If someone offers you “feedback,” your Spidey sense might start to tingle. Feedback isn’t often part of a warm and fuzzy feeling.
“Advice” is better. If you ask someone else for advice, you’re engaging them in your journey.
But, as Peter Shepherd points out, “noodling” is the best of all. When we start noodling over an idea, we can be sure that no one is going to get injured.
They didn’t reject you.
They rejected an application. They rejected a business plan. They rejected a piece of paper.
They don’t know you.
The “freestanding insert” was a multi-billion dollar business. Printed in bulk, then handed over to newspapers that would insert it into their Sunday paper, it was filled with coupons. In fact, the coupons were the entire point.
And the coupons worked.
They worked for two reasons:
As commerce moves online. the activities are changing, the middlemen are as well, but the two pillars remain. Priceline was a pioneer in this, giving travel shoppers a way to sign up for hassle, inconvenience and insecurity (you didn’t know which airline until after you bought your ticket) as a way to signal to airlines that they cared a great deal about price.
Mark Fraunfelder brings us this 200-year-old quote:
“Money is the best bait to fish for man with.” — Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia (1732)
I’m not sure that’s true. I think our story about money ends up being even more important.
[PS I just subscribed to Mark’s brand new newsletter. He’s been writing for and with the net forever, and I’m excited about Magnet. It’s not free, which is another story about money worth exploring.]
Great non-fiction helps us see the unseen, plants and nurtures ideas that matter, and, sometimes, can leave us better than we were.
Isabel Wilkerson’s new book Caste does all of those things. It uses language, analogy and history to pull together disparate threads into a coherent, devastating whole.
Highly recommended.
We don’t pay surgeons by the hour.
And if the person who cuts the lawn shows up with a very fast riding mower, we don’t insist on paying less because they didn’t have to work as hard.
Often, what we care about is the work done, not how long it took to do it.
And yet, some jobs, from law to programming, charge by the hour.
When you sell your time, you’re giving away your ability to be a thoughtful, productivity-improving professional.
Sell results.
[Today’s one of the last days of 2020 to enroll in The Creative’s Workshop. I hope you can check it out.]
[This probably impacts every person reading this, but few of us get to decide to fix it. I figured it was worth sharing so you can share it…]
Don’t require special characters (like ! or worse, ‘) in the passwords created in your app or on your site. You’re simply training people to either forget them or to write them down in an unsafe location. Instead, require long passwords.
When you set up a wifi password that others have to use, there’s really no reason to use capital letters, special characters or anything that’s a hassle to type on a phone. Try a phone number instead.
Don’t use ‘0’, ‘O’, ‘o’, ‘l’ or ‘1’ in any context where they have to be distinguished–like room numbers, serial numbers or the names of children. This is why zip codes are easier to use than postal codes, and why mixed letters and numbers are worth avoiding.
If you’re requiring 2FA (a good thing), don’t rely on email or texts, use an app instead. And don’t make the text code 7 digits (as my former bank did in an effort to pretend that they cared). 6 is more than enough.
Instead of serial numbers, companies should consider using three words mushed together, like hey-zebra-fun. This is way easier to read and communicate to others. Imagine how easy it would be to deal with your VIN or computer serial number if you could simply say three words. All the company will need is three lists of 300 common words, which, when juxtaposed, give us plenty of combinations.
And a password manager is a worthwhile program to install. If you haven’t, today’s a great day to start.
BONUS: It never hurts to say ‘please’ in your forms and other online communications. It’s free.
Thanks.
PS all of this advice is on the path to obsolete once computers can talk and think and interact just a little better than now. Which is happening. Here’s my recent podcast about it.
Marketing bonus: A fun summary of my work from Brendan.
Things rarely turn out precisely the way we hoped.
Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we can figure out why.
If we find the lesson and learn from it, it might be even more valuable than if we’d simply gotten lucky.
One of the most difficult things to do in skateboarding is to learn to ‘drop in’. This is the commitment at the top of the ramp. One moment, you’re standing still, at the abyss, and the next you’re committed, fully engaged with gravity.
The worse thing you can do is half.
When you sort of commit, you’re likely to fall.
The rule is pretty simple: If you’re going to bother going skateboarding, then you’ve already decided. In this moment, you’re not making a new decision. You’re simply acting on what you said you wanted to do in the first place.
Decide once. It’s fine to opt-out. But once you decide, there’s no upside in re-litigating your decision, particularly when it leads to needless risk and wasted effort.
And of course, you may have realized all the moments in our lives where our hesitation to drop in is precisely at the heart of the challenge.
[Skateboarding details here. Worth noting that “dropping in” while surfing is a very different thing, and the opposite rules apply.]
Your skills.
Your reputation.
The noise in your head, your attitude, your personal passions…
But after that, it starts to diverge.
Some own real estate. Some own machines. Some own trademarks, or the permission asset of being able to interact with people who want to be interacted with.
If you want to build a career as a freelancer, or a business as an entrepreneur, it helps to own something. Really valuable public companies are worth so much because of the assets they own and the market position they can defend as they grow. A hard-working but disrespected worker (whether an online freelancer or an actual factory worker) struggles because they’re not seen as owning enough. People have choices, and they often choose to hire and do business with entities that own something that they want to use or leverage.
As you seek to make a difference and to level up, it helps to come back to that key question: what do you own?
We act differently when we know we’re about to be on display.
Aim a camera at someone and they tense up. I guess we call it “taking” a picture for a reason. We feel defensive.
Social media multiplies this by counting “likes” (which doesn’t mean someone actually likes us) or “friends” (which doesn’t mean that someone is actually our friend.)
The irony is that the people we’re most likely to want to trust and engage with are the ones who don’t pose. They’re consistent, committed and clear, but they’re not faking it.
Figure out what you want to say, the change you seek to make, the story you want to tell–and then tell it. Wholeheartedly and with intent.
Posing is unnecessary.
