The wedding of Steve and Mindy Penn
I’m thrilled to have celebrated and been a part of my little brother’s wedding as best man yesterday. For those wedding guests who are interested in the photos from the event, you’ll find them in this Flickr set. Special thanks to Brooke Pichette for some of the ceremony photos!
Here also you’ll find the prepared remarks for the best man’s toast I wrote and delivered amidst much revelry:
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen! If I might have a few moments of your time to say a few words.
More than a few of you have probably noticed how much I use my camera. I’m an amateur photographer, with emphasis on the amateur part, and I wanted to share a few observations from behind the lens. Cameras can capture much more than we can consciously perceive. Our eyes see everything as a blur, a continuous flow, doubly so at a wedding, but the lens can capture the tiniest moments in time.
One of the things a lens can catch that our eyes miss are little expressions on our faces. Psychologists and behavioral specialists call these micro-emotions, the faces we make in between moments. We never see them. They’re there, and they may register subconsciously, but we never really see them with the naked eye. In those slices of time, everything is revealed, because we’re unable to mask our true faces, emotions, and feelings in the spaces between the notes of life.
Why do I bring this up? In the past day, I’ve had the chance to take plenty of photos of Steve and Mindy, and here’s what the lens shows in the moments between the chaos of getting married: they really love each other, very deeply and truly. The thin slices of time when no one is looking tell the reason we’re all gathered here today: two friends in love not just consciously, but thoroughly, in every way from the obvious to the subtle, from the conscious to the invisible. Love that’s apparent even when no one is looking, even when no one except the camera lens is even capable of looking.
Please join me in a toast to Steve and Mindy as we all wish them a lifetime of those little moments together. To my brother and my new sister, I celebrate all the moments you’ll share together – even when no one is looking.
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Why I’m a little thankful for Facebook Groups
Facebook’s latest implementation, Groups, has some quirks that are mildly irritating, such as the ability to add people without their consent and then flood their inboxes with unwelcome mail – a classic definition of spam if there ever was one. I will let other people with more influence and larger axes complain about the feature, because I wanted to say something else:
Thank you.
Not to Facebook, but to the many of you who have added me to a variety of groups. Why am I saying thank you? Because as badly implemented as Facebook’s technology has been, it has been revelatory.
It has been revelatory in the number of people who thought of me, unasked, as valuable enough to at least warrant inclusion in their newly formed groups.
It has been truly revelatory to see the variety of groups I’ve been invited to. The fact that so many have been about new media, marketing, and social tells me what you think I am proficient at, and I am greatly pleased that it is in alignment with what I try to provide value in.
These little things let me know that I’m doing stuff that matters to you, a sort of unsolicited testimonial, and for that I thank you. While I won’t use Facebook’s features until they fix the issues with them (no longer lend your strength to that which you wish to be free from), I thank you nonetheless.
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Travel blogging: hotel coffee
I’m on vacation for the first time in years, out in Seattle. During this time, I’ll be doing much, much less online, but on those few occasions when I feel like firing up the machinery, I’ll post stuff.
Today’s topic is easy: hotel coffee. One of the most common and accurate complaints is that hotel room coffee sucks, and if you use the coffeemaker as designed, it does indeed. Coffee needs 3 things to work well: time to brew, water close to boiling temperature, and sufficient quantity of coffee grinds. Hotel room coffeemakers generally fail at all 3.
To remedy this, there’s a relatively easy fix that addresses 2 out of 3. First, if you can, double up the individual serving packets of coffee. Typically hotels provide one regular and one decaf. If you’re going for flavor, use both. If there isn’t room, wait for the next step.
Process the coffee like normal. Then after it’s done brewing, remove the filter packet and put it in the cup or carafe. If you have the decaf packet, put it in now as well. Let it steep for another 2-3 minutes, then pull both packets. Voila! You’ll have coffee that tastes like coffee. It may lack the double strength caffeine boost you’re looking for, but at least the flavor will be there.
Bonus tip: if you get a chance during your travels to scoop up a couple of the little individual serving size salt packets, grab a few. Take the barest punch of salt and add it to your hotel coffee and it will dramatically reduce any of the bitter flavors. The reason for this is simple: salt partially blocks the neuroreceptors on your tongue that detect bitterness, making a bitter coffee a little more palatable.
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The name is the result
I had the pleasure and privilege to attend New England Warrior Camp again this year (my 11th out of 13) in the woods of Sudbury, Massachusetts this past weekend. Others have done a much better job illuminating the actual goings-on, such as my friend and senior, Jon Merz. One of my huge takeaways from the weekend, however, came from one of the training sessions.
Dennis Mahoney, head instructor at Shinobi Martial Arts, gave us this important lesson in his session:
The name of a technique describes the effect on your attacker, not what you do.
In the martial arts, we get so fixated on what we’re supposed to be doing that we forget completely about what we’re supposed to be achieving. Dennis’ session was a stark reminder that our goal is what matters, not our method. As a martial artist, you can get to omotegyakutedori, the outward wrist twist catch and lock, with your hands, arms, feet, weapons, probably even a used cheeseburger container. As long as you achieve the effects of getting the upper quarter of the body locked up, spine locked, and arm assembly locked, you’ve more or less achieved the technique.
Where most of us go wrong is in rigid insistence that we move exactly a certain way, hold the hand or wrist in exactly the right manner at exactly the right angle – despite the fact that conditions and situations may dictate a completely different set of methods to get to the desired result. Instead of adapting to the situation and working towards a goal, we get bogged down in “the way we’re supposed to do it”, as though attackers use textbook methods to assault us.
So what does this have to do with anything outside the martial arts? Think about how insistent some people can be on any particular marketing method. You MUST be using social media! You MUST be using email marketing! You MUST be doing SEO.
Well, no. What you MUST do is know what outcome you are trying to achieve, and then figure out which of the tools in your toolbox can help you achieve that result. Think about that for a second. What’s the purpose of email marketing? To reach out to people and let them know about stuff that’s going on, right? What else can do that? Email can, certainly. So can Twitter. So can LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.. All of those have mechanisms for outreach, and thus if the desired effect is “let people know stuff is going on”, then the thing we call email marketing isn’t just POP3, SMTP, and IMAP, but a collection of tools to reach people and a way of doing it that makes them glad to hear from us.
Here’s another example: search engine optimization. This means being findable, right? Findable where? Our narrow view of marketing says that we obey the dictates of Google, and while that’s important, being findable also means making sure your podcast is in iTunes, that your business can be located on various location services, that you have social profiles with consistent naming, and so on. Being findable is far more than just inbound link building.
The next time you sit down to evaluate your marketing, look at it from the perspective of what you want to achieve and then examine all of your tools to see if they can be used in that context. You might be surprised to realize that some of the tools in your toolbox have far more uses than what you’ve traditionally used them for.
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Hire Friday: Alternate Advance Close, Porcupine Questions
Every time you write a cover letter, every time you send a resume, every time you get on the phone for an interview, you are selling. You are working in a sales job with the most important product in the world to you: your talent. While it might seem obvious to you why you’re the perfect fit for a job, chances are the person on the other end probably isn’t aware of that. Your job is to guide them into that decision, and to do that, you need to learn how to sell.
Here’s one of the biggest, most obvious, most blatant missed opportunities for a shot at a job: the closing sentences of a cover letter/email. I’ve lost track of how many cover letters end with this stupid statement (or variations thereof):
I look forward to discussing the opportunity with you at your earliest convenience.
This is epic failure, because as a hiring manager who has other crap to do, it’s never convenient to talk to you, the candidate, and therefore you won’t get a call back.
The antidote to this failure is the alternate advance close, a simple close in which you provide two options, both of which result in a win for you.
Christopher, I’d love to discuss the opportunity with you. Which is better for you, a phone call on Thursday at 2 PM ET or a phone call on Friday at 11 AM ET?
Either answer results in getting the appointment set up, which is the goal!
Suppose the hiring manager says, “neither is good for me”? I’ve seen people stop the conversation dead at this point and lose – they stammer out a “uhhh, okay, well, whenever is good for you…” which is equivalent to saying, “don’t ever call me back”. The right way to respond is the porcupine technique (in which you toss back the question immediately, as if someone had thrown a porcupine at you): “I understand. When is good for you?”
Be politely persistent with your selling. Keep tossing out alternate advances and porcupine responses until you’ve got your shot in the spotlight for the interview – and then keep selling in the interview. Sell in your followup call and email. I’ll leave you with this YouTube clip from the Boiler Room of a high pressure, super hard sell.
Should you sell like that? That’s up to you and your style, but let me leave you with this thought: if you’re talking about putting food on the table for yourself and for anyone you have responsibility to care for, how determined would you be to learn how to sell, in order to buy them the future they look to you to provide?
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