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Articles filed in: Success
Reclaiming Old Marketing
filed in Marketing, Strategy, Success
The fastest way to shut down a conversation is to tell someone you’re ‘in marketing’.
Why is that?
Over the past six decades, the perception of marketing has changed dramatically. Marketing has gone from being a helpful conversation to being perceived as sleight of hand tactics that trick people into making decisions they later regret. That’s not the kind of marketing I grew up around. And it’s not the kind of marketing I want to practice or see in the world.
The kind of marketing I witnessed growing up was the helpful conversations my mother had with Buckley’s butchers about the best cuts of meat to buy for the meal she wanted to cook, within her budget. Their marketing worked even when the supermarket chains arrived because the Buckley’s had earned people’s trust over years of helpful conversations.
The promise of ‘new marketing’ was that we could reach more people, faster and cheaper. What wasn’t as clearly understood was what might be lost by going for those quick wins.
It turns out that the tools and tactics of new marketing aren’t a shortcut. The tried, trusted and true methods of old marketing help us to maintain our integrity and get to where we want to go.
Image by Denise Jans
The One Thing
filed in Meaningful Work, Strategy, Success
A novel is written one word, one sentence at a time. A marathon completed in strides, not miles. Every day we stand on the shoulders of the effort we made the one before.
We don’t make progress, we choose it.
What’s the one thing you could do today that would make a difference to your work?
What’s the one you could stop doing today that would have an impact on your progress?
What’s the one thing you need to learn to get you closer to your goal?
What’s the one thing you need to unlearn to change your perspective about what’s possible?
What one thing are you willing to do today in service of tomorrow?
Image by CJ Dayrit
The Best Laid Plans
filed in Meaningful Work, Strategy, Success
This day ten years ago you probably had plans in place for the year ahead. Maybe you achieved some of those goals in 2010. But I’m guessing that you could never have planned for some of the unexpected events, opportunities, twists and turns of the decade you’ve just lived.
It turns out that it’s harder to predict the future than we think because we underestimate how much we, and the world will change over time. As psychologist, Dan Gilbert says;
‘Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you’ve ever been. The one constant in our life is change.’
Ten years ago, I had just started blogging. I had no plans to write a book. I couldn’t have imagined building an online community, the joy of teaching story skills to thousands of people or speaking at TEDx. None of those things happened because I had a five year or a ten-year plan. They happened one blog post, one idea, one conversation at a time. Long-term goals, dreams and intentions are worthy, but they only eventuate because of our short-term actions.
Here’s to the next decade of showing up to do work we’re proud of and building a world that’s better for our being here.
Image by Tamarcus Brown
The Advantage Of Not Knowing For Sure
Success is as unpredictable as failure. Nobody knows for sure what will be a hit or a miss. Every runaway success is only obvious with hindsight. And yet we expend so much of our creative energy trying to be successful to our detriment.
When you liberate yourself from the pressure of having to win, you’re free to try things that haven’t been done before. You can permit yourself to develop your unique perspective—share and alternative worldview. Walk an untrodden path.
It isn’t just fear of failure that stifles creativity and innovation—it’s the pursuit of the ‘sure thing’ that closes us off to the possibilities. If we always knew exactly where we’d land we would never discover how high or how far we might have gone.
Image by Eugene Lim
Care Most
It was the day of her son’s birthday party. Natalie was on red alert. Everything had to be perfect. She’d booked the party venue months ago and ordered the birthday cake weeks in advance. Things began to unravel when she went to pick up the cake. There’d been a mistake. The cake Natalie ordered, featuring her son’s favourite cartoon character hadn’t been made. She exploded.
Max, the bakery assistant, just listened. He allowed Natalie to finish before he spoke, acknowledging her frustration. Then he apologised before offering her an alternative cake free of charge.
Max could have blamed the person who took the order or the baker who forgot to make the cake. He could have assumed that because he couldn’t make everything right, there was no point trying to make something better.
We sometimes believe we are powerless to make a difference in an ‘all is lost’ moment, when in fact the opposite is true. Often all it takes is the smallest signal that we care to change everything.
Image by kazuend
Gap Bridging
Every non-fiction book title in the book store makes a promise to a prospective reader.
The author promises to bridge a gap in the reader’s knowledge, skills or abilities.
The reader believes they will be changed by the time they turn the last page.
Your audience is also asking you to make and fulfil promises.
What gap does your product or service help your audience to bridge?
Who are you promising your audience you can help them to become?
Image by Michal Balog
Needs And Wants
filed in Meaningful Work, Strategy, Success
As creators, marketers and salespeople, we are, quite rightly, used to obsessing about our ideal client’s needs and wants.
After all, if we don’t understand what the people we care about serving care about, we’re unlikely to get the opportunity to serve them.
But if we are to do our best work, we must also be intentional about the kind of business and life we want to build. We often default to prioritising our needs while neglecting our wants.
What do you care about?
What kind of work serves you?
What do you need?
What do you want?
Image by Alice Achterhof
A Question Of Choices
filed in Meaningful Work, Strategy, Success
What makes you the best choice for the people you want to serve?
What makes these people the best choice for you?
What stories do you choose to tell your right people about the value you create?
What stories do your right people choose to believe about the value you deliver?
What choices do you make every day about how to build your right business?
How do those choices help you to earn the trust of the right people?
Our choices not only determine our priorities, plans and results—they are also clues about what matters to us.
Image by Maarten van den Heuvel
The Daily Opportunity
filed in Meaningful Work, Strategy, Success
We tend to think of opportunities as make or break moments. Those once in a lifetime happenings that could have accelerated our dreams if only we’d grabbed them before they passed us by.
But meaningful progress doesn’t happen in a single, magical alignment of the stars.
Opportunity can’t pass us by because it’s available to us in this moment and the next one.
The stars align when we show up every day to make the most of the opportunity that’s right in front of us.
Image by Jeff Sullivan
By Heart Vs. With Heart
filed in Meaningful Work, Success, Worldview
When we were taught poetry in primary school, my classmates and I were encouraged to learn verses by heart. The teacher would call upon us during a lesson to stand and recite a poem or a verse.
This was how we learned the words that were written without understanding the depth of their meaning. We knew the poems by heart, but we didn’t know what to make of them or why they should matter to us because we never learned to say them with heart.
We have the opportunity every day to work by heart or to choose to do it with heart.
The more often we choose the latter the better for all of us.
Image by Josh Applegate