Change for the better
Change for the better
For every ailment under the sun
There is a remedy, or there is none;
If there be one, try to find it;
If there be none, never mind it.
- Mother Goose
The first step on your path to freedom starts with a simple understanding of the things about yourself that you can and cannot change. Freedom begins in understanding which parts of yourself are within your power to change and which parts are not.
Attempt to change what you cannot and life will be frustration without end.
Ignore the changes within your grasp and life will be fruitless at best.
All change, however, needs momentum. All change needs a spark, a gentle push, something to get the wheel rolling.
Here’s a simple question to ask yourself:
What one thing can you change about yourself – a habit, a practice – in the next 30 days?
As we cross over into November, what one thing can you change for the better? Choose something daily, something measurable, and something you can achieve. Post it here if you like, hashtag it with #30better, share it with friends, and make one change in the next 30 days for the better.
Ready?
It’s my life, it’ll change for the better
I’ve faced the light
It’s worth the fight
See a new day
Start a new way
Get it straight
Make a change for the better
- Journey
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It Gets Better: Marketing
There’s a very inspiring project created by Dan Savage called It Gets Better, in which people lend their voices to LGBT teens to encourage them in the face of bullying and harassment. I added my own perspective and encourage you to add yours.
Hi. My name is Christopher Penn, Vice President of Strategy and Innovation at Blue Sky Factory, one of the Inc. 5000′s fastest growing companies in America. I have this message for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender kids. It gets better. It gets a lot better.
Here’s why: it gets better because after you leave the little fishbowl of school, there’s an entire world out there that needs your differences. Now, I have no experience of what it’s like to be gay or bisexual, but I do know what it’s like to be different, growing up as a minority in an overwhelming majority. The things that set you apart as different in school are in many cases the things that employers are desperately going to need when you’re out of school.
I work in marketing, and one of the hardest things in the world is to figure out what’s called a unique selling proposition, the thing that makes your product or service different. If you’re a member of the majority that’s never been different or experienced different, this is an incredibly difficult thing to do and it’s why the ads for so many products and services really suck.
If, on the other hand, you can see different, you can create different, you can think different, then you can be incredibly successful in business. Doing what everyone else is doing, trying to be what everyone else is will get you to second place at best. Only those folks who are different, who are willing to step outside the status quo and go where others are afraid to will succeed.
You feel different now and may feel like that’s a negative. It won’t be. Stay with us. Keep going. Keep persevering through other people’s shortsightedness, because in the real world, all of us need your differences on our team to succeed.
It gets better.
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This opportunity comes once in a lifetime
You better lose yourself in the music, the moment
You own it, you better never let it go
You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow
This opportunity comes once in a lifetime
- Eminem
One of the reasons we miss opportunities is that we fail to see them for what they are. Our conventional, jaded, cynical view of the world (made that way in part by marketers hyping everything mundane as extraordinary, sorry) closes our eyes to opportunities that are literally right in front of us. It’s not that they aren’t there, it’s just that we don’t have the eyes to see them. We see a friend request as a statistic. We see a tweet as noise – in fact, we even treat discussion of friends as signal to noise ratios.
I love the lyrics in Eminem’s song Lose Yourself, which in part open this blog post (video). What if, instead of simply seeing life as a series of drab, boring events, we saw each day as opportunity? What if instead of sleepwalking through the day, each day was instead our one chance, our shot to take? How would you work, play, live if every day was the opportunity to have that breakthrough you’ve been waiting your whole life for?
I’m not saying to be naive. Absolutely not everything in every day is going to be that amazing opportunity. Absolutely not every email you get will be THE break you’ve been waiting for. But there are plenty more opportunities for enjoyment, amazement, wonder, and awakening than we are conditioned to look for, little moments that you will completely and totally miss – and deeply regret. What if you were so jaded and inured to life and the people in it that you stopped paying attention to the smiles of your children?
It doesn’t have to be that way. Life doesn’t have to feel that way. Here’s a simple but powerful antidote: look for opportunities. Look for the things that you want more of in your life. Look for more happiness, more smiles, more love, more prosperity. It’s there. It’s there waiting in front of you, waiting for you to open your eyes and ears to realize it. Ask yourself the next time you feel cynical words rising through your mind to your tongue: what if this were the opportunity, the one shot? How would you listen to it differently? How would you treat it differently? What would you say or do differently if this were your chance?
The original music video:
Do not miss your chance.
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The genuine absence of leadership
Dear politicians:
I have watched with interest, mostly feigned, at this season’s political advertising, and I applaud you for being incredibly effective in your attack ads, which seem to be 99% of your advertising spend. You have done an amazing job of convincing me of this simple fact:
Not one of you corrupt morons should ever be allowed in office.
As a marketer, I get that you need to contrast yourself with the other folks running. In regular marketing, some contrast is mandatory. But by spending all your time telling me why I shouldn’t vote for the other guy or gal, you’ve convinced me you’re all a bunch of corrupt morons, regardless of party or affiliation, because I’m sure there’s a grain of truth in each of your attack ads somewhere in there.
Let me give you a comparative analogy. Pretend we’re all on a desert island somewhere, and most of us have survived a plane crash. As the survivors gather and figure out what’s going on, we start the inevitable discussion about who should lead us and what roles we should take to help the community survive until we’re rescued.
What you’re doing by throwing as many attack ads is effectively having two or more people on the desert island screaming at each other: DON’T FOLLOW HIM! HE’LL EAT ALL THE COCONUTS! That’s not leadership. If government were a matter of desert island life or death, the rest of us would leave you on the beach to starve and die.
Wait a minute. Government is a matter of life or death, for our society as a whole. Take a look around. 14.7 million people are unemployed. 26.4 million people are underemployed – that’s nearly 1 in 5 working Americans. The desert island is the entire country, and a good portion of us are hungry, if not starving while you spend all your time screaming why the other guy/gal/party is a bad choice, while stealing as many coconuts as you can.
Our only hope is that the citizens of America do as the desert island folks would do: leave you idiots to starve to death on your own and run this place ourselves. Call social media a fishbowl, call it frivolity or time wasting, call it narcissistic, but PodCamp Boston 5 raised $7,000 towards the Greater Boston Food Bank’s Kids Meals program. One silly little conference started by Chris Brogan and I a few years ago has done more real good for people with immediate need than all of your political campaign spending combined.
So politicians, congratulations. Your attack ads have achieved their goals: you’ve convinced me that the other guy or gal shouldn’t get elected. Unfortunately for you, they’ve convinced me the same about you.
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Who to follow: serendipity or segmentation?
One of the most hotly contested discussion topics at PodCamp NH this past weekend was the question of who to follow on social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter. As has been discussed many times before, some people believed in casting a wide net and following many, while others believed in being highly selective and following just a few. By the end of the discussion, I’m not convinced folks were any more clear as to which strategy to pursue.
Here’s a different way to look at the question: what are your goals? Broadly, there are two different goals you could be pursuing with your social networking strategy, segmentation and serendipity.
If you have a goal of creating a tight, highly valuable network where the only interactions you have are with people you know and trust, you’re effectively pursuing a segmentation strategy. You’re looking to get maximum value out of the content that comes from the network, at the cost of not having as much reach. This is especially effective when you want to target a very specific niche as a marketer.
If you have a goal of creating a broad, diverse network where you’re interacting with many people across many different industries and backgrounds, you’re pursuing a serendipity strategy. You’re looking to get maximum value out of the network itself, creating fruitful grounds for interconnections in your network and connections through you as its hub. This comes at the cost of a lack of focus in the content of the network. A serendipity strategy is especially effective when you’re looking to reach people in different pockets, pools, or verticals, as well as when you’re looking for new and different ideas.
Neither strategy is “right”. Neither strategy is inherently better than the other. One focuses on value through content, the other focuses on value through the network. Which strategy you choose depends on what kind of value you want. It’s also worth pointing out that neither strategy is black and white or as clear cut. You can still create some opportunities for serendipity while having a focus on content, and you can still create some opportunities to find content while having a focus on the network. It’s just a question of which value you’ll get more of.
Do you know which kind of value you want?
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