“Stop the willpower madness”
Marketing efforts don’t fail. They stop. Like New Year’s Resolutions, our marketing efforts simply peter out and fade away over time.
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100 posts
The future isn’t real
When we think about “the future” of our business or our marketing, we’re not considering real events. We’re imagining what might happen. No matter how skilled we may be at marketing, our vision of the future is quite literally a figment of our imagination.
Holding on by the eyelids
The business world often tells us to be aggressive. We’re told to project strength and hide weakness. But if there’s one thing that’s clear from my study of high-stakes decision making, strategy, and conflict it’s this: aggression is weakness, and calmness is strength.
Average is deadly
“Because George believed he was supposed to find a solution, he did.” Whether we believe it or not, our beliefs affect our actions and our abilities.
It’s a slip and not a fall
At the age of 49, only a few years before being elevated to the presidency, Abraham Lincoln considered himself a flat failure. And on that evening in 1858, after watching the election results come in at the telegraph office, he walked home defeated.
Joy
There’s a tendency for consultants, especially new ones, to take themselves pretty seriously. I certainly did. Knowing, as Benjamin Franklin once said, that “grave men are taken ... as wise men,” I fell into the trap of trying to be overly serious in my conversations, marketing, and day-to-day work.
How to get better marketing advice
It’s hard to see our own business objectively. It’s hard because we’re so close to it. We can’t see much of ourselves without a mirror, and we can’t always see our own business from the inside, either.
How do you suppose customers choose?
A large part of my day-to-day work is applying marketing strategy to help people make a successful transition into consulting. And some of the most common struggles I help them work through are variations on, “My industry is so price-sensitive.”
You’ve already lost that money
You’ve probably tried a lot of things to market your business over the years. And you may have noticed that the tough part isn’t coming up with new ideas to try out. The tough part is stopping the stuff that isn’t working.
You have to get it done
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that, if you want to get a lot of things done quickly, you have to slow down. It feels counterintuitive. We can easily think that, in order to achieve a lot, we must do a lot—and fast.
The Worry List: Utterly unglamorous, incredibly important
This week’s newsletter builds on last week’s to demonstrate how to use and maintain a Worry List. It’s time to go full flashlight on our worries.
It merely failed
The future is a mystery to us all. And that means the greatest risk is in assuming it isn’t. In assuming our plans are perfect and won’t need adjustment.
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