Are you prepped to be wrong?
Here’s an excerpt of Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk on creativity The main point on it is about being prepared to get things wrong. Yet, something that keeps coming back to mind is how you can approach things in your business. It can go from trying to avoid mistakes and playing it safe —or be prepared to get it wrong, so you can have a go at new approaches you come up with. On which side of the spectrum would you rather be? You can see the full presentation here.
Saying it out loud
Your price. At it’s top. No discounts. No words after it. Have you tried doing that? Being in a sales conversation, get to the price part and just say it —as natural as saying “It rains outside”. Silence. And a smile. Or do you jump to fill it in, justify why it’s like this and what it involves? (Been there, done that.) A question for you: What’s the thing that you do (your most expensive one) and how much is it? I’m curious to know. 🙂
Price fear
Working on proposals, quotations and offers gets into some sort of comfort zone. A zone where you don’t need to push for hearing a No, or where even ghosting is preferable to being rejected. Or trying to avoid saying a high price, so that you don’t miss the opportunity. Or flinching at the very last minute —and lowball the offer. Or decide to start with a low price, because that way you can “upsell the next time”. Behind all that, there’s fear. And fear is a natural, instinctive survival…
Not being the expert
Not behaving like the expert can take many forms. One of them: trying to avoid pushback, arguments, or resistance in your relationship with clients. It can hurt you more than help. You can be in the order-taking business, if you prefer. And that’s fine. The impact that comes from it, though, will be smaller. You can be in the service business, where your impact will be higher. Or you can be in the transformation business, and help them achieve the potential your customers have. How you want…
Teach the game in verse
Friend-of-the-list and daily emailer Kevin Freidberg sent this message “Teach the game in reverse”. And I read “Teach the game in verse”, which also makes absolute sense, since his writing sounds like that to me (do go check him out). You can think of how you share your thinking in a sense of poetry —verse. Trying (to see) that will push you into some boundaries: space, time, ideas. This will get to be more on point on what you wanna say. And without the need to fill in the things with tons…
Your job is to be an orange
“While the client always wants to level the playing field and compare “apples to apples,” your job is to be an orange. Do everything you can to show why you’re different.” Tim Williams Be the orange when they’re trying to compare apples. Be a square showing your edge, in a world full of circles. When they’re waiting for you to convince them, show them the way they can do best —even if that means it’s not you who does the gig. When they’re waiting for more of the same, bring the surprise. And…
Surprise
To Sting, the essence of all music is surprise. Sting. Interview w/ Rick Beato. And in business, it goes the same way: the essence of all (meaningful) business is surprise. Marty Neumeier in his book Metaskills sustains: “While it’s possible to define beauty, it can’t be reduced to a pat formula for the simple reason that one of the components of beauty is surprise. In everything we experience as beautiful, there is a moment of surprise when we first encounter it. If there’s no surprise,…
Getting Paid for Years
Internet connection problems. So here’s a great article by Tim Williams on the same subject of expertise. 🙂 Getting Paid for Years – Ignition Group.
If I do a job in 30 minutes…
“If I do a job in 30 minutes it’s because I spent 10 years learning how to do that in 30 minutes. You owe me for the years, not the minutes.” Nonsense. This whole argument assumes that to know something, it’s about the effort you put on. About the time you “spent” in learning the thing. How much it meant, in terms of effort, for you to do something. It takes that if something feels as simple as breathing to you, but not for others, it shouldn’t be valuable. Or that for it to be valuable, you…
Sampling
In music, sampling is the act of taking one bit of a song/audio media and putting it to a different use from its first intended context. It can go from different songs, like… Fatboy Slim’s Praise you. Grabbing tracks from different, already known songs. To Nirvana’s Smells like teen spirit. Grabbing drum beats from disco’s Gap Band. To Billie Eilish’s Australian crosswalk signal in Bad Guy All of them are original in their very own ways It’s more than just a copy. Even doing a cover, it’s…