Quit charging your worth
“Charging your worth” focuses on you, not on the outcomes and transformations you can drive. It doesn’t focus on what your clients are after. It assigns the subjectivity to your POV (what you think it’s worth), instead of figuring out what is valuable for your clients. It implies that your worth has a fixed price. So that for whatever task you do, the price will be the same. Design a strategy? X price. Mown the lawn? The same X price. Wash the dishes? Same X price Implement a whole biz…
Category creation
“Category creation” really is creating sub-categories or niche markets. Hank Barnes. Rethinking Categories Which is not wrong. It’s just *not* creating a new category. To stay in the game of business, you need 2 things: will AND resources. To create a new category, you rely heavily on resources: you need money and time, a.k.a. big pockets AND patient investors. Louis Grenier lists here 4 reasons why *not* to create a “new” category. And it’s bloody genius. BTW, niching down ain’t category…
You’re not getting this guitar back!
“II would never pay a couple million dollars for just about anything.”Guitar plugged and 30 seconds later…’ll give you what you want. But I’m keeping this thing.” Would you pay $2 million for a guitar that was previously re-sold for 150 bucks? Meet Greeny. And his owner: Kirk Hammett (from Metallica). He didn’t buy a 2-million dollar guitar, he bought the unique sound he could make (that this Les Paul —in a specific setting— sounded like a Fender, when they’re not supposed to sound like…
5 ways to see things… different.
Strategic creativity. Unlike the usual take on creativity (drawing, creating art, “inventiveness”), it aims at pondering questions about what could be, instead of what is. It’s not about “How can we be creative?” but about What if this could be different? Is there another way? Can we make another way? Here’s a (sort of) manifesto: BTW, this is not a How-To run/manage creatives. This kind of strategic creativity has nothing to do with that. It’s about how you can leverage your strategic…
Simple and repetitive
“The power of playing simple and repetitive.It doesn’t take long for people to get it.” Victor Wooten He’s got a definition of how music needs this naturality so that you stop listening and start feeling. Once you get it, you can be pulled where the other cool, more nuanced (or sophisticated) stuff is. Same is with your writing. Same with choosing your niche. Same with specializing. Start with that. Play simple. Make people stop listening. Have them feeling. Then you move into deeper…
Ditch the beginner’s mind
Beginner’s mind v accepting to not know. The first is about trying to find a pattern. Start with a clean slate. Trying to figure out the right questions to make. Accepting not knowing is embracing the unknown and go deeper to explore, to make better questions. One is about starts, the other about change and transformation.
The Earth is flat
You sell time. And time is money. Those statements are the equivalent of saying “the Earth is flat”. Just because some people believe it, it doesn’t make it a fact.
A shiny ribbon
You receive a present and are asked: “What did you get?” Your reply: “A nice, blue, shiny ribbon.” Wait. What? The ribbon is what makes the present nicer, what completes the picture of it, a part of it. But that’s not the present itself. Same is with marketing and storytelling. So, to whoever tells you that “marketing is storytelling”, think twice. It’s the other way around. Storytelling is (a tiny bit) of (one/few points of) marketing. Does it help? Yeah. Is it all about storytelling? No….
Don’t bridge the gap. Own it.
Bridging a gap to avoid going into the depths of it might not always be the best choice. It’d leave too many things on the table. Yes, you might need to bridge gaps some times —yet not every gap needs to be bridged. Imagine the Grand Canyon with lots of bridges all over it. It would only create noise. Owning a gap, on the other side, makes you accept it as it is. There’s nothing to fix, it is what it is. It has unknowns that you can explore. It has potential to do and be so much more than…
Canyons
Here are 2 holes in the ground that you can’t (don’t want to, actually) modify. You can’t, either, take things home off it and you can only see —and explore: The Colca Canyon in Peru Colca Canyon – Nad Hemnani and the Grand Canyon in the US. Grand Canyon – Sonaal Bangera 2 big gaps in the Earth. Do they have value? Yeah. They attract a very specific kind of traveler for each of the available options: from no-budget, to low budget, to medium, to money’s-not-a-problem ($7K+/person). They can…