Compassionate Selfishness

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Ever heard this story?

A man is walking along a beach where thousands of starfish have been washed onto the sand. He sees another man, scooping and bending, then hurling something out to sea again and again. When he catches up, he sees that the man is throwing marooned starfish into the water.

“There are too many to save,” said the first man. “What you’re doing is meaningless.”

The second man flings another starfish into the water, looks at the first man, and smiles. “It certainly meant a great deal to that one.”

If that seems entirely too New Age and hippie-dippie to you, maybe you’ll like this story better:

Two guys are hiking and they see a grizzly bear, who starts to chase them. The first guy starts running.

“What are you doing?” shouts the second guy. “You can’t outrun a grizzly.”

“I don’t have to outrun the grizzly,” the first guy yells over his shoulder. “I just have to outrun you.”

It amuses me that these are essentially the same story.

Despite our earnest do-gooder yearnings, sometimes not everyone makes it. That’s not a reason to give up.

If you want to save the world, paralysis and inaction are completely unhelpful. You’ve got to just start somewhere. And you might as well start with yourself.

Survivor guilt

So many are having a brutally tough time finding a job, or they’re consumed by anxiety about keeping the job they have. I have many friends in those ranks.

A few have more work than they can handle. They’d be pretty relaxed except they have an awful lot to do. But they’re smiling. I have friends in those ranks, too.

One of the most pernicious barriers to success is avoiding moving from the first group to the second, because you feel bad for for surviving, or even thriving.

You feel bad for the guy closer to the bear.

The answer, however, is not to lie down and let the bear maul you too.

No one benefits if you fail

The bear doesn’t even actually want to eat you. It just feels that way, with his hot breath at the back of your neck and the graze of his claws against your shoulder blade.

You may run a business, or be employed in one. You may be trying to put your dreams into action and start a business. You may be among the ranks of the newly unemployed, trying to figure out how you’re going to stay afloat.

You may feel a lot like a stranded starfish, with no compassionate philosopher to fling you back into the comfortable sea.

Please know that no one benefits if you fail. You collect no karma points by standing idly by while the economic meltdown engulfs you. You have to get strong before you can help anyone else.

We all feel like sitting down and giving up sometimes. Then we stand up again and keep working. It’s what human beings do. It’s how we’ve come this far.

You have every right to survive. You have every right to rescue yourself.

Teach yourself. If you can’t afford the expensive guru classes, create your own class using the amazing amount of free information we have now. Write your own success map.

(You can start with one of these, if you like. They’re free, and honest-to-goodness, I won’t spam you or sell your email address to a Romanian meth lab.)

Keep going

Your success is going to be a lumpy, funny-looking little thing at first. Keep at it. Your first eBook, your first consulting client, your first blog posts, your first podcast might not be thrilling successes.

What other people call failures, you’ll learn to call fascinating experiments.

Learn from everything you do. Keep doing projects that are a little bigger. Keep figuring things out.

Quit talking to people who tell you it’s a pipe dream, or too risky. Or that it’s pointless, the starfish are too many and there’s only one of you. Right now, you can’t afford the luxury of pessimism and whining.

Learn to fling yourself back into the sea.

People who can help

There are thousands more fantastic resources for each one of these that sprang to mind this morning. Can you do me a favor and let us all know about your favorite survival tactic in the comments?

(More about the real starfish story here.)

Flickr Creative Commons image by Misserion

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Filed Under: compassion Tagged With: , , ,

Obey Me or Fail

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yodagami
Are you trying to do something hard and complicated? Maybe it’s lose weight or build a business online or improve your Star Wars origami skills.

Along the way, you might have sought out some advice. It could be advice from someone you know, free advice from blogs or the library, or a paid “how to” product.

If your Hard Thing has enough pieces that need to get put together, and you don’t quite know how all of those pieces work, the thing is probably giving you a giant headache.

Advice is swirling around you like a sandstorm. Each guru is competing for your attention and action. Everyone has a surefire system for you.

Your head gets more and more jammed up with conflicting information, even as the gurus are trying to get you unjammed by giving you a single path to take. They use their authority and a mountain of case studies to grab your attention and try to get you focused.

“Obey me or fail. It’s your choice.”

If you don’t learn how to navigate all this well-meaning advice, you risk getting too exhausted to go on before you’ve reached your goal.

Here are some tips I’ve found useful for finding a path through the wilderness:

Find one or two voices you trust

There are many paths up the mountain, but if you try to put a foot on every one, you’re not going to get very far.

(If anyone knows the source of that paraphrased quote, will you let me know in the comments?)

For almost every complex endeavor, there’s a limited number of things you need to do, but lots of different ways you might do them.

Whatever path you’re on, you’re going to get to a rocky, annoyingly difficult spot and think to yourself, “This can’t really be the path. This isn’t a path at all. Is that giant boulder really supposed to be right there in the middle of it?”

Sorry. There’s a giant boulder in the middle of all the paths. You can get a good map and a really spiffy compass, but you’re the one who has to scramble over the boulder. With very few exceptions, a new and better map will just take you a few miles out of your way to circle back to the same damned rock.

Find a map-maker you trust and follow her map to the end goal. It’s generally a good idea to make sure that someone else has used this map to get to where you’d like to go.

Starting over with a new map is hardly ever quicker, even though it’s always tempting.

Create cycles of action and learning

Learning and taking action are two very different modes. If you’re going to do your Hard Thing, you want to honor them both.

Action without learning is usually fruitless. It’s too likely to leave you wandering around without direction or purpose.

Learning without action is definitely fruitless, assuming you actually want to do your Hard Thing. Sometimes the dream and the mental challenge can make you feel good, which might be enough. If that’s why you’re doing it, go ahead and be honest with yourself about it.

Assuming you want to take the action route, you need to consciously plan out that moment of transition. If you’ve picked up some advice, whether it’s a paid information product or a blog or a free email course, take a separate step to translate the advice into activities. Go through each lesson and figure out what next action you should be taking, then figure out when you plan to take that action. Create a worksheet for yourself and fill it out.

I can’t tell you how much I learned from Teaching Sells in the process of creating worksheets and next actions for other students to take. When you sit down and take the time to map out how you’re going to translate learning to action, you’ll find yourself much less overwhelmed.

If there are lots of individual components you need to master, you may need to string together different pieces of advice. You don’t necessarily need to get a Big Overarching Map from anyone else, but if the system you’re using doesn’t have one, be sure to create one for yourself.

Understand what the pieces are (even if you’re completely clueless about how to do them) and scribble out some rough ideas about how you might put them together.

Plan out your cycles of learning and doing. They’ll both seem to be taking too long to produce any results. That’s ok. If you’re consistently alternating between learning and doing, and if you’re following a decent map, you’ll get there.

When you’re in the middle of it, it always feels like you’ll never get to the end of the path. That’s how you know it’s a path worth being on.

Be your own guru

I was talking with Havi the other night about her frustration with gurus. She’s spent a lot of time getting clients unstuck who aren’t moving forward with their businesses because they can’t complete some seemingly necessary step like creating a USP or developing their personal brand.

Her advice is often to just keep moving past the stuck spot.

Sometimes there are spots on the map that you won’t be able to use. They’re not suited to your project, or your personality, or the resources you bring. Sometimes you need to blaze a few pieces of your own trail.

Sometimes you’ve actually completed the step already, but it doesn’t look like you thought it would, so you wait around trying to figure out what comes next.

If you spend more than two weeks feeling stuck about a particular step on your map, try moving forward without it. If you skip it and things start working again, that step might not be one you need. Or it may be a piece you can fill in later, when you know more.

Learning matters, but when it keeps you from doing, that’s a red flag. While you don’t want to bounce from map to map, it’s also not helpful to use a map that’s inscribed in stone. (Too damned heavy, for one thing.)

At the end of the day, any map is really a model for you to write your own map on top of it.

So what Hard Thing are you working on? How’s it going? Are you stuck or are you rocking and rolling? Let us know about it in the comments.

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Flickr Creative Commons image by PhillipWest

Filed Under: eclectic, Uncategorized

Handling Angry Customers:
#1, Phone Trees from Hell

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As promised, here’s a quote from a long letter I’m working on to business that encountered me as a cranky, unhappy customer.

Your phone tree, like that in many businesses, is a service nightmare. If I want technical support, it tells me to hang up and call another number. Then when I call that number, I get transferred back to the original number that can’t help me. If your system can transfer me from the second number to the first, why did I have to hang up and redial to get from the first to the second?

I will tell you that if I had tried to order the product by phone rather than the Web, I would have hung up and taken my business elsewhere. Your phone tree isn’t saving you money, it’s costing you sales.

When I finally reached an employee, he didn’t know the answer so he transferred me back into the phone tree. An employee should never transfer a customer into another phone tree. Customers need to be transferred to people who can answer questions.

The next employee I finally managed to talk with gave me a rushed, brusque answer. It was incorrect. More of my time wasted.

I’m convinced that American businesses flush more money down the toilet with bad phone practices than in any other way.

You say you want to build a relationship with customers. If that’s true, and not lip service, you need to be calling your own phone number every week. Better yet, get a relative to do it, or someone else who’s not too familiar with the systems you have set up.

Watch over her shoulder while she tries to figure out what button to push to answer her question. Listen to the frustration build in her voice as she just tries to reach a human being. And monitor the conversations she has to find out how your employees are treating people who call.

Stay tuned for next week’s installment, Your Customer Does Not Live in New York. I think you’ll like it even if you do, in fact, live in New York.

Filed Under: small business Tagged With: , ,

Turning Crap into Gold: How to (Gracefully) Handle Angry Customers

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turning crap into gold

One of the most unpleasant parts of running any businesses is dealing with customers who are mad at you.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a dog walker or a graphic designer or a neurosurgeon. One of these days, someone’s going to express some significant dissatisfaction with what you do or how you do it.

When you’re still a small business, it feels like they’re attacking you. (Or, worse, attacking your baby. Those heartless rats!)

But bigger businesses foul this up too. We all take it too personally—it’s human nature.

The fact is, customers who care enough to get mad at you can provide a wonderful blessing. A cranky, ranting customer represents one of several possibilities.

The customer is nuts

This is the one that doesn’t help you at all. If the customer is truly delusional (some people are, you know), you’ll just have to set a boundary and walk away.

If you can afford it, give them all of their money back. And make it very clear that you won’t be doing more business with them.

Be very polite, set a very clear and firm boundary, and disengage.

The customer is right

Here’s the one that hurts. Your service/product/attitude/delivery were unacceptable.

When you were getting started with your business, you were going to do everything exactly right. You were going to have the best service in the world, wonderfully fair prices, amazing quality, the most remarkable product.

Then reality started to sink in. (This business thing really does have a lot in common with parenting.)

Perfection only exists in dreams. When you get off your tail and actually do stuff, you mess some of it up. And you know, there are a lot of good reasons so much service is terrible, and so many products aren’t what you hoped they would be.

The first thing to do is to, in Ben Zander’s wonderful suggestion, throw your hands in the air, smile, and say, “How fascinating!”

(Do not do this in front of the customer. She will kick you in the pants.)

Screw-ups mean you were trying something that wasn’t dead easy for you. Congratulations! You get 1,000 gold stars for getting out of your comfort zone. Almost no one is willing to do that, and you did. Please allow me to give you a hug.

Picking up the pieces

Now, back to addressing that pesky problem. A good screw-up generally means there’s something in your systems that needs a tweak.

If you can manage it, try not to freak out and overcorrect. The first thing to ask yourself is, Realistically is this going to happen again? If the answer is really no, do what you need to do to cool the customer off, and try not to dwell on it.

But usually there’s an opportunity for improvement. A better process you can put into place. A better system for managing client questions, or for packaging orders, or for setting expectations so people aren’t disappointed when they get their stuff.

Since I recently had a customer service experience that left me unreasonable, angry, frustrated, and generally feeling rotten, I thought I’d unpack that for you here. There are some really good lessons about the kinds of things that make people angry, and solutions for fixing them.

I won’t name the vendor. There’s no point, and they’re not really the Satanic minions I felt they were when I was having my problem.

And this isn’t about them. It’s about you. And me. And getting better.

Since this easily could be one of my ten-screen marathons, I’m going to break it up for you. The first installment of my letter to the vendor is tomorrow. (Ooh, cliffhanger!)

Filed Under: small business Tagged With: , ,

What’s Going On?

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I miss you guys so much! The problem with producing one post a week is that if you miss a couple, you go dark for an awfully long time.

This is just a quickie to let you know where the heck I’ve been. I’ve got some nifty post ideas, so you’ll start hearing from me again very soon.

Teaching Sells

I became a partner in Brian Clark’s wonderful Teaching Sells, which I originally joined as a member in 2007, about 45 seconds after it first opened.

If you don’t know about Teaching Sells, it’s an online course that shows you how to create the next generation of information products. Beyond ebooks and teleseminars, the Teaching Sells model shows you how to create interactive learning environments, so you can teach anything from weight loss to cold-weather koi pond gardening, in a way that lets you serve your customer/learners with much richer, more useful education.

I’ve been helping to expand the original course content and make it even more user-friendly, including creating audio recordings of the original articles, and worksheets to get folks moving through the content and taking action.

It’s fun, fun work, and it’s very time consuming. One of the cool side-effects, though, is that I’m learning the Teaching Sells methods in much more depth. (If you’ve bought an information product yourself and you’re not quite using it, try teaching it to someone else! It’s a fantastic exercise.)

Personal stuff

One upside is that this partnership has allowed me to completely transition out of the corporate world. (Translation: I quit my day job.) I can’t even tell you the flood of energy and creativity this has given me. And it’s given me the bandwidth to say yes to a bunch of great client projects, which always gives new perspective.

The downside is what I am not-so-fondly calling “launch strep,” brought on by too many late nights. Everyone in my house got it, so we’ve been a very pleasant bunch to be around. We’ve all taken our meds and seem to be well again, fortunately. Three cheers for modern medicine.

Yanik Silver’s Underground Conference

I’m giving a talk on blogging this weekend (actually it was yesterday, and it was so much fun) to Yanik Silver’s Underground conference.

It’s been a long time since I went to a conference and didn’t see any familiar faces. (The only two I recognized on sight were Perry Belcher, who’s got an amazing story about how he became The Twitter Guy, and Facebook goddess Mari Smith.) This crowd is great, though, and so receptive to learning about how social media and Internet marketing can go hand in hand.

Maybe I’m just a starry-eyed optimist (ok, I definitely am), but I think the Internet Marketing crowd is coming around to the “quality content” point of view. There will always be some who slap together mediocre content to try to seduce the search engines, but the case for genuinely remarkable writing is becoming stronger and clearer. Which just makes me so happy I could giggle.

OK, I can’t let myself ramble on, as I want to get to Yanik’s young entrepreneur’s lunch (as a Tired Old Lady entrepreneur, I suppose my role will be to give advice and encouragement). I just didn’t want to go another day without letting you know how much I miss you guys, and writing for Remarkable Communication. I’ll be back soon, so keep the faith.

xoxoxox

Filed Under: eclectic

SlowBlogging

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A few days ago, Mara Rogers wrote a post for Copyblogger about SpeedBlogging. Her post had a lot of smart tips for writing blog posts more quickly and efficiently, and I don’t disagree with any of the advice she gave.

But I’d like to propose another way to approach your posts: SlowBlogging.

Heard about the Slow Food movement? They’re an organization devoted to food that’s less convenient. No tomatoes in January (or June, if you live in Melbourne), no Lean Cuisine, no balancing a Big Mac on the steering wheel while you’re trying to merge onto the freeway. The Slow Food movement is all about food that’s quirky, local, and tasty.

Blogging is inherently a quick medium, but sometimes you want some handmade content that takes a little more time.

Chris Garrett calls these posts flagship content. Most blog posts are best consumed when they’re fresh, but these keep their value. They act, in Chris’s phrase, as “ambassadors for your blog.” They build your reputation and you can send readers to them again and again.

Solid “pillar” or “flagship” content takes a little longer to put together than routine daily posts do. Here are some SlowBlogging ideas you can try when you’re creating that cornerstone content.

Some ideas need more time

Mara’s an advocate of keeping a bank of ideas for future posts, and so am I. There’s nothing worse than wanting to cook up a tasty blog post and having nothing in the pantry.

Some ideas are topical, and you’ll need to write them up right away. If you’re going to comment on the latest celebrity train wreck, you’ll need to strike fast. But other ideas need more time to mature. You might think of them as bottles of homemade elderberry wine. They don’t taste too good when you first bottle them, but after they’ve been sitting for awhile, they start to get really tasty.

You’ll have some ideas that you’re just not sure what to do with. Park them in your idea cellar until they’re ready. Although some ideas do turn out to be duds, I’ve found that I often get the best posts out of ideas that have been sitting dormant for the longest time. You never know when that idea will ripen up and give you the perfect angle for a classic post.

Should it be a series?

Some ideas refuse to gracefully boil down into a single blog post. If you have a topic that’s getting away from you, consider making it a series.

Writing a blog series lets you give some loving in-depth attention to a topic without overwhelming your readers. And it gives you a wonderful feeling of luxury to know exactly what you’re going to write about for the next 7 or 8 posts.

A well-written series can form a terrific cornerstone for a blog. You might want to check out Brian’s Copywriting 101 series to see how he did it over on Copyblogger. I recently had a great time with a series on Dumb Things Small Businesses Do.

Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite

I love Mara’s fearless advice to “write and commit, then click Publish.”

I can tell you from personal experience that my method isn’t necessarily the key to optimal blogging productivity. But for me, writing is rewriting. It’s in the editing stages that I find the most important ideas in a post and polish them up to make them shine. (As well as clearing away any murky stuff that makes the post less delicious.)

I try to write a post two days before I want to post it. Over those next two days, I’ll read the post with fresh eyes each day and make changes. I do a last pass when I’m prepping it to post.

I do sometimes write “same-day” posts, but when I do, I still try to run through them at least three times. And if I can give myself a break between rewrites, I do.

This is a time when you want to know yourself. If you’re putting your posts through dozens of rewrites because you’re insecure or perfectionistic, try to force yourself to let go a little earlier in the process.

But if you tend to post your first drafts, try a few rewrites, especially on your authority content. You just may see a new depth and weight appear in your writing.

Write for pleasure

The Slow Food movement is all about taking a long Sunday morning to simmer the perfect pasta sauce just because you want to. You take your time picking out the perfect ripe tomatoes, you make a special trip to the farmer’s market for those really good Italian sausages, not because you have to, but because it’s enjoyable.

Sometimes you need to be efficient and get a point across. But I hope you’re also taking some time to write posts that give you pleasure. Play with language a little. Have some fun tossing an idea around. Let your personality come through.

Life is too short to bore yourself with your own content. No, it’s not all about you, but you’re also not a content-producing automaton. At least sometimes, take the time to savor the process of writing.

Mara’s SpeedBlogging techniques are definitely useful. And sometimes you want a nice, quick stir-fry list post for your blog. But when you need a long-simmered blog post Bolognese, give SlowBlogging a try. Variety is the spice of life . . . and blogging.

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Flickr Creative Commons image by lepiaf.geo

Filed Under: Weblogs Tagged With: , ,

Where Are Your Blind Spots?

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Everyone should follow the golden rule, right?

No, no, not the one that says “he who has the gold makes the rules.” I’m talking about the golden rule we all grew up with.

Treat others the way you would like to be treated.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Works for kindergarten and it works now, right?

The key to wealth, health, happiness and world peace?

Not necessarily.

The platinum rule

There’s another rule, sometimes called the platinum rule.

“Do unto others as they would want done to them.”

The platinum rule doesn’t take your likes and dislikes as the standard. It gets your ego out of it (as much as possible) and puts your customer at the center, where she should be.

(One hotel management pundit even came up with a double platinum rule, where you’re expected to anticipate what your customer would like if only she knew about it. Sounds suspiciously like marketing to me.)

How to use the golden rule to drive your customers up the wall

I have a friend who runs a service business. He’s extremely conscientious. It’s very common for him to spend three or four unbilled hours researching the cheapest possible solutions for his customers.

There’s just one problem. His customers are ready to strangle him.

In almost every case, they don’t actually want the absolute cheapest way to solve the problem. They prefer a solution that’s packaged for convenience. Or that comes with a help desk so they can ask dopey questions. Or that just gives them the nice warm feeling of certainty they have when they buy a name brand.

His efforts to save them money too often cost them time and aggravation. And even now, most customers will be happy to spend money to save on time and aggravation. (They at least appreciate being given the option.)

He’s living by the golden rule. He would love it if a vendor bent over backwards to save him money, and he assumes that’s what his customers want.

It’s not. But he can’t get out of his own head long enough to see that.

Making it about their needs

It’s incredibly hard to think like another person. We all believe we do, but we have blind spots.

My friend can’t conceive of a customer who’s got bigger worries than cash flow.

I have a hard time remembering that most customers don’t want an overwhelming map of all the territory they could cover, they just want a fast map to get where they want to go.

You’re not going to be able to wave a magic wand and get completely out of your own head. No one is so enlightened that they don’t fall into this trap. Even the Dalai Lama probably assumes that everybody likes yak butter.

How to find your own blind spots

The next time a customer gets mad at you, try to listen for what might really be going on. Did they take your professionalism for condescension? Did your relatively minor screw-up make them look bad in front of a friend?

What assumptions did you make about this client relationship? Try to look at even the ones you think are ridiculously obvious. If you can get into a productive conversation about it with the customer, that’s fantastic. It will make the customer feel good and it will help you get smarter.

Surveying your customers works, too. To get out of blind spot hell, remember to leave things open-ended. If you create multiple-choice questions, you’re just asking people to validate what you’ve already decided.

How about you?

What blind spots have caught you up lately? Let us know in the comments.

Flickr Creative Commons photo by woodleywonderworks

Filed Under: small business Tagged With: , , , ,

The Mad Ninja Skill for Getting
Anything Done

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I’ve found it: the magic bullet. The bass-o-matic technique that solves all problems, cures all ills, makes its own sauce, whitens and freshens your teeth (and laundry) while you sleep.

I’m going to share my super ninja secret for moving forward when I’m stuck (it works even better when combined with Havi’s destuckifier), finding focus, lighting up the escape route when the cabin starts to fill with smoke, and giving me the ninja strength to punch my way through obstacles and make things happen.

This is the equivalent of Beatrix Kiddo’s Five Point Exploding Palm Technique. It’s so powerful and dangerous that you might want to burn your computer after reading this blog post. Or at least, I don’t know, clear your browser cache.

The top-seekrit, ultra dangerous, uber-ninja skill that will set you free

Start writing stuff down.

(From this point forward I’m going to get all bossy and tell you what I do. Feel free to slavishly follow my model or to ignore it and make your own.)

I’m not talking about making lists, although that works too. I’m talking about journaling.

(Normally I despise the practice of making nouns into verbs, but journaling is just different for me from writing or writing in a journal. Feel free to throw rotten apples at me, I understand.)

Journaling is the act of getting all the gunk out of your brain and onto paper.

Journaling isn’t really writing. Writing involves editing and shaping and making careful word choices.

Journaling is more of a purge. We all have a lot of crap rattling around in our heads. Unworthy thoughts. Petty obsessions. Stupid fears.

Everyone. The Dalai Lama, Pema Chödrön, everybody. Murky, ugly mental gunk is part of being a human being. Most of us walk along desperately hoping that no one ever finds out what awful people we truly are.

Don’t worry. The nicest people you know are secretly even more horrible than you. (Hard to believe, I know.)

Journaling lets some air in. Getting the gunk on paper makes it suddenly look not all that bad after all. And writing down all the horribleness robs it of its power. Which leaves you free and clear to master the universe.

The main technique

Use physical pen and paper. Yes, even if your handwriting is atrocious. Yes, even if you hate to write by hand. If you are physically able to write by hand, do.

When you write with a pen on a piece of paper, you can’t go back and change a word because “gee, I didn’t really mean I hate my little brother.” You’re stuck with what’s there. It’s a tiny commitment to get the true first thing out of your mind and onto the page.

If you need to use a keyboard and screen, turn the monitor off. You want to remove your ability to go back and edit. Journaling is all about uncensoring yourself and freeing up your need to be “nice” or “appropriate” or even “sane.”

You don’t have to get all fancy and use a Moleskine or whatever the cool kids are using. You could use a fountain pen, which is what I like (this is a good beginner’s pen), or a .19 Bic. Doesn’t matter. But do use something that’s as comfortable as possible and lets you write quickly. Think flow.

Write without stopping. When you’re journaling, keep the pen moving. Even if you have to write this is stupid this is stupid this is stupid this is stupid this is stupid until you come up with something to say.

Journaling is not about consideration. It’s about moving too fast for your Inner Grown-Up to keep up.

Embrace the horrible. You’re de-gunking, remember? There’s going to be yukky stuff in there. Racist, homophobic, heterophobic, boring, immature, petty, mean-spirited, cruel, violent, bitter, self-pitying. downright evil. Name any quality you don’t want to have, it’s gonna come out.

What you find out when you do this is that you can write the words

I wish a nuclear bomb would destroy all life on earth so my assbag neighbor would melt and die

and nothing bad happens. No nuclear bombs. No destruction. No lightning bolt smiting you dead.

Plus, the feeling goes away. Or at least it eases up a little. You may find yourself starting to laugh about how out of proportion it all is.

You air it out. And when you air it out, the demon loses its ability to slow you down and confuse you. Life works better when you’re not slowed down and confused.

How often do you do it?

Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way recommends three “morning pages” of freewriting every day for a month. I’ve done that a bunch of times, and it’s a great exercise, very freeing.

I usually journal when I’m feeling blocked up. There’s a particular sense in my gut when I’m not moving freely and I’m unfocused and crabby. That’s when I know I’ve got some gunk to clear out.

Sometimes I need to journal every day. Other times, I might go a month or two without needing it.

Journaling and goals

Lately I’ve had enough big projects to juggle that I’ve had to get a little more focused about goals. Plus I gained about 15 pounds that, for some reason, don’t look all that good on me.

So I’m doing Dave Navarro’s Damn Serious New Year’s process for some goals. Every day I journal a page (or two, if I feel like it) on progress and stuck places and looking for potential gunk. It keeps my attention on my goals and reminds me why I want them.

And it helps me see that I am getting traction and the wheels are moving, even if the movement is subtle. Which is huge. I don’t know anyone strong enough to keep taking action on goals if they don’t think that action will bear fruit. Journaling lets you see the little baby steps of progress, and those will build momentum if you let them.

Share your ninja prowess

Do you ever journal? What tools do you like to use? Paper or pixels? Fancy notebook or scrap paper? Do you journal every day? Do you keep your journals or destroy them?

Let us know your ninja journaling techniques in the comments!

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Do We Really Need Brass Balls?

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Along with the notion that an entrepreneur has to be a ruthless warrior, there’s another metaphor that gets used a lot for small business owners–you’ve gotta have brass balls.

Apart from the irritating implication that only people with certain kinds of plumbing get to be successful, once you start meeting a lot of extremely successful people, you realize that this “requirement” is completely bogus.

I’ve done quite a bit of work with a gentleman who founded a billion-dollar company. He’s about as decisive as a squirrel trying to cross the street.

He’s prone to massive anxiety (and creating the same in the people who work with him). He makes a lot of fear-based decisions. He can be a little hysterical.

He’s also smart, resourceful, knows his customer incredibly well, and has boundless enthusiasm and energy for his business.

I’m not going to speculate on the makeup of the man’s testicles, but I don’t think anyone would use the term brass.

I know another entrepreneur, a woman who runs a top-of-the-line consultancy. She manages a team of 20 coaches who transmit her expertise to her clientele. She’s better than anyone at what she does because she’s more empathetic and more perceptive than her competitors, so she creates better solutions for her customers.

Is she a confident, self-assured businesswoman? Sure she is. Does anyone tell her she has brass balls? I suppose it’s possible, but that’s probably the last way you’d describe this woman’s warm, elegant style.

For various reasons, I’ve come into contact with many people at the height of success. They vary quite a bit. Some of them are megalomaniac control freaks. Some of them are head cases. Quite a few of them are low-key, quiet types that you would never guess made millions of dollars a year.

Success requires a commitment to consistent, focused action, and the ability to figure out the right kind of action to focus on. It requires either luck or talent. (If you’re lucky enough to get both, you can make it happen faster.) Usually it requires mentors, or at least good models.

Brass balls, however, are entirely optional. You have my permission to succeed wildly without them.

(Yes, I know the picture is of brass bells. But sorry, I am not going to sully my nice blog design with a photo of trucknutz.)

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Dumb Things Small Businesses Do
#7: Following the Herd

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Human beings are wired funny.

We were given these giant brains so we could be creative, could think of new ways to do things, could come up with incredible new inventions. We even have opposable thumbs, with which we can make all kinds of nifty tools like the wheel, the printing press, and Twitter.

But we also have a big scary alarm that goes off when we’re doing something different from the tribe. We’re wired to “think different,” but not too different.

We can respond to adversity with tremendous creativity, but too often we need adversity before we’ll buck the crowds.

Most people, in most endeavors, are clueless

Remember when we used to use the expression “rocket scientist” to mean someone who was incredibly on the ball? Then NASA showed us that, although they hire lots of amazingly smart and educated people, rocket scientists aren’t immune to following one another off a cliff.

Brain surgeons, nuclear physicists and assembly language programmers* are smart, but they’re not so smart that they wouldn’t do something incredibly dumb because someone else did it.

Despite what our moms tried to teach us, if our friends jumped off a bridge, we absolutely would too. Don’t assume that you’re smarter than the 909 people who drank poisoned Kool-Aid at Jonestown. You’re just in a better environment.

(Yes, if you’re a young’un, that’s where the expression “drink the Kool-Aid” comes from. Pretty horrific, actually. If you can stand to think about it–and mostly, I can’t–Jonestown offers one of the most striking and stark sets of lessons on mass psychology you’ll find anywhere. Robert Cialdini’s essential book Influence spells the lessons out so you don’t have to wreck your entire night reading about Jonestown on Wikipedia.)

Nearly everyone looks to the left and the right to see what to do

Human beings learn by imitation. We have such incredible richness of cultural diversity because each of us, when we’re little, learns how to be a human being by watching the big ones. We can learn all kinds of complicated and illogical behaviors that way. And in fact, each of us does.

Monkey see, monkey do. But humans are a lot better at that game than monkeys are.

A few people in a thousand manage to be contrary-minded enough to escape. By nature, they’re wired to zig when everyone else zags. In dark ages, they burn these folks as heretics. Today, they’re Warren Buffett and Richard Branson.

Remember that when you think the world is going to hell. Heretics are billionaires now.

You don’t have to be born a contrarian.

You can learn it. And you should, if you want economic and personal freedom.

Just opening your eyes and seeing that “most people do what most people do” allows you to at least question whether the herd knows where the hell it’s going.

Which puts you into that category of one or two in a thousand. Incredibly simple, actually.

Assumptions worth questioning

Dan Kennedy likes to yell at entrepreneurs who immediately assume that interesting business tactics won’t work in my business.

I won’t yell at you, but I will encourage you to always question that assumption. The weirder an idea looks to you, the better payoff you might get. Spectacular successes have been created by coming up with creative ways to implement ideas that first seemed irrelevant or off the wall.

  • If you do everything online, question the assumption that direct mail is too expensive.
  • If you do everything offline, question the assumption that the online world is too confusing for you to figure out, or that your customers don’t use a computer.
  • If you’ve got a great way to get leads, question the assumption that it’s always going to work the same way it does now.
  • If you’ve built an orderly, comfortable business, question the assumption that you can’t handle a good dose of creative chaos.
  • Always question the assumption that you have to compete on price.
  • Always question the assumption that you, personally, can do it better than anyone else.
  • Always question the assumption that the middle of the road is the safest place to be. If you don’t believe that’s a damaging assumption, ask a squirrel.

How about you? Are you willing to become a creative contrarian? Willing to find a few juicy opportunities by zigging when everyone else is zagging right off a cliff (and bitching about it the entire time)? Let us know about it in the comments.

7 Dumb Things Small Businesses Do

* P.S. Thanks to my Twitter buds, in particular Coyote Squirrel, for giving me some good plausible alternatives to “rocket scientist.” What a bunch of sweeties.

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