Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (4 page)

There’s a sweet spot for getting on
Oprah
and for being on NPR as well. You rarely hear about romance novels on
All Things Considered
.

My point isn’t that you shouldn’t try to get these middlemen to broaden their horizons or that you should give up on something you’re passionate about. It’s just that it might be easier to build a new sweet spot than it is to persuade an established middleman to change his rules for you.

I never had a chance with existing magazines, so I invented a writing style for myself that worked well with
Fast Company
, which until then had never had a columnist. Bloggers around the world are discovering that it’s cheaper and faster and more effective to build their own media channels than it is to waste time arguing with the old ones.

So I guess my advice would be to either build your product and network along the way to align with exactly what the middlemen want, or reject them and live/thrive without them. It’s the middle ground that’s really frustrating.

Google yourself.

If you’re a salesperson, your prospects already do.

If you’re looking for a job, your prospective employers already do.

If you’ve got a job, your coworkers already do.

What do they see? Do you know?

If you don’t like it, you can fix it. Start a blog, even if it’s just a few pages’ worth. Have some colleagues suggest you for Wikipedia (if the powers that be think you’re notable enough), or make sure you’re represented on HubPages or Squidwho, or write an article for ChangeThis.

You can be finished by tonight. It’s worth it.

Someone asked me the other day if posting a blog post every day is intimidating or a grind.

I view it as something I
get
to do. I spend most of my blogging time deciding what not to post.

The best work, at least for me, is the stuff you get to do. If you are really good at that, you’re lucky enough to have very little of the
have-to
stuff left.

Maybe it should be “the forces for mediocrity …”

There’s a myth that all you need to do is outline your vision and prove it’s right—then, quite suddenly, people will line up and support you.

In fact, the opposite is true. Remarkable visions and genuine insight are always met with resistance. And when you start to make progress, your efforts are met with even more resistance. Products, services, career paths … whatever it is, the forces for mediocrity will align to stop you, forgiving no errors and never backing down until it’s over.

If it were any other way, it would be easy. And if it were any other way, everyone would do it and your work would ultimately be devalued. The yin and yang are clear: without people pushing against your quest to do something worth talking about, it’s unlikely that it would be worth the journey. Persist.

Persistence isn’t using the same tactics over and over. That’s just annoying.

Persistence is having the same goal over and over.

Most people spend a lot of time to get an education.

They wait for the teacher (hopefully a great one) to give them something of value.

Many employees do the same thing at work. They wait for a boss (hopefully a great one) to give them responsibility or authority or experiences that add up to a career.

A few people—not many, but a few—take. They take the best education they can get, pushing teachers for more, finding things to do, exploring non-defined niches. They take more courses than the minimum, they invent new projects, and they show up with questions.

A few people, not many, take opportunities at work. Marketers have the easiest time of this (it’s sort of hard to commandeer the chain saw) but don’t do it nearly as often as they should.

What have you taken today?

I trust Sara Fishko.

I don’t know her, I’ve never bought anything from her, and I wouldn’t recognize her if we met, but I trust her.

Every once in a while, over the last few years, Sara’s voice has come out of my radio, telling me about one interesting cultural event or another. She’s consistent. She shows up. She has built a body of work over time, taking her time, that has led to trust.

Twitter can do that for you.

Not for a million New Yorkers, but perhaps for a hundred or a thousand people you want to reach. Blogs do the same thing.

The best time to look for a job next year is right now. The best time to plan for a sale in three years is right now. The mistake so many marketers make is that they conflate the urgency of making another sale with the timing of earning the right to make that sale. In other words, you must build trust before you need it. Building trust right when you want to make a sale is just too late.

Publishing your ideas—in books, or on a blog, or in little twits
on Twitter—and doing it with patience, over time, is the best way I can think of to lay a foundation for whatever it is you hope to do next.

I like reading magic books.

I don’t do magic. Not often (and not well). But reading the books is fun. It’s a vicarious thing, imagining how a trick might work, visualizing the effect, and then smiling at how the technique is done. One trick after another, it’s a pleasant adventure.

A lot of people read business books in just the same way. They cruise through the case studies or the insights or examples and imagine what it would be like to be that brilliant entrepreneur or that successful CEO or that great sales rep. A pleasant adventure.

There’s a huge gap between most how-to books (cookbooks, gardening, magic, etc.) and business books, though. The gap is motivation. Gardening books don’t push you to actually do something. Cookbooks don’t spend a lot of time trying to sell you on why making a roast chicken isn’t as risky as you might think.

The stakes are a lot higher when it comes to business.

Wreck a roast chicken and it’s $12 down the drain. Wreck a product launch and there goes your career.

I’m passionate about writing business books precisely for this reason. There are more business books sold than most other nonfiction categories for the same reason. High stakes, high rewards.

The fascinating thing is this: I spend 95% of my time persuading people to take action and just 5% of the time on the recipes.

The recipe that makes up just about any business book can be condensed to just two or three pages. The rest is the sell. The proof. The persuasion.

Which leads to your role as the reader. How to read a business book—it’s not as obvious as it seems.

• Bullet points are not the point.
  

If you’re reading for the recipe, and just the recipe, you can get through a business book in just a few minutes. But most people who do that get very little out of the experience. Take a look at the widely divergent reviews for
The Dip
. The people who “got it” understood that it was a book about getting you to change your perspective and thus your behavior. Those who didn’t get it were looking for bullet points. They wasted their money.

Computer books, of course, are nothing but bullet points. Programmers get amazing value because for $30 they are presented with everything they need to program with a certain tool. Yet most programmers are not world class, precisely because the bullet points aren’t enough to get them to see things the way the author does, and aren’t enough to get them motivated enough to actually program great code.

So, how to read a business book:

1. Decide, before you start, that you’re going to change three things about what you do all day at work. Then, as you’re reading, find the three things and do them. The goal of the reading, then, isn’t to persuade you to change; it’s to help you choose
   what
   to change.
   
2. If you’re going to invest a valuable asset (like time), go ahead and make it productive. Use a Post-it or two, or some index cards or a highlighter. Not to write down stuff so you can forget it later, but to create marching orders. It’s simple: if three weeks go by and you haven’t taken action on what you’ve written down, you’ve wasted your time.
   
3. It’s not about you, it’s about the next person. The single best use of a business book is to help someone else. Sharing what you read, handing the book to a person who needs it—pushing those around you to get in sync and to take action—that’s the main reason it’s a book, not a video or a seminar. A book is a souvenir and a container and a motivator and an easily leveraged tool. Hoarding books makes them worth less, not more.
   

Effective managers hand books to their teams. Not so they can be reminded of high school, but so that next week she can say to them, “Are we there yet?”

In the U.S., the next two weeks are traditionally the slowest of the year. Plenty of vacations, half-day Fridays, casual Mondays, martini Tuesdays … you get the idea.

What if you and your team go against type? What if you spend the two weeks while your competitors (and the forces for the status quo) are snoozing—and turn whatever you’re working on into a completed project?

So, here’s the challenge: assemble your team (it might be just you) on Monday and focus like your hair is on fire (I have no direct experience in this area, but I’m told that hair flammability is quite urgent).

Do nothing except finish the project. Hey, you could have been on vacation, so it’s okay to neglect everything else, to put your email on vacation auto respond, and your phone on voice mail and to beg off on the sleepy weekly all-hands meeting and to avoid the interactions with those who might say no.

And then finish it. Finish the website or the manuscript or the business plan or the suite of tools. No, this isn’t a great week to do outreach or make a pitch. That’s not the goal. It’s to finish that project that’s been stuck too long. Finish it or cancel it.

I’ve seen it before and I’m sure I’ll see it again.

Whenever a business cycle starts to falter, the media start wringing their hands. Then big businesses do, then freelancers, then entrepreneurs, and soon everyone is keening.

People and organizations that have no real financial stress start to pull back “because it’s prudent.” Now is not the time, they say. They cut budgets and put off investments. It’s almost as if everyone is just waiting for an excuse to do less.

In fact, they are.

Growth is frightening for a lot of people. It brings change and the opportunity for public failure. So if the astrological signs aren’t right or the water is too cold or we’ve got a twinge in our elbow, we find an excuse. We decide to do it later, or not at all.

What a shame. What a waste.

Inc.
magazine reports that a huge percentage of companies in this year’s
Inc.
500 were founded within months of 9/11. Talk about uncertain times.

But uncertain times, frozen liquidity, political change, and poor astrological forecasts (not to mention chicken entrails) all lead to less competition, more available talent, and a do-or-die attitude that causes real change to happen.

If I weren’t already running my own business, today is the day I’d start one.

People really want to believe that effort is a myth, at least if we consider what we consume in the media:

• politicians and beauty queens who get by on a smile and a wink
  
• lottery winners who turn a lifetime of lousy jobs into one big payday
  
• sports stars who are born with skills we could never hope to acquire
  
• Hollywood celebrities with the talent of being in the right place at the right time
  
• failed CEOs with $40 million buyouts
  

It really seems (at least if you read popular media) that who you know and whether you get “picked” are the two keys to success. Luck.

The thing about luck is this: we’re already lucky. We’re insanely lucky that we weren’t born during the Black Plague or in a country with no freedom. We’re lucky that we’ve got access to highly leveraged tools and terrific opportunities. If we set that luck aside, though, something interesting shows up.

Delete the outliers—the people who are hit by a bus or win the lottery, the people who luck out in a big way—and we’re left with everyone else. And for everyone else, effort is directly related to success. Not all the time, but as much as you would expect. Smarter, harder-working, better-informed, and better-liked people do better than other people, most of the time.

Effort takes many forms. Showing up, certainly. Knowing stuff (being smart might be the luck of the draw, but knowing stuff is the result of effort). Being kind when it’s more fun not to be. Paying forward when there’s no hope of tangible reward. Doing the right thing. You’ve heard these things a hundred times before, of course, but I guess it’s easier to bet on luck.

If people aren’t betting on luck, then why do we make so many dumb choices? Why aren’t useful books selling at fifty times the rate they sell now? Why does anyone, ever, watch reality TV shows? Why do people do such dumb stuff with their money?

I think we’ve been tricked by the veneer of lucky people on the top of the heap. We see the folks who manage to skate by, or who get so much more than we think they deserve, and it’s easy to forget that:

A.
these guys are the exceptions,

and

B.
there’s nothing you can do about it anyway.

And that’s the key to the paradox of effort: while luck may be more appealing than effort, you don’t get to choose luck. Effort, on the other hand, is totally available, all the time.

This is a hard sell. Diet books that say “eat less, exercise more” may work, but they don’t sell many copies.

With that forewarning, here’s a bootstrapper’s/marketer’s/entrepreneur’s/fast-rising executive’s effort diet. Go through the list and decide whether each item is worth it. Or make up your own diet. Effort is a choice, so at least make it on purpose: