Always Eat Left Handed: 15 Surprisingly Simple Secrets of Success (7 page)

Author’s Note: 
Parts of this section were excerpted (and edited) from my second book 
Likeonomics
, which focused on the principle of Timing in Chapter 8.

Chapter 14 - Let Ideas Travel

Lesson - Share The Credit

At the end of 2006, the then-popular blog search engine
Technorati
released a list of the 100 most popular blog posts of the entire year (ranked by the number of other sites linking to them).  Almost all the posts mentioned centered either on politics or technology.  Among the top 100 posts were articles about Stephen Colbert’s performance at the White House Press Correspondent’s Dinner and a post about a Saturday Night Live skit titled “What if Al Gore Were President?” 

In between the geeks and wonks, there were also a handful of business posts that managed to make the cut.  It was a list that I had been watching closely for some time.  A few years earlier, I had started a blog called
Influential Marketing
, where I shared marketing ideas and thoughts.  By August of 2006, I was steadily getting about 25 visitors a day … hardly what you would consider a major audience.

Then everything changed.

On August 10
^th
of 2006, I published a post I titled “The 5 Rules Of Social Media Optimization (SMO).”  In it, I described what I believed was a new field of marketing that would be a companion to the already popular practice of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  Within hours, several other respected Internet marketing bloggers added their own suggestions to the original post and my original five rules had gone up to 17. 

Don’t “Own” The Idea

Over the course of the following week, dozens of people commented on the post.  My blog visitors shot up to several thousand each day.  More sites linked to the original post and elaborated on the concept and idea.  SMO went viral.

The conversation was happening at a speed that only the online environment can really enable.  And I had a choice to make.  I could claim the idea as my own and become the “SMO guy.”  I could build my entire blog around that concept and register all the relevant domain names.  Then maybe one day I would write the book. 

That was the way to own an idea, and I knew it … but instead I chose to do the opposite.

I shared the other blog posts and rules as addendums to my original post.  I invited others to take the rules, remix them and share them again.  I asked anyone interested to take the idea and write about it freely.  They did.  Within a matter of months, it was cited enough times across the web to make the list of Top 100 posts on Technorati for the entire year of 2006. 

Thousands of people a day started visiting my blog to read the post about SMO, and many stayed and subscribed to read my other ideas.  Thanks to the traffic and visibility, my blog was selected by
AdAge
magazine as one of the Top 25 marketing blogs in the country.  The
Wall Street Journal
even profiled it and called it “intellectual and educational.”

Two years later, thanks in part to the popularity of the blog, I successfully pitched and won a contract with McGraw-Hill, one of the largest publishers in the world, to write my first book
Personality Not Included
.

Being Internet Famous

My story of going viral online and building an audience is one that has been duplicated on the web by writers, musicians, entertainers and all sorts of others over the past decade.  The Internet is helping individual obscure voices get recognized and discovered.  Most of them are finding success by openly sharing content and ideas and watching them spread organically.

Letting ideas travel changes everything.

But in my case, there was something more than just having a good idea that made the difference.  The idea was only the beginning.  What allowed this idea to catch on was the open choice to allow anyone to take it and use it freely – and the smart influencers in the digital marketing community that jumped into the idea immediately and started talking about it. 

In perhaps the perfect full circle illustration of the journey that SMO took, six years after initially sharing the idea on my blog, I happened to be sitting in a meeting with a client listening to a new potential partner pitch their approach to work with us.

They promised they were a pioneer in digital marketing, and offered a roster of “SMO experts.”  They even had a Powerpoint slide about it.  I didn’t know them, and they didn’t know me.  In that meeting, I wasn’t the “creator of SMO” – and that was just fine with me.  SMO had been good to me.  Thanks to the idea, I had jumpstarted a platform for myself, made amazing connections with very smart fellow marketers, and landed a five figure book deal.  I didn’t need anything else.

The only thing I had to do was remember the lesson it offered. 

How To Let Your Ideas Travel 

Letting ideas travel starts with a philosophy of unselfishness – because it can sometimes be hard to see your ideas taken and used by others.  Aside from this broad advice, there are three things that can help you to promote your ideas to travel.

1. Embrace your first followers.
     One of the most popular TEDTalks posted online also happens to be one of the shortest.  In it, entrepreneur Derek Sivers shows a video of a guy doing a crazy dance on a lawn, and then how others start joining him in the craziness.  In just a few minutes, he explains the undervalued power of the “first follower.”  The first follower, he shares, “is what transforms a lone nut into a leader.”  Key to the process, though, is that the leader must accept that first follower as an equal – otherwise the idea doesn’t catch on.  The lesson from his simple video and brilliant talk is clear … when it comes to letting your ideas travel, the first and most important step is to find your first followers and then embrace them as co-creators of the idea.
   
2. Make participation easy.
     As an idea moves from a smaller group to a larger one, making it easy to share and participate in is a critical part of helping to get further adoption.  Social media dramatically helps with this challenge as sharing is built into most social networks and online tools – but even if you don’t have an online idea to share, it is important to think of ways to make participation in the idea as easy as possible so that it can travel.
   
3. Accept remixing.
     As new people will start to take your idea and share it, they will naturally want to add their own mark.  This can be hard to deal with because you will feel your ownership getting diluted.  Sharing the credit, though, requires some level of letting go of control.  Once you do, your ideas are far more likely to influence more people … and the credit that you share will often come back in your direction as a result.
   

Chapter 15 - Walk In High Heels

Lesson - Learn Empathy

In 2001 Frank Baird had a crazy idea. 

While working as a community advocate and family therapist in California with women and families broken apart by domestic abuse, he wanted to find a new way to create more visibility and dialogue around the cause.  At the time, holding a march was a popular way to show support - but Frank wanted to do something different.

So in 2001 he proposed to call his march “Walk A Mile In Her Shoes” – and then invited men to do exactly that by agreeing to wear bright red high heels and walk a mile.  Doing it, they would create a spectacle that no one could ignore, and bring awareness to this important cause in the process. 

Making It Real

More than a decade later, domestic abuse is becoming a highly visible topic, rightly getting more and more media attention than ever.  Today there are large global concerts featuring stars like Beyoncé performing to support causes like domestic abuse.  There is a major film called
Girl Rising
that depicts stories of hope and change to bring education to more girls and women around the world and break the cycle of the many ways that women are held back in societies around the world. 

The aim for all of it is to bring awareness to the issue – but Frank’s march has something that many of the other campaigns miss.  His has the power to create true empathy.  Once a man actually walks a mile in high heels, it is hard to forget that experience.  It is a reminder of a pledge taken to support women and fight against all forms of domestic abuse. 

Wearing high heels changes everything.

The $42 Million Dollar Question

When you have empathy, people start to understand one another in real ways.  This is true for relationships between the genders – but also for other kinds of relationships. One example of a relationship that has become strained over the past decade is the one between a doctor and patient.  With the rapid explosion of healthcare content online – anyone can immediately self diagnose their own problems with a startling level of frequency.

Of course, that doesn’t always mean a doctor will listen.

It is a good thing Carolyn Bucksbaum didn’t see a doctor who listened nearly twenty years ago.  Back then she was just a patient with a feeling something was wrong and a doctor who refused to listen to her ideas of what it might be.  Her story was profiled in a
New York Times
article in 2011 which focused on the sometimes dysfunctional nature of doctor-patient conversations.

Bucksbaum’s story had a special significance, mainly because of her dramatically different experience receiving treatment from another doctor at the University of Chicago Medical Center.  He took the time to listen and  explain everything.  He made her feel at ease.  What he perhaps didn’t expect was just how she would choose to repay him. 

The Bucksbaums had built a small fortune for themselves building retail shopping malls. And they wanted to give back.  So they decided to donate $42 million dollars for the creation of a new clinical center that would focus on teaching medical professionals how to have more empathy in communications with patients.

Can that money really make a difference?  One reason for hope is that in multiple studies, researchers have proved there is a strong link between better doctor patient interaction and better healthcare outcomes. 

The business world is learning the same lesson.  One of the most popular topics right now in the typically ROI focused world of corporate organizations is just how creating more human organizations can be good for the companies, employees and customers.  The ability to show empathy is now a key leadership skill.

Learning empathy changes everything.

How To Learn Empathy

Can you really teach someone to be a better person?  That’s a question I have heard before at several workshops from skeptical adults who doubted that something they considered to be an element of someone’s personality can actually be changed.  The good news is, the answer is yes.  I have seen it happen many times.

And empathy is often at the center of that change – because it involves someone stepping outside their own point of view and developing their ability to see things from a different perspective.  Here are three techniques that I have found helpful to train business leaders and students alike:

1. Imagine a crazy backstory.
   When you are faced with someone who’s behavior you don’t understand, often it is because you can’t imagine a situation where you could act the same way.  One of the biggest ways to increase your ability to empathize is to imagine a crazy scenario where you might behave exactly in the same way as the person you’re interacting with.  You might not be a screamer – but what would cause you to yell at someone loudly to berate them in a certain situation?  The fact is, we don’t often know the full backstories of the people we interact with – and what they happen to be dealing with in their own lives. The only thing you know for sure is that person’s backstory is different than whatever you might imagine.
   
2. Spot unintentional incentives.
   Our behavior in many ways is ruled by the incentives that we have placed around us. When call center staff are told to spend as little time on the phone per call with a customer as possible – the predictable result is that they become rude, short, and eager to transfer a customer quickly instead of taking the time to solve their problem.  When you find it hard to understand or empathize with someone’s reactions or behavior – consider that the problem may actually be the incentives that are encouraging them to act exactly how they act … and see what you can do about changing those incentives.
   
3. Ask about emotions.
     When we interact with one another, most of us tend to be good at asking questions about specific things.  Where did you go? What did you do?  What we are NOT that good at is asking questions directly about emotions.  Why are you feeling sad?  Are you angry?  These questions reflect on the mood and facial expressions you may be reading, but often we feel they cross a social guideline and therefore we stay away from them.  They seem too personal.  Of course there will be a boundary that some people will not want to cross in terms of sharing extremely personal details … but sometimes just noticing and asking about emotions is all you need in order to encourage someone to open up and share a little more of how they are feeling.  When you ask about feelings – you are immediately empathizing on a level that more general questions rarely break through.
   

Conclusion

Lesson - Always Eat Left Handed!

By now you’ve had the opportunity to read this collection of lessons and tips on personal success that I gathered and curated after years of watching and talking with others about how our seemingly small choices actually have a big effect on our future successes (or failures).