Squandered

Listen. I’ve squandered a bunch of chances, second chances, third.

For most of my life I was of the opinion that real change was a good week away. Like I’d have plenty in a short period of time.  I would turn that corner.

I thought a loan, a sale, or even an infusion of VC cash would make me be my real self, the one that had money to do something. I figured all I needed was $20k and all would be well.

Most people live their entire lives this way.  I promise you.

If – at any time in my life – I had gotten this dough it would simply have been squandered.

Right now, it’s not the case. I’ve earned it, and I’m not giddy about it. I’m happy, I’m pleased. I’m not self-satisfied nor am I a ball of energy that can’t wait to spend it.

This means I might keep it.

Being The Best In the World Is Highly Underrated (The Dip by Seth Godin: Book Review of Sorts)

“Being the best in the world is highly underrated.”
-Seth Godin, The Dip

When I read The Dip the first time.  I was restless. Something was off kilter.  I misread the message.  The message I got was Try Harder Than Anyone In The World Right Now. In Godin’s words: Power through the dip.

By itself, that’s a recipe for burnout. The real message is: Raise your standards till you make or do something better than anyone else does it. 

I had this little business, see.. I sold websites to Realtors, Accountants. etc.  The damned Rotary Club. On a good day, I was mediocre at it. (Some of the story is here, more is here). It’s still open, limping along.  I’m not suggesting anyone buy anything, I’m taking care of the wind-down.

I sold a lot of WordPress websites. Hundreds. I used Thesis and Headway for this. I was fast at it. I was shoving mediocrity down the throats of the world, faster, faster.

How Burnout Happens: First, Tolerate Mediocrity….

I tried to help. But it was a job. The chase of volume meant it was a job. I wanted to be a half notch better than the  dumb templates that they all bought that were $99/month for next-to-nothing. Econ class thinking.  I needed to make an income, it was a lifestyle business. Of sorts. I was bereft of imagination at the time. So it didn’t provide an amazing lifestyle.

I was running from it. I hired Trish.  I hired designers so I didn’t have to design (I can’t summon the muse). I hated the business from the first. It was there because it made sense. Every email filled my heart with despair. “Oh, shit what does she want.” I burnt out because – in my heart -. I knew that the work didn’t matter.

Get some Relator to the first page of google for his “Suburb +Short Sale”. God. Who wants that job?

I didn’t prepare. I blew off calls.  I blew off conference calls. I never got much better than what I was when I started.

I hoped that nobody would show up on Webinars I was doing so I could have a beer. Any – flimsy – excuse was a welcome reprieve.

I invented a McJob for myself. I never meant to.  Each step seemed reasonable.

More People Aren’t Going To Save You

I brought in people – Rachael Acklin, Chris Jordan.  Tennyson Rog. Kasey Kelly.  Others. I asked them to be part of the “fun.” when I pitched it to them, it seemed reasonable. “Just do a header, footer and the rest, and get it done fast so you can make a few hundred bucks a week, while you’re between projects.”

Problem is, it’s not just a couple hours in design work.  It’s also letting your soul get infected with a notion that mediocrity is sometimes OK. That we’re just doing our jobs. That’s cancer of the worst kind.

Because I was just trying to make dollar-store websites. Nobody could care about a site that a designer put a couple hours in.  Not me, not the designer, not the client.  And yet, the tension that the creative act requires, the energy, you still had to summon it. The act of making something itself is tense. It requires both effort and thought.

Cognitive Dissonance: Nobody Wants To Be Mediocre

I made errors at PageTent/FlatRate/Whatever I called it. I underestimated the creative energy required to do work. Mediocrity demoralizes you before you start. It’s hard to invoke the muse on some never-gonna-matter website. “Oh, great muse, please give me the strength to tell yet another story of yet another realtor that wants to help you buy or sell a home.” That prayer doesn’t happen.

Who wants to go through all that? I’ll leave that to Meyers. They can –  and do – sell pabulum.

Thee act of doing work that you know – at the outset – is going to wind up being mediocre is taxing. That created cognitive dinremarkable and mediocre creates stress and tension. Why should I be doing this? Is this who I am? Some monkey making websites for idiotic Realtors? (an aside: I was an idiotic realtor).  It’s painful at the outset, it’s painful in the middle, and it’s painful at the end.

But hey, I netted a few hundred bucks each time. It was fun. Really.

.:.

People Run Through Walls To Be The Best in The World

Jason Moore, my friend and partner at Simplifilm says that quality sells. I’ve always believed that selling sells. The first big project we did together, lives on at AgentTechSecrets.Com.

…it’s beyond obvious that that video is something to see. It’s a bad story, masterfully told.

Quality Sells. That’s what Jason said to me.  

OKAYfine.  The problem  with that idea is that when you’re broke, you can’t paint in color.

You have to take what seems to be now money because you’re always a step ahead of the spider. You have to do “now” things. I was broke, and my big client was forever paying me late. I had to do “now things.” I was stuck in the badlands.  People that tolerate low quality work are often low quality.  This meant drama and hostility from clients.

This created a circular effect. A drama cycle that mired me on the respirator for 2 years.

By not doing quality work, I didn’t get quality people. By not getting quality people, I couldn’t do work at the creative pace I wanted to.  By not doing great work, I couldn’t say no to money, even when it was attatched to a crazyperson.

(By and large, my clients were fine, I had to put up with, probably, 30% morons. That’s down to 0% with Simplifilm).

Enter Simplifilm: Quality Sells

It started by accident. I did a little work for some folks in the WordPress space. It was about that time I was learning to use Headway Themes.  They were coming out with a new release, and I also knew that they needed a video to show that they weren’t the same as the other things out there.

I pinged Jason -can we do this? Can we make Headway 2.0 an amazing product. Can we do it cheaply? 

Yup, he said.  We got it together, haggled with the owners of Headway (great, great folks), and made it happen. He and I worked out arrangements so we’d do it for a price of almost nothing.

We made this video:

THAT was a software video. THAT was quality. EVERYONE was blown away, and the relaunch of the video on the site contributed to a 200% increase in sales.

The day the video dropped, everyone wanted one.

Jason did 90% of the ‘awesome’ over on Headway. I just stayed out of his way and showed him what Headway did.  Helped when he needed it, and kept Grant (always impatient) muzzled (Grant is Awesome).

The day after we got Simplifilm done we got 3 more: MarketMeSuite, Borders (RIP) Bookbrwer and WishList Member.  Ramit says it’s a business when you do it 3 times.  We had three customers and then it was clear that we’d be fine. We are, we are.

My Flat-Rate Mistake: Trying To Build an Industrial Age Factory In The New Economy

The new economy isn’t about production or distribution.  The businesses that think it is are dying first. Look at Borders. Look at the record industry. Going, going, gone.
I was trying to do that – create a factory where I’d be part of a cascaded of indifferent propagation. I’d put out mediocre websites populated by mediocre content. There wasn’t one person in the chain that had any skin in the game. There wasn’t a soul that was a stakeholder there.

Not me.

Not the customer.

Not their readers.

I created a business that was the modern day equivalent of whatever you see in the end-caps at Walgreens. We did an honest enough job, but it was really tough to give a rip about it. Just like the T-shirts, or consumer electronics that sits there. People bought. Nobody cared.

The lesson of the Dip isn’t “to become the hardest working grinder in the world,” it’s “to become the best.”  We are getting close to becoming the best on Earth at telling software stories. We’re not there just yet, but the distance we have between us and the rest of it all is exhilarating. The air up here tastes better than any air I’ve ever had. I can’t wait to get higher.

Made To Stick – Executive Summary Notes

I’m currently reading Made to Stick.  I’ve not gotten to it even though Scott told me to.  Sorry.

I’m also gonna grab the papers referenced by the Studies and read ‘em and report here, so it might take me some time, but this book comes highly recommended and seems to be grounded in academics.

Right now, for every “hard” book I read, I get to read something easy.  Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath is easy to read, and is in the “easy” category.

I’ll be updating this post from time to time – but I’m keeping more real-time notes on the chapters in a google doc found here.

I’ll do this, from time to time with the easier stuff I read when I’m at my desk reading.  Some stuff won’t make sense to do this with.  This will go out in the feed, but not on the main page.

Intro:

  1. Sticky Ideas are simple
  2. Sticky Ideas are Unexpected
  3. Sticky Ideas are Concrete –  Human actions, sensory info, etc REAL things – bird in bush, razor blades in apples.
  4. Credible: It is qualified
  5. Emotions: people must feel something for an idea to stick. as much fat as a ….
  6. Stories Spread Sticky Ideas

I’ll perhaps distill the main chapters and some of the Internet available source materials when possible.

This study  (pdf, tiny font, worth reading) was referenced and was in Marketing Science in 1999. The premise is that most creative ads follow 6 recognizable templates below (marked for the skimmers amongst us all)

SELECT STUDIES FROM MADE TO STICK

Jacob Goldenberg • David Mazursky • Sorin Solomo

The Fundamental Templates of Quality Ads:

  1. Pictorial analogy template: taking a picture of the product and transplanting it to another place or introducing it into extreme places
  2. The Extreme Situation TemplateUnrealistic situations that demonstrate key attributes: Superglue holding a hat to a metal beam.  Variants: absurd alternative, extreme worth, extreme attribute.
  3. Consequences Template: Indicates implications of executing or failint to execute the recommendation advocated in the ad.
  4. Competition Template: Portrays Situations In Which The Product is subjected to competition  with another product out of its class.   (Car vs. bullet)
  5. Interactive Experiment Template: Ether engage (test drive) or imagine (yourself in a Mercury) the situation.
  6. The dimensionality Alteration TemplateManipulates the dimension of the product in relation to is environment: new parameter, multiplication, division, time leap. Example: speed of aircraft used to measure the size of the ocean.

Sugarman -AdWeek Copywriting Handbook

Most “business” books suck. They suck because be author isn’t grounded. He’s more focused on being an Awesome Author than he is on actually learning what he is purporting to teach. There’s a giant gulf between guys who are the genuine article (Gitomer) and the goons that want you to “master your purpose,” — whatever the hell that means.

Each book has something of value, but you have to sift. Sifting is fine – you only paid a few bucks for the book.

Joe Sugarman is different. He’s highly specific and highly specialized. My friend Derek Halpern at Social Triggers told me to go read Sugarman. If you don’t know Derek yet, he started a new blog late last year, and it’s taken over the world. He is the best marketer working today. You would be stupid to ignore his advice. So would I.

I’ve read a ton of books on copywriting.  I plan to read a ton more.  Most copywriting books are crap sandwiches, written by wannabes, never-dids, and people that strut like roosters after writing an open house flyer.

Most copywriting books have something of value, but you have to sift through pabulum to get the gems.

When you read Sugarman, there’s no sifting. Every single page is a gem. There’s nothing to disagree with, just a proven step-by-step system for getting results.  He talks about print a lot, but really, that doesn’t matter –the competence translates.

Sugarman’s Axioms, Elements and Triggers

Sugarman writes book and it’s organized 3 sections, with Axioms, Elements and Triggers. He explains at length what these each do, and the purpose in the ads and context. It feels like you’re at a seminar – his folksy, down home way with words is highly convincing.

Unlike a lot of books, you can retain the value from this one long after it’s gone. Simply memorizing the Axioms, Elements and Triggers in Apendix C will go a long way into making us well informed copywriters.

He has many of each – and I’ll be delving into all of that here in a bit. Mostly, for my own benefit, but you may see some benefit from it as well.

Willy Loman, Rabbit Angstrom

Lately, I’ve been reading and rereading The Death of a Salesman.  

I couldn’t stick with Meditations as much as I’d like, and I need something with a different style of language.

It’s an uncomfortable read. I’m a salesman. That’s who I am, it’s my nature. I’m not yet great at selling – and I’m just now learning about that.

Willie was given over to delusion. There’s a fine line between optimism and delusion. I’m not even sure delusion is bad- from Pollyanna’s perspective, life is pretty sweet.

Life has consequences. Willie cracked up under the pressure of all of it. His delusion caused him to not be able to be a good dad. He misapprehended the nature of what makes for success. He screwed up his kids. He didn’t rise through the ranks, he stayed chasing the next deal, payday, chick or whatever.

He sold himself a fiction, had no understanding of the business world he traded in. Sometimes, I’m Willy.

My father likes John Updike. I remember seeing Rabbit is Rich throughout our house as a child. I didn’t understand that Rabbit was a nickname. I thought that my dad was witholding some long epic novel about a Rabbit that got rich.

Rabbit is a bad guy. A truly bad human being. Worse than Willy. He’s a metaphor for America as well. I reread the first three books lately, through the eyes of a 35 year old.

America in the 50s, 60s and 70s had unearned wealth. We sat at the top of the world, and ordinary americans had national pride. We did nothing to earn our place in the world. We didn’t deserve it. Rabbit wound up having a wife he didn’t deserve, a job he didn’t deserve. He ambled through life without thinking anything all the way through. He never got that he was lucky.

His entitlement lead him to burn a house down, have dozens of affairs with people that weren’t his wife, wreck businesses and friendships. In the end, he got by, and had more than he ever deserve.

He wants to get away from the from grown up responsibilities. Rabbit escapes to a woman (and leaves his family behind). He runs from a good life, because he’s no longer the man or the High School Athlete of renown.

When we’re faced with grown up limitations, we can either do the work to become better, or flail. Most people flail. America flails now, as our wealth and demise are being ground to bits by the notion that we’re poor (we’re not). We prospered despite ourselves, and we fail despite ourselves.

All we can do is the very best we can to understand our place in the world and give to it. Rabbit never did. Even Hitler’s dog liked him.  Rabbit occasionally does tender things and shows kindness towards others. Doesn’t make him a better guy – people are inconsistent.

Yet, despite his failures, fortune favored him. I know the feeling. To the last, he was entitled. He was just allowed to exist because of the wealth in America and he never saw it that way. I know that Updike did.

Self awareness is a bitch. It’s hard to really know yourself without feeling too proud or too blue. The best I can figure is that I go through my life feeling extremely lucky to have it, to be here. We all want to inject significance or meaning into our world. It’s nice to believe that we saved the day, did our job right or were somehow the lynchpin.

We’re cogs.We get to be alive – and we get to work together and hang out with one another. Isn’t that enough?

Practice

I was asked a few times – why are you making this blog?  OKAYfine.  I’ll answer.

I’m not going to be Seth Godin or Malcolm  Gladwell.  That ship has sailed.  I don’t have stars in my eyes.

I’m not even going to be Chris Brogan or  Scott Stratten or any of those guys.  I don’t have the temperament to pursue those goals seriously.  So why blog publicly? Why do something if you’re never going to be the best in the world?

A few reasons:

First, I want practice.  I want to learn how to build and keep an audience.  I want to learn what works, what doesn’t work.  I want to do it in a relatively safe, and self contained space.  Worst case scenario – here – I screw it up, I just end it. Nobody depends on Instigate.Me for livelihood.

I want to be in the habit of writing for the benefit of others.  Some narcissistic personal branding blog won’t do that. I don’t know how John Chow does it (and well).  I can’t pull that off, so why try?  What I can do is talk honestly about the stuff I’ve learned.

A personal mission statement is bullshit.  I’ve done ‘em and they made little almost no difference.  This is sort of a testament of where my thoughts are at a particular point in time.  I have little doubt that if this goes long enough, I’ll disagree with a lot of what’s written.  I have little doubt that

When I’m running regularly and writing, the rest of my life falls into place.  Things just go better. I’m centered. Not given to chatter, delusion or nonsense.  I need to write and to run to live. I think humans were made to move.

I need to get better.  As we create stuff our capacity to create generally improves.  This is that project so I make sure I don’t go idle.

I’m no expert. I’m a reader of lots of things, particularly philosophy. That may change.  My favorite passages, thus far, are from Ayn Rand, Marcus Aurelius and Miyamoto Musashi.  There will be others. (Ayn Rand, it’s important to note, has some of my least favorite passages, as she was given over to shrill nonsense for much of her life).

I want to know what I think, when I thought it and how future thoughts got informed.

I want a snapshot.  I suspect that I will change my mind about a lot of the things I write about.  I suspect that I will someday cringe at what I initially wrote.

Anyway, this is “why.”  Many reasons.  None of them matter that much.