Expand your three words
A bunch of folks are starting to put together their three words lists. I’ve seen some from Tim Brechlin, Helena Bouchez, and many others. While we’ve said in years past that the three words aren’t resolutions or goals, I wanted to take a moment to explore how they could give rise to goals and measurements. If you’re the sort of person who likes to be able to take something like the 3 words exercise and turn it into a plan of action, here’s one way of doing that.
First, the three words aren’t measurable. Let’s be very clear about that. They are abstract concepts.
Next, we need to set down vision, strategy, and tactics. Lest we get caught up in the degenerate corporate versions of these words, we should define them clearly now.
Vision: what will you and your life look like when you have achieved?
Strategy: what tangible, measurable things will you do to achieve your vision? (and how will you measure them?)
Tactics: how will you do the things that your strategy dictates?
Let’s put this in a mind map so you can see more clearly how this might break out.
It becomes clear how we can take the word and start to expand it into a broader picture of how that word might influence our lives in 2012. I’ll use one of Tim Brechlin’s words, initiative. Tim mentioned that he wants to bring more initiative to his photography. What would this look like in the vision of a successful year for photography in 2012? Tim might be so bold as to say, “By the end of 2012, I will have shot 12 photos that I’m proud enough to sell and will have made at least one sale of them.” That way, at the end of 2012 he can legitimately say that he’s a professional (shoots photos for money) photographer.
This gives rise to questions about what he should be doing and how. Let’s see how this might break out:
Now we’re truly digging into the what and how. What’s more, now that we’re digging into the specifics, we can see a plan of action and a weekly agenda beginning to grow. Each task can be broken down even more granularly until what was just a single word is now an entire recipe:
Here’s the beauty of this kind of structure. By doing this kind of mind mapping explosion of the meaning of the three words in vision, strategy, and tactics, we can feel the depth and reach of what those three simple words really mean to us. We avoid the trap of those words becoming cliches or even punchlines to jokes later in the year as we confront our inevitable deviation from them. Recite the words with the plans you set down in front of you now and those words will have much greater meaning in the year to come.
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Three Words for 2012
Every year since 2006, friends of Chris Brogan put together our three words for the coming year that define what we’re focusing on in the coming year. They’re not goals, but more like rails or guides that help keep us moving in the general correct direction. Here are mine for 2012.
Story
When I look at what I’ve created in the past few years, there’s value in the content. How-to lessons, detailed research, data and techniques, but something’s been missing. Something’s been lacking. On the way home from the dojo one night, I was listening to master teacher Stephen K. Hayes talking about how the deeper lessons of both Buddhism and ninjutsu are transmitted. He said, “We’re going to tell a few stories here, and hopefully this will evoke some stories in your mind of your own. That’s how this training works.” At that moment I realized exactly what has been missing from a lot of my work. In 2012, one of my three words and focus points will be on better learning this skill.
Restoration
One of the more interesting healing classes in World of Warcraft is the restoration druid. Rather than heal with holy powers and flashes of light, the druid uses the powers of nature to restore allies to health. Regrowth, nourish, rejuvenation, lifebloom, swiftmend, tranquility. Here’s what’s powerful about the idea of restoration druid spells on real life: so much of what we’ve done in the past few years has burned everything to the ground. We’ve exhausted our email lists. We’ve tapped out our social networks. We’ve cut staff down to the bone to scrape up a few extra pennies per share on earnings calls. In short, we’ve depleted all of our resources and wondered why our marketing is getting less and less effective. In 2012, one of my study points will be restoration. How do we continue to be effective as marketers while restoring our resources to health?
This extends to personal life as well. When you go all-out, inevitably, something has to suffer. My question to myself is, how can I bring restoration and regrowth to areas of my life other than business?
Compassion
Originally I had chosen something else for the third word, but as I was looking over the years, I thought it’d make 2012 more challenging and interesting to focus on something I’m not good at. Compassion I mean in the Buddhist sense – the ability to see through your own issues and feelings enough to understand what someone else is going through and provide some kind of legitimate help. One of the greatest dangers of social media, particularly as you start to develop any kind of following, is that you tend to attract like-minded people. As a result, you hear less and less about things you disagree with, things that challenge you, things that make you think. When all you hear is how awesome you are (whether you are or not) you face the great danger of your ego overwhelming any good work you’re providing. I have heard in the back of my mind from time to time the ugly, egotistical whisper that says, “this (person/place/thing/task) is below me”. It’s exactly at those moments when compassion can provide a much-needed bitch slap upside the head to bring reality back into the picture.
My task for 2012 is to be more rigorous and more disciplined in my own mind, guarding against that ever-growing danger.
So there you have it, my three words for 2012: story, restoration, compassion. Blog yours and leave a link in the comments!
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Awaken Your Holidays
To celebrate the holidays, instead of doing a silly video or the myriad of other Christmas themes, I thought I’d honor the timeless tradition of regifting and give you something other people gave me.
Back in early 2011, I took a trip to South Korea and during that time period, I knew that blogging and the usual stuff was out of the question. For 10 days, 10 authors took my place and wrote some incredible material. I’ve packaged up those posts as a totally free, no-strings-attached eBook for you to enjoy over the holidays. Without further ado, Awaken Your Superhero:
- Download in MOBI Format for Amazon Kindle
- Download in EPUB Format for Nook and iBooks
- Download in PDF Format for all other readers
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Making the cut
Decide: from French decider or Latin decidere, infinitive of decido (“cut off, decide”), from de (“down from”) + caedo (“cut”).
To decide something isn’t to just make up your mind. To decide, in the truest sense of the word, is to cut down or cut away from all other possible choices. Once you cut down the tree, there’s no uncutting it. There’s no undo, no going back.
As we wind down the year and start preparing for the new one, start thinking about what you’re going to change. More specifically, we have too much right now vying for our attention. Rich or poor, we are being bombarded every minute of every day with demands for our attention, our eyes and ears, our mindshare. Foods manufactured with tons of additives scream for our attention via our tastes. Music and ads blare at every opportunity for just a few moments. Our inboxes overflow with requests for our time.
To make your days more productive and powerful, think about what you can cut out from your life.
Perhaps it’s a person, someone in your life who brings very little that’s positive and a whole lot that’s negative. Examine your previous interactions with this person and consider whether cutting them out would be a relief. In the digital age, cutting someone out is easier than ever. Simply block or remove them from all your channels. Cut them out!
Perhaps it’s a medium of some kind. Professionally or personally, managing and maintaining tons of social networks is draining, especially if you’re making a legitimate attempt to provide unique value on each. Would you be more effective if you laid one or two channels down to rest and simply paid them no heed? Cut it out!
Perhaps what you need to cut is some busy-ness. Time is most easily recouped from mindless habits that we have. We might turn on our favorite video game or television show. We might fill our days with strings of mindless tasks that we do purely out of habit, such as compulsively checking email or vacantly surfing through friends’ Facebook profiles. Look at what fills your days, find the least valuable thing you do, and cut it out!
Cutting effectively requires commitment. Anyone who has ever cooked and used a knife in the kitchen knows this to be true. You can’t half-heartedly saw at a cut of beef or a baguette and expect to get any kind of worthwhile results – you have to commit, exert some force, and make the cut.
Here’s the secret to all of this: pick just one thing and cut it out. In the martial arts, using a blade against multiple attackers is one of the most difficult skills imaginable, requiring years or even decades of practice to be able to do effectively. Real life is no different! You can’t cleanly and effectively cut 10 steaks at once without insane skill. You can’t clean 10 rooms in your house at the same time without a robot army. Pick one target, one habit, one negative influence in your life, and cut it down. Once you’re sure it’s finished off and isn’t going to get back up and fight you, move to your next target, but don’t try to tackle a whole horde of them.
Are you ready to begin cutting? Have you picked your target for 2012? Sharpen your blade, firm your resolve, and draw your sword!
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Why we love the Big Bad
We love the Big Bad. This is, of course, a reference to the arch-villain in any story. Blizzard Entertainment calls them the Box Cover Villains. The Lich King. Deathwing. Sauron in Lord of the Rings. Emperor Palpatine in Star Wars. Hitler and Osama Bin Laden in real life. We love the Big Bad, because facing the big bad and fighting him, in the words of Emperor Palpatine, gives us focus, makes us stronger.
Here’s the problem with the Big Bad: they’re exceedingly rare. This is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because you don’t want world-destroying people or creatures to manifest themselves ever very often. It’s a curse because we’re always on the lookout for the Big Bad. Why is this a curse? Because most of our problems aren’t Big Bads that you can rally against.
The temperature of the oceans, for example, has gone up fairly significantly over the past 100 years from a variety of distributed causes, such as carbon in the atmosphere, depletion of important layers of the atmosphere, and generally unsustainable living. There’s a named Big Bad – climate crisis – but it’s so amorphous and unfocused that it’s hard to rally against, and in some ways, we, the “heroes”, are the villains behind it.
We want there to be a Big Bad in the economy, and to be sure, there are some people who are decidedly not team players, but the ultimate problem is that as a society, as a whole, we borrowed and continue to borrow more than we can afford to borrow. That’s the heart of the problem, and there’s no villain you can pin that to, save the one in the mirror.
In the world of business, we love Big Bads as much as we do at the movie theater. Who’s our top competitor? What’s our top competing product or service? How can we rally the troops to ever increasing productivity by making someone else the villain? As with general society, the Big Bad is exceedingly rare. The cause of our ills in the marketing department isn’t a mustachioed competing CMO, but our own incompetence at designing a marketing campaign or executing an ad campaign.
The challenge before us as marketers and citizens is to realize that most of the problems we face don’t have Big Bads. There’s no Box Cover Villain making you terrible at social media. There’s no Box Cover Villain that’s causing our government to make poor choices (though arguably you could put all of Congress on one video game box…) or us as voters to pick raving lunatics to run the country.
The uncomfortable reality is that a significant portion of the time, if we must have a Box Cover Villain, then it’s our collective picture we have to put there. Our challenge to “win” against this particular Box Cover Villain is to be awake enough, aware enough, alert enough, and alive enough to change our own actions that ultimately make us the villains as well as the heroes.
The question is: are we ready to take those steps? Are we ready to make those hard choices?
As Sir Thomas the paladin says, if it wasn’t hard, it wouldn’t be heroic.
Think today through the choices you make that contribute to your being either the villain or the hero of our world’s story.
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The foolproof way to win
There is such a thing as a foolproof way to win. There is no easy button for it. It requires you to act bravely, egolessly, and boldly. The foolproof way to win is to help everyone involved win.
Here’s an example from earlier today. I was having a discussion with a friend about an intellectual property issue in which there were multiple valid parties who could have claimed ownership of an idea. The way to lose? Lawyer up, whip out your cease and desist letters, and go to town. I’d win the battle but lose the war.
The way we won? We took the idea in its original incarnation and improved it. Bent it enough that the original, very generic idea became better, stronger, and more unique. Now everyone’s happy. The original IP holder has their idea intact and doesn’t need to go to court. My friend can enjoy their new and improved version that will stand on its own and be different and better. Everyone walks away a winner.
Why doesn’t this happen more often? Why has the term “win-win” become so cliche as to be meaningless when it’s actually a perfectly valid strategy? The reason why is that you have to be willing to let go of winning in order to win. If you’re tightly clenching onto the idea that you are right, that you must win, and that everyone else must lose in order for you to win, then “win-win” is as much a dream as it is a cliche for you. That’s why so many people mock it or make light of it: they simply can’t do it.
If you can let go of the desire to win in order to free your mind to bigger possibilities, “win-win” can manifest itself.
In ninjutsu, the pinnacle of achievement, the height of martial prowess, is working in such a way that everyone wants you to win, knowing that they win in the process. When you can find a way to win that helps the people around you, the entire universe will work hard on your behalf to see you succeed. It isn’t easy. It isn’t simple. It isn’t obvious. But it’s worth it.
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