I’m really winding down now, taking a few days off, and hoping you’ll do the same. Wishing for peace. Goodwill towards all. Warm, happy, safe, loving holidays to you. And thank you. Here’s another (third this week) beautiful picture of Yosemite in winter.
(Photo credit: Jeff Banke, Shutterstock)
Christopher is six years old. That’s his picture here to the right, taken a few months ago.
Last week one of his teachers shared this with me: She asked him what he does when he’s frustrated. He answered:
“Stop. Breathe. Think.”
He’s not a genius or anything like that, so I doubt he invented that solution all by himself. But still, it’s a really great answer, don’t you think?
In case you’re wondering, my post here yesterday was also subtitled Holidays Part 1. (I did that in invisible ink, so you wouldn’t see it there. But it was.)
For part 2, keeping on with my holiday theme of moving back a bit from business, reflecting on what’s really important in life (even if just for a while, around this time), I’d like to refer back to some earlier posts I’ve done, before 2009, that reflect the same “and having a life in the meantime” theme that’s part of the charter of this blog (see the subtitle there, in the banner?). You may have seen some of my more recent posts in this same motif (which, by the way, seem to bring me a lot of traffic), such as the what business schools don’t teach, or 10 ways to save your life from your business, or 10 lessons learned in 22 years of bootstrapping. These others are from more than a year ago:
(Photo: Jeff Bank/Shutterstock)
This is Monday of the first of two holiday weeks. This is a good time to pull back a bit, reflect on things from a different perspective. 
It’s really good that our various religions, cultures, and traditions remind us, every once in a while, to slow down and think. Especially this year, which has been a tough one for a lot of us, an especially difficult year for small business, entrepreneurship, economics, health care, and politics.
Let’s pause a bit from normal business. Let’s think about what matters most, whatever that is, for each one of us. And then ask whether the way we spend ourselves – time, effort, stress, dreams – matches what’s most important to us.
One thing I’d like to suggest, is looking for the common denominators we can all agree on. Like compassion. That ought not to be controversial.
I don’t mean to be “preachy” (my daughter’s word). When I get all goody-goody like this, please don’t ask my wife about it. I can be as hypocritical as the next person, but jeez, at least we can remind each other once in a while, no? In this context, I’m really glad the well-known words of wisdom are “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Instead of “let he (or she) who is without sin write blogs.”
Especially during the holidays.
And thank you for reading this blog. I like writing it and I’m grateful that my readership has grown a lot this year. Thanks for linking here, thanks for tweeting here, and thanks especially for your comments.
(Photo credit: Winter in Yosemite Valley, by Peter Weber, via Shutterstock)
Your business or your life? The nagging question comes up a lot. Recently I saw this startling statement:
Maximizing your chance for success means sacrificing health and family.
That was in this post by Jason Cohen on VentureBeat. He’s serious. He quotes Mark Cuban and one other successful entrepreneur. He says you can’t get it all done otherwise. Build your business first, then build your life. Yeah, right. Like business gets easier at some point? When it grows? Good luck with that.
Logical flaw: for every successful entrepreneur who cites sacrificing health and family as the key to success, there are 10 others who say sacrificing health and family is a tragic mistake. Another logical flaw: millions of people sacrificed health and family and weren’t successful. All their sacrifice did was ruin their lives. Nobody quotes them. They call that survivor bias.
Personally, I don’t buy the passion, obsession, sacrifice all for your business philosophy. Success in life can be something different than purely sales, growth, profits, and celebrity as an entrepreneurial success. Not many of us end up as top-ten world-class entrepreneurs, and, for the rest of us, having a life can be way more important. The sacrifice doesn’t cause success. It’s a rationalization. So I’d like to suggest two sets of rules to help you save your life from your business. The first five are fundamental rules. The second set, five more, are suggestions more than rules; different ways to think about things; reminders.
First, the five fundamentals. I consider these practical, realistic, actionable rules that are good for everybody. For the record, four of the five are rules that I’ve lived with for a long time. Two of them thanks go to my wife and not me; and the fifth, the exercise one, I learned the hard way, by not doing it. I promise you that you can live by all five and not have to sacrifice business success for any of them. These will help you keep your balance:
And then, after the fundamentals, five fine touches, embellishments, not-so-universal, but maybe still useful:
None of the above guarantees business success, but none of it is really going to get in the way of your success either, and it may help you stay sane in the meantime. Think about this: my wife taught me, early in our 40-year-marriage, that time is the scarcest resource, way scarcer than money. And some day you’re going to turn 60. Unless you die first.
(Image: Kenneth V. Pilon/Shutterstock)
Here it is Friday, but it’s a special Friday because we had Thanksgiving yesterday so nobody will be in the office today. I woke up late on a dark, rainy day, made my coffee, savoring the smell of the freshly ground beans and the process of grinding and filtering and all. Browsed email, Twitter, the web. Everybody else was asleep upstairs.
What to do? Do I catch up on a collection of blog posts I mean to write? Get to that op-ed piece for the local newspaper? Work on the book that’s cooking in the back of my mind? I’m really glad I can’t do any calls today (I’m chairing an angel investment group and I’m behind on calls to members) so that isn’t even an option.
All of this reminds me that I really like what I do. I have for years, but more so since I stopped running the company and focused on blogging, writing, speaking, and teaching. I get to my office happily. I enjoy the work. Still, a break every so often is a good thing. Everybody needs a slow day now and then. I decided to look for a picture to go with this post, and my mood on this morning, so I browsed Flickr for “coffee.”
So, in honor of that soft, slow beginning of the day today, I found this picture on Flickr. Title: “Hot Coffee on a Rainy Day.” Taken by David Joyce (deapeajay on Flickr). And taken almost exactly a year ago, end of November. He says
“This photo didn’t get the overall impact I was aiming for, but here it is anyway. I was trying to capture the experience of drinking coffee by a large window on a rainy afternoon. That’s always been one of the most serene settings for me.”
It struck me as exactly on target for me and this post today, although it’s morning for me. And I like the reminder that Flickr is a really good resource. And, to top that off, here’s another really nice Fall photo from David Joyce. He calls it “Last Leaf of Fall.”
So imagine yourself working on a few variations of a blog post headline when your editor says one of them, perhaps not your favorite, would be better for SEO (search engine optimization). That’s what we call a no brainer. Never say no to better SEO. Period.
I was in a conversation along those lines yesterday. It reminded me of one of my favorite little life-advice snippets has always been “never say no to an offer of a breath mint.” If you don’t immediately see why, think about it.
I asked around, got some help from friends, and came up with the following “never say no” list:
Honorable mentions: these last two are a bit off the small business and entrepreneurship setting as a target, but I decided to include them both, one because it’s good life advice and the other because, like its author says, “it’s in the manual.”
In an ideal world, saying no to one thing makes you more credible when you say yes to another. Telling a caller the truth about what your product doesn’t do makes them more likely to call back when they need what it does do. Turning down one kind of consulting job because you’re not expert enough makes you that much more credible when you call yourself an expert in something else later on.
I’ve really enjoyed the power of no in the past. No, our software doesn’t do that, it does this instead. And no, that’s not the kind of consulting I do. It’s a good feeling to say no during a sales call.
The world we live in, however, is not that ideal world. A lot of those customers don’t come back for what you really can say yes to. A lot of them go somewhere else, settle for something else, and their itch is scratched, and they’re done. 
I’ve never forgotten the hard lesson I learned in 1985 when I turned down an invitation to speak at COMDEX, the then-big PC industry show in Las Vegas, on PC industry trends. I’d been an industry trends follower previously, but had been concentrating on business planning for a couple of years. I attended the show for a client, looking at trends for their business plan, and attended the workshop I would have given. To my dismay, the guy who did it presented nothing more than what anybody could read in the trade magazines the week before. And to my further dismay, the audience seemed to like it. My turning down this opportunity was my paying homage to a standard of professionalism that apparently no longer existed. And nobody cared.
Last week Matthew Scott (MatthewRayScott on Twitter) sent me back to that memory with his very interesting eight-minute reflection on expertise, on his blog The Strategic Incubator. He called it Social Media Experts + Irrelevance.
His eight-minute audio post is about turning down what would have been a $21,000 engagement conducting workshops on Twitter and Facebook about marketing because he didn’t consider himself “expert” enough. And then discovering that the person who ended up doing it was probably way less knowledgeable than he is. And younger, with no visible track record in marketing, and not nearly as visible in Twitter.
Matthew, on the other hand, is a successful marketing/strategy coach who’s really good at Twitter (in my opinion). He should publish a collection of his “note to self” tweets as a book. He’s also a veteran of actual management in big companies, and a former military officer, a good writer, and a good thinker. And I don’t think he should have turned down that job, because, well, if he isn’t an expert, then I don’t know who is.
But in his thoughtful podcast on the subject, Matthew says:
“I had to turn it down because I’m not an expert. … and how the heck is this person going to stand up and deliver a message in which they have credibility?”
He ends up dismissing his own question, as:
“Irrelevant. The conference invited them. The conference gave them credibility.”
And that’s the problem – who is an expert? Who gets to be the expert in these things? Is there an age requirement? Success requirement? Some minimum number of Twitter followers, Facebook friends, or blog subscribers? Last month I posted this post tracking a blogger who complained about social media experts without sales or new product launch experience, and then this one suggesting that expertise comes from more than specific middle management experience. I think these are real issues, without good answers.
What we’re calling social media is a new phenomenon. It’s very hard to measure expertise. I have to admit that I’m very impressed with blog subscriber numbers, less so with large numbers of Twitter followers, but at least that’s a metric. And they don’t publish revenue stats like they do the winnings of pro golfers or tennis players. And Twitter, particularly, is a virtual ocean of people who are putting expert beside their names and are getting by with it.
Too bad Matthew, you should have taken the money. The conference and its audience would have been better off.
(Photo credit: Levent Konuk/Shutterstock)
This post title should be recited to the tune of “lions, tigers, and bears, oh my;” that is if you’re old enough to remember The Wizard of Oz, or young (at heart) enough to have seen it as a rerun. It’s rhythmic and its cyclical and it never stops.
Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn are potential business advantages right now. Believe it or not, Twitter offers me real productivity gains. If you don’t see it yet, you will, later on. Facebook and LinkedIn do that for others (not me, but only because I can’t deal with too many different media). Businesses that manage these facilities well are ahead of the game, for now. If you don’t believe me, look at Zappo’s valuations when Amazon.com bought it.
Soon, though, they’ll be expected. It won’t be that businesses operating on the leading edge get credit. Instead, it will be that businesses operating behind that edge will suffer.
That’s the cycle: technology boosts productivity, and that boosts expectations, so we go back to the start again.
I’ve seen that same cycle for a long time now, over and over. When I started with spreadsheets, in 1980, they were so new that my use of spreadsheets gave me competitive advantage in business school. (That image to the right is a 1979 ad for VisiCalc, the first mainstream spreadsheet). Not any more; everybody assumes spreadsheets. Complicated spreadsheets don’t buy anybody competitive advantage. The same was true, believe it or not, with word processing (yes, there was a time when business people didn’t all understand word processing). Now we all assume that. There was a time when an early personal computer and WordStar software and a daisy wheel printer was a huge competitive advantage. No longer. And the same thing happened with desktop publishing. First it was competitive advantage, but then the bar was raised, and it became merely expected. And with email, and Internet websites. Technology to productivity to expectations to back to the start again.
True, we got better output. Spreadsheets give us better business analysis, word processing gives us better writing tools, and desktop publishing gives us better output. But we don’t spend less time. We just expect more.
(Photo credit: Woosa Rosa/Shutterstock)
There can be great truth in stories. People have communicated in stories from the very beginning. We use stories to tell about God, family, each other, and business. Stories can be true or false by the message they carry, not just what happens in the story. Fables, parables, short stories … think about how much you learn, and teach, with stories. 
Can a story tell truth without being technically factual? I think we all know it can. Is the lesson of sour grapes less true because there was no original fox? Or is the story of the gingerbread man not true?
Marketing is all about stories. (Aside — great book in this area, All Marketers are Liars, by Seth Godin). There’s the story of how it started, the invention of whatever it is you’re selling, or the invention of your business itself, the story of the brand, the packaging, the formula, or whatever. There’s the story of how the customer finds the solution. There’s the story of how the customer problem is solved.
A good business plan is a collection of stories. Your vision is a story about the future. Even financial projections are stories, told in numbers. If we sell this many units at that price, we have this much in sales; but we also have to spend this much in rent, and so on.
As a frequent reader of business plans, I look for the stories. The most important is the story of the customer, the solution to a problem, the path to find it, and the decision to buy. I also look for the story of the startup, and the story of the growth in the future. I want them to be convincing.
(Photo credit: Pixelbliss/Shutterstock)
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