a famous Japanese proverb says “The reputation of a thousand years may be undermined by the conduct of one hour” and we see that these days more than any other time.

Blend It All

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There’s a thought that everyone should have a clear “work/life balance” — one part of your life is work, one is personal, and never the two shall cross. While that may be necessary for some of us, for most I think it can be a nice blending of the two.

I see three areas where a blending can be good: Your schedule, your contacts, and your notes.

Scheduled Variety

I read some about this in the great book Off Balance, but my business partner Ali exemplifies it best by following what she calls “scheduled variety” — intentionally letting work and personal schedules blend together a bit to get the best of both.

Rather than saying that “work is 9-5”, you might catch up on a few emails at 8, work may “start” at 9, then you have lunch with your spouse, work for three more hours, catch a 4:00 yoga class, and polish up a proposal before bed. Your company may or may not allow this, but it’s a great way to stay energized if you’re allowed to.

All of your contacts

For a while, I tried to keep a separate list of “personal” and “business” contacts. It’s easy enough to do, because most people have separate email accounts and contacts tend to go with those. However, I found that I was duplicating a lot of people on both lists, which made it harder to keep things accurate. Ultimately, I blended them into a single contacts list (that syncs to both accounts) and things are much easier.

Not only do I no longer have to figure out if someone is a “personal” or “business” contact, removing the duplicates made it much easier to keep their info accurate.

If your contacts are all in Google, something like Contacts+ can take care of it for you. If you have Outlook or other areas to connect, try PieSync.

One set of notes

While all of us have official internal work notes for company-wide things like client info, we also tend to have our own work notes — ideas we have, short to-do lists, and many other things. I find that people often try to separate those away from their “personal” notes, but I again vote for blending them.

I follow a lot of productivity groups online, and often see questions about how best to split up personal and business notes. This could be using Evernote, Notion, Roam Research or anything; the tool doesn’t really matter. People try to split them up and find that it’s messy, but they’re often missing the bigger point — those notes should be in one bucket.

In my case, I keep my notes in Roam Research and they’re my notes — the personal me, the business me, the spiritual me, etc. Anything about me goes in one place. There are a couple of clear advantages:

  • Less meta work. You don’t have to think about which area something is for, you can just put it in your notes and move on.
  • With many systems (like Roam), you may find things tie together in interesting ways. One of my favorite examples relates to some notes I took about the book Essentialism; I heard some great tips for improving my life, while at a business event at my church. I have no idea which bucket it would go into if I had tried to split that out. As a consequence, I’ve been able to use ideas from that talk (and book) in all three aspects of my life.

Blending might not work for everyone, and a big part of that will depend on your company and your role. If you can, though, try to blend it all and reap the benefits.