Creativity isn’t about writing or drawing

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I consider myself to be rather creative when it comes to solving problems, but not at all creative when it comes to art. So does that make me “creative” or not?

In a fantastic podcast episode of The Futur, Blair Enns referenced Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi with a simple quote that aims to add some clarity to the thought. He said:

“Creativity is not the ability to write or draw, that’s Personal Creativity. It’s the ability to bring perspective to problems that others are unable to see.”

So based on that, it seems that I am creative. My ability to “bring perspective to problems that others are unable to see” needs to continue to improve, but that’s where I see myself when it comes to creativity.

Of course, many people have both kinds. Ali, for example, has both excellent personal creativity as well as strategic creativity. It’s great to find people that can cover both sides!

Where do you see yourself between those two terms? One over the other, a little of both, or neither for now?

Wantrepreneurs are content consumers

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People that work to grow their business generally fall into one of two camps: entrepreneurs and wantrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs work with their plan, and wantrepreneurs just hope that things work out along the way. Both can succeed, but the odds are much higher for one over the other.

It reminds me a bit of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s famous quote of “A goal without a plan is just a wish“.

The challenge is that coming up with a plan isn’t always easy. As I’ve built my company, I’ve struggled many times to understand how to create the plan for the next step of the journey. Working through my thoughts (in places such as this blog) has helped tremendously.

In the book “The 1-Page Marketing Plan“, author Allan Dib says it like this:

“One of the major distinctions between successful entrepreneurs and “wantrepreneurs” is that successful entrepreneurs are predominantly content creators whereas wantrepreneurs are predominantly content consumers.”

Now, consuming content can be a great thing. That’s what you’re doing right now, and I spend a lot of time every day consuming content through books, podcasts, social media, and other platforms. If I stopped there, though, I’d be holding myself back.

While there are exceptions to every rule, I’ll bet that when you think about the entrepreneurs that you look up to, most of them are avid content creators. In my case, I create content for two main reasons:

  1. To teach myself. The best way to learn something is to teach it to others, so publishing in public on here forces me to refine my thoughts before I share them.
  2. To be seen. I’m not looking to go big on social media or anything, but staying top of mind is a great way to attract new business.

One side benefit of the content creation that I do is that it forces me to be a better consumer of content. If I’m low on ideas to write about, it’s usually because I haven’t been reading enough. I read more to write more, and I write to help sharpen my skills as a business owner.

If you run a business of almost any kind, creating more content will likely be one of the best things you can do with your time.

The insatiable need to know more

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As time goes on, I’m finding that people who are always striving to learn more tend to have more success in business. From my vantage point, it seems to cover two areas:

  1. Learning timeless best practices for running a business (and the learning there never ends).
  2. Keeping up with industry trends and innovations to take things further.

There was a point in the past where you could essentially just keep things steady, but the time for that is gone and constant learning is likely to be one of your best friends.

This is Austin Grigg working to make things appear effortless.

This is Adam Walker and Jeff Hilimire putting out a new podcast about reading and learning.

This is Jason Blumer always learning and sharing, like his recent symposium on accounting trends and challenges.

The list could go on, but it seems that the people who focus on learning tend to be the ones worth following, and the ones worth following tend to see the most success.

In the popular book “The E-Myth Revisited“, author Michael Gerber says:

“Contrary to popular belief, my experience has shown me that the people who are exceptionally good in business aren’t so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.“

There are certainly successful people on both sides of the idea of the “insatiable need to know more”, but it seems that diving in will make your odds of success a whole lot higher.

Best practices are average

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People are often advised to “follow best practices”, and it’s not bad advice. Carefully following in the steps of those that have gone before us is a safe way to proceed. At the same time, best practices are designed to be limiting.

In his book “Clear Thinking“, author Shane Parrish warns that best practices are always average:

Doing something different means you might underperform, but it also means you might change the game entirely. If you do what everyone else does, you’ll get the same results that everyone else gets. Best practices aren’t always the best. By definition, they’re average.

It reminds me of the classic saying “Nobody gets fired for buying IBM“. It’s a safe bet; it’s unlikely to have huge rewards, but it’s also unlikely to turn out horrible. It’s average.

In a lot of cases, the “average best practice” is ideal. If you want to take a gamble on going far, though, avoiding best practices can sometimes be the best thing you can do.

Loss leaders are aimed at dumb customers

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Many stores offer special deals on “loss leaders” — products that are sold very cheap, often at a loss, in order to entice customers into the store to buy other things that are substantially marked up in price.

One store that doesn’t do this is Costco. Generally speaking, they try to simply keep low margins on everything that they sell; nothing at a loss, but nothing with a huge margin either.

The “Acquired” podcast did a great episode on Costco recently, and the hosts explained loss leaders this way:

Do you sell loss leaders in the store, loss leaders being when you mark down items below your cost in order to attract people into the store with sales? If you’re those other retailers, yeah, of course, this is a time-honored tactic and retailing. Of course you’re going to use this.

The flip side of doing loss leaders is that you have to make up for it somewhere. You got to markup other goods in the store to fat margins to make it worth doing the loss leader for you. Basically, it means you’re treating your customers like they’re stupid.

That’s exactly my read on this, too. I feel like Acquired number one tenet: treat the audience like they’re smart. If you’re going to ever do loss leaders, you’re violating that tenet and saying like, we’re going to get one over on our customers.

If a store has a widely-advertised loss leader to bring you, you need to question their prices on other products.

That said, Costco actually does have one loss leader — the hot dogs they sell. They’ve famously been $1.50 (with a drink) since Costco opened 42 years ago. In fact, when then-CEO Jim Sinegal stepped down, some questioned if the price of the hot dog would go up. Jim’s famous response? “If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out.”

In Costco’s case, the hot dog isn’t hurting them a bit. They might be losing a few dollars with each one that they sell, but how much did you spend in total the last time you shopped there? 🙂

I like the way the Acquired guys ended their quote, essentially giving two options: treat your audience like they’re smart, or try to get one over on them.

It seems like an easy decision to make.

Value is what people perceive it to be

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The word “value” gets discussed and dissected in business quite a bit, but what does it really mean? At the end of the day, it means whatever the customer wants it to mean.

I once bought a $5 bottle of Coke and was happy to do it. Given the situation, the value was high. I also find some of the services that we pay for to be an incredible value and I’m happy to pay them.

When it comes to other services, there’s a common thought that effort=value, but that’s not usually true. Just because something requires more effort to produce doesn’t mean it’s worth more value to consume.

Henry George said that “the value of something lies in how much labor we’re willing to exchange for it“, not in how much labor was put into creating it. Put another way, the value in a product or service is shown in how many calories we’re willing to give up to have that product or service.

In the long-famous book “The E-Myth Revisited“, author Michael Gerber laid it out very plainly:

“What is value? How do we understand it? I would suggest that value is what people perceive it to be, and nothing more.“

We try to showcase and emphasize the value of the services that we offer, but at the end of the day the real value is only in what others see.

Failure comes from a failure to imagine failure

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“Be prepared” has been the motto of the Boy Scouts since 1907, and it’s good advice. Being prepared is rarely a bad idea and can help immensely when you unexpectedly need it most.

In his book “Clear Thinking“, author Shane Parrish gives some examples of how being prepared makes you a better “problem anticipator”, which is often better than being a “problem solver”:

Many people think they’re bad problem solvers when in fact they’re bad problem anticipators. Most of us don’t want to think about more problems; we have enough already. We think that before bad things happen, we’ll get a warning, we’ll have time to prepare, we’ll be ready. But the world doesn’t work that way. Bad things happen to good people all the time. We get laid off without warning. We get into a car accident. Our boss comes into our office and lays into us. A pandemic spreads throughout the world. No warnings. No time to prepare.

The lack of warnings is the brutal part. Sometimes you’ll get a few minutes, but you’ll always wish you had a few minutes more. Having plans in place will essentially buy you some of that time.

Here’s another small section from the book, talking about the lack of a “two-minute warning” on many problems, and then the great quote from Josh Wolfe that I used as the title of this post:

When bad things happen, there is no two-minute warning where you get a commercial break to prepare. You have to deal with it as it happens. The best decision-makers know that bad things happen, and that they’re not immune. They don’t just wing it and react. They anticipate and make contingency plans. And because they’re ready, their confidence doesn’t crack. The venture capitalist Josh Wolfe likes to say, “Failure comes from a failure to imagine failure.”

Preparedness is a tricky thing. We all want to be prepared for what might come, but we could end up going too far and spend all of our time preparing and never getting a chance to live. For me, I imagine potential problems on a scale from “likely, but not a big deal” going up to “unlikely, but a huge deal” and I focus mostly on the two ends.

On the “likely, but not a big deal” are things you can often anticipate a bit and easily prepare for:

  • 70% chance of rain? I’ll bring an umbrella.
  • Traffic will be busy on I-75? I’ll leave a few minutes early.

On the other side we have the “unlikely, but a huge deal“, and I do things to prepare for those.

  • Car accident? I keep insurance on all of our cars.
  • Unexpected job loss or expense? I keep savings put aside.

Pre-Mortem

Lastly, at least in the world of business, is the idea of a “pre-mortem”. We all know about the idea of a post-mortem, when you look back at a project to see what went wrong that can be corrected for next time. A pre-mortem is the opposite — looking ahead at an upcoming project to see what might go wrong and working ahead of time to anticipate and try to prevent those problems from occurring.

A pre-mortem is intentionally a place to try to “imagine failure”. The more ideas you come up with, the more prepared you can be to handle them if they come true. The very first episode of the popular “The Long and The Short Of It” podcast covered pre-mortems and it’s worth a listen.

What do you do to try to imagine failure?

Your personal board of directors

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Having a personal board of directors would be amazing. I’m on a few boards with other organizations, but it’d be neat to have my own — I could just have a group of people to call on to answer questions and help me work through things.

As it turns out, I have one!

Most of them don’t know they’re on it, and some are no longer even living, but I have a great group of people I can turn to for help.

Shane Parrish explains his board in his book “Clear Thinking“, when he says :

Put all of your exemplars on your “personal board of directors,” a concept that originates with author Jim Collins: Back in the early ’80s, I made Bill Lazier the honorary chairman of my personal board of directors. And when I chose members . . . they were not chosen for their success. They were chosen for their values and their character. . . . They’re the sorts of people I wouldn’t want to let down.

He unpacks “exemplars” a bit more, saying:

One of my exemplars is Charlie Munger, the billionaire business partner of Warren Buffett. He raised my standard for holding an opinion. One night at dinner, he commented, “I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything unless I know the other side’s argument better than they do.”

My board of directors

It got me thinking about who might be on my board, and they come from various walks of life.

Some are people that I don’t really know but I read quite a lot, such as:

  • Charlie Munger
  • Seth Godin
  • Blair Enns
  • Gary Vaynerchuk

Others are people I know personally and talk to often, including:

Both lists could go on quite a bit further, but these are all people that I think about when making decisions. Would Charlie think this is a wise financial move? Would Gary think I’m holding myself back? Would Ali agree with the ethical ramifications of it?

It’s awesome to have my own board of directors, and I’ll bet you have one too. Who is on yours?

If you purchase from cold outreach, you’re condoning their behavior

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As with most of you, I get hit with cold outreach all the time. Cold emails, phone calls, LinkedIn connections, people at our door, etc. While they may occasionally have decent offers, my rule on cold outreach has become very simple — no.

Last week I had someone stop by our house to sell us a new roof. It was admittedly bad timing (I was on a call, and our dog was going nuts), but it helped me come up with a nice phrase to quickly get him to go away: “We don’t purchase from companies that do business this way.“

If you need to interrupt my day to insert your sales pitch, there is a 0% chance I’ll purchase from you. It’s kind of nice to have that set rule, as it saves me a bit of time because I don’t need to evaluate the offer at all. It’s just “no”.

Ads

Proper advertising is a bit different, as it’s part of the deal. If I’m watching live TV, I know there will be commercials and I have no problem with it. I know which podcasts insert ads, and I’m ok with the decision to continue to listen to them. If I perform a search on Google, I know that there will be (ever more…) ads on the top. I’ve accepted that deal and companies that play into those ecosystems are fine by me.

The random interruptions are the deal-breaker and most everyone hates them. The problem is, they can work, and they don’t have to work very often to make it worth their time. If a guy can knock on 200 doors and sell one new roof, it was worth his time (and wasting the time of 199 others is of no concern to them).

If you purchase anything that came via cold outreach, you’re condoning that behavior and telling them it’s ok to annoy as many people as they want as long as it leads to a sale eventually. Just say no.

Present or be present?

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The title of this post may be a little confusing, but spelled out it’s:

Present (“pre-sent”, like giving a presentation) or be present (“pres-ent”, like being active in the room).

In many cases, those are two different things. If you have an important presentation to give, you may often distance yourself from those in the room by staying inside of your head. In a recent episode of the “2Bobs” podcast, Blair Enns shares how this can impact a sales presentation where the seller is just driving forward without taking the time to listen and respond:

“I just think of listening to a podcast interview where the interviewer asks a very good question and gets the beginnings of a great answer from the guest. Then you want them to pull on that thread and go deep, and they don’t, they go to the next question… That could have been a 20-minute conversation about their need state, about an objection you need to overcome, about something big that’s going on in their lives. I explain it as being present or presenting, and it’s one of my fondest lines that I’ve authored is you can present to people or you can be present to them. You cannot do both.”

Unpacking it further, he says:

“When you go into presentation mode, you are no longer present. Advisor you, expert you, you are present to your clients. You are good at listening. You are good at asking questions. You are good at creating space to let them talk. Salesperson you does none of that.”

Whether it’s a podcast interview, a sales conversation, or anything else, it can be tough to wear both hats at once but it’s critical to success. Salespeople have much better rates of success when they can stay present and ask great follow-up questions, and we all know that the best podcast interviews are able to pull at interesting threads and dig deep on them.

Depending on the situation I can certainly sometimes go a bit too much into “presentation mode”, but working to stay in more of a true “conversation mode” will always yield better results.