Tag Archives: Creativity

Discover Your Strengths and Supercharge Your Business

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Have you ever been kept awake until 2 in the morning having an imaginary conversation with one of your blog readers who thinks you’re great and left a long comment telling you so? Or spent hours obsessively trying to figure out how to do better work, spurred by a fan letter from a customer about the terrific job you did? Or is it maybe more likely that your late-night solo conversations and obsessive problem-solving go to the trolls , the complainers, and the folks who just plain can’t stand you? Don’t worry. If you give an undue amount of attention to negative comments and feedback, to the extent of almost ignoring the good stuff altogether, it doesn’t mean you’re neurotic. It means you’re exactly like the rest of us. Chip Heath and Dan Heath in their marvelous book Switch make this observation: Imagine a world in which you experienced a rush of gratitude every single time you flipped a light switch and the room lit up. Imagine a world in which after a husband forgot his wife’s birthday, she gave him a big kiss and said, “For thirteen of the last fourteen years you remembered my birthday! That’s wonderful!” This is not our world. But in times of change, it needs to be. Play to your strengths I’ve long been fascinated by the advice to those who tell us to focus on our strengths, not our weaknesses, in order to create breakthrough success. It’s so appealing. You mean I don’t have to learn to cold call, balance my checkbook, or know how my RSS feed works? Sign me up. But it seems like it might be contradicted by another idea that’s gained a lot of attention recently: there’s not really any such thing as talent. Researchers like Carol Dweck and brilliant nonfiction writers like Malcolm Gladwell tell us that what we call “talent” is really the result of a heck of a lot of hard work. What are strengths, anyway? Until recently, I never realized this was a trick question. I thought that your strengths were things you were good at, and your weaknesses were things you sucked at. But Marcus Buckingham, who’s made a career out of writing about strengths, put it this way: A strength is “an activity that makes you feel strong.” It is an activity where the doing of it invigorates you. Before you do it, you find yourself instinctively looking forward to it. While you are doing it you don’t struggle to concentrate, but instead you become so immersed that time speeds up and you lose yourself in the present moment. And after you are finished doing it, you feel authentic, connected to the best parts of who you really are. Your strengths are the activities that give you the juice to put your 10,000 hours in. They’re the work you love enough to become the best in the world at. I’ll give you an example I recently heard Yo-Yo Ma giving an interview about how he got started as a cellist. As it happens, Yo-Yo’s parents are both musicians, and had high musical expectations for their little son. So when Yo-Yo was three, they gave the boy a violin. And Yo-Yo hated it. Wouldn’t practice. Wouldn’t focus. Didn’t have any zest for it. His frustrated parents finally gave up in disgust. And then little Yo-Yo saw and heard something amazing, something that surprised and delighted him. Something that he knew was exactly what he wanted to play. It was a double bass — the violin’s really, really big brother. Now that was more like it. He and his parents split the size difference, and Ma began to study first the viola and then settled (at four years old) on the cello. By seven he was a recognized prodigy, performing for Eisenhower and JFK, and by eight he played on national television, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. To have become so skilled between the ages of four and seven, he must have put in untold hours of practice. But they were hours spent on something he adored. One thing that interests me about Ma is that he isn’t just a brilliant cellist. He isn’t just world-famous and in-demand and a name brand. He also seems to be a remarkably happy and kind human being. He loves working with children. He’s been married a long time to the same person. He radiates kindness and a certain goofy charm. He’s got a great sense of humor, referring to himself at times as an “itinerant musician.” And he’s known for boundless energy. If I’m going to be a nationally-famous virtuoso, that’s the kind I want to be. Build your business like Yo-Yo When you see someone busting her tail to build a business, writing tons of great content, reaching out to potential customers, speaking and podcasting and doing everything we’re supposed to do to build a terrific content-based marketing program , it’s easy to ask: How does anyone find the time to do all that? The truth is, it’s not a time management problem — it’s an energy management one. When you focus on your strengths, you do the work that gives you energy. You do the work that drives you, that makes you giggle, that keeps you up late because you’re just having too much fun to stop. When you’re starting out, you do everything. You build the blog site and write all the content and do the bookkeeping and answer the support emails. Some of those things build you up and some wear you down. Pay attention to which is which. As soon as you can (it could be today), find partners who are energized by the tasks that exhaust and deplete you. If you can’t find the right partner, outsource the aspects of your business that make you want to crawl back into bed. And put your time and attention on what the Heath brothers call the “bright spots” – on what’s really working today. Put your time on the work that gives you juice. Do more of what’s working well. Do more of what energizes and strengthens you. Do more of what your readers and customers adore. Do more of what you can do better than anyone on earth. I know it sounds too simple to be real. But it’s how every genuinely great business — of any size — is built. About the Author : Sonia Simone is Senior Editor of Copyblogger, CMO of Copyblogger Media, and founder of Remarkable Communication . Share your bright spots with her on twitter .

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Why Being Too Diligent About Your Facts Can Hurt Your Content

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Once upon a time, the world was flat. Now it’s round. Who knows? Maybe some day we’ll find out it’s square. It’s hard to come across a cold hard fact anymore. Drink 8 glasses of water a day. Drink 16 glasses of water a day. Don’t drink any water; get all your water from fruits and vegetables. The contradictory advice goes on forever. There’s almost nothing you can nail down with absolute certainty. Even your own content. When you’re writing a game-changing piece of content, it’s natural to want to nail that article down with irrefutable data. So you spend seventeen hours to come up with data from books, white papers, and online sources. But your research is tainted No matter how hard you work to nail down the facts, you’re going to run into accuracy problems. That’s because your information sources aren’t entirely reliable. Even if the source is reliable, the information may not be. For example, a magazine may accurately report the findings of a study, but who says the study results are actually correct? Here are just a few ways your research can become tainted: Research is often funded by lobby groups pushing their own agendas. Passed-down information can lose relevant bits. What was once fact has since been overturned by new evidence. Let’s look at them one by one. Problem 1: Research may not be objective Let’s say a lobby group wants to increase sales of lemonade. They fund research to find more reasons for you to drink lemonade. They pour squillions of dollars into their research, and amazingly enough, all that research comes to the same conclusion: lemonade has amazing health benefits. Of course, that’s not how the research is presented to you . The research is presented in an interesting, fact-driven way that makes you believe it. Given a slew of reasonable-sounding facts and a truckload of statistics, and most of us will change our perception . That’s not to say lobby groups are bad people. They’re just like you and me. We tell our kids to eat spinach because it will make them big and strong. Doesn’t matter if the spinach doesn’t actually have the nutrients to get kids big and strong. Doesn’t matter if we’ve cooked the goodness out of the spinach. The kids swallow the idea — and hopefully the spinach. We all present information in the best light. And when we add figures and facts, it becomes something written in stone. Except it’s not written in stone. It’s not cold, hard fact. It’s just one view, one presentation of the data. Problem 2: Hand-me down facts Use tea bags to polish hardwood floors. Mix turmeric and honey in hot water and drink it for a cough. Use the underside of a ceramic mug to put an edge on that dull kitchen knife. These are hand-me down facts. They work — but do they work just the way they’re written? Did the author leave out a piece of critical information in the re-telling? Perhaps you have to steep the tea bags for a certain amount of time. Maybe you have to be careful to get the exact correct angle between your knife and that ceramic mug. Facts often develop holes over time. As stories get handed down, they lose information. The main part of the story may be true, but misleading without key pieces of information that go with it. The only way to be sure it to check for yourself. You take those tea bags and polish a part of your hardwood floor. If the floors shine, you’ve got a personal story of your own to tell. Hand-me-down data looks valid, but unless you’ve proved it yourself, you’re quoting unproven research. And that takes us to the final problem: The data keeps changing. Problem 3: Facts evolve As recently as 1980, most neuroscientists would tell you with confidence that the brain had no meaningful plasticity. Plasticity means that the brain is adaptable. That it can heal damage from strokes, accidents, and other horrible things, and that it can change and adapt after the critical period of childhood. There’s now research (yeah, I’m aware of the irony in referencing research in this article) that all areas of the brain can change and evolve even in adulthood. Destroyed function can be “re-routed” to other areas of the brain. And intense mental activity (like studying for med school exams) can change the brain in measurable ways in a matter of weeks. I want you to understand one thing: these original nay-sayers were neuroscientists. They live, breathe, and map their entire careers around research about how the brain works. Some of the smartest people on the planet. And they were wrong. Today, neuroplasticity is an irrefutable fact. But who’s to know what will come around the corner? Does this mean you shouldn’t research your articles? Not at all. Research matters. Facts matter. All I’m saying is that it isn’t necessary to spend all those hours tracking down facts. Often, the facts you find are only half-right, or they’re just a part of greater truths to be revealed. Go ahead and do your research, but put on an egg timer. If you don’t get what you’re looking for in about 20 minutes, it’s time to get your own facts together. Don’t make up facts that aren’t true, but tell us your own experience. It’s better to simply write what you know. Not only does it make for a good story , you can be secure that what you’re saying is really true. Research makes things interesting, but your own case studies are just as interesting. So don’t be bashful. Use your personal stories and experiences more often — you don’t need fifteen sources and two experts to back you up. You might be wrong Sure, you may be wrong about the way you interpret what you experience. The neuroscientists were wrong too. So were all the smart, educated people who insisted the world was flat. There have been countless geniuses who insisted on theories that would ultimately prove to be wrong. Research won’t save you from being wrong. It’ll just get in the way of telling your story — and that’s more important than having irrefutable facts. Especially because the facts are never irrefutable. No matter how much research you do. About the Author: Sean D’Souza offers a great free report on ‘Why Headlines Fail’ when you subscribe to his Psychotactics Newsletter . Be sure to check out his blog , too.

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The Freakonomics Guide to Making Boring Content Sexy

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It’s easy to write about certain topics, like celebrities, or technology, or even social media. Everybody wants a piece of it. But what if your passion is botany, supply chain logistics, or cognitive psychology? How do you get noticed with a compelling story when your subject is … well … boring? In the summer of 2006, an economics book was on the New York Time Bestseller list. The title was provocative and promised to be anything but a boring read. Even my hero Malcolm Gladwell said, “Prepare to be dazzled.” Since I really can’t stand economics (hated it ever since college), I skeptically handed over my $25 and took Freakonomics home. From the very first page, I was treated to a wild ride through the most bizarre stories I’d ever encountered. I learned about cheating schoolteachers and self-sacrificing sumo wrestlers. Why drug dealers still live with their moms and how the KKK is like a real estate agent. Every story taught a boring economic principle in a way that made me want more. I realized that Freakonomics was an instruction manual for transforming boring blog posts into sexy must-read masterpieces. Check it out: People love “dot connectors” Our world is getting more complicated by the second. Every day your readers are trying to get a handle on what happened yesterday, what’s happening now, and what will happen tomorrow. If you connect the dots for them, you can get popular in a hurry. Freakonomics is built around connecting dots in an interesting way. For example, it’s long been an economic principle that almost every choice we make is connected to incentives. Pretty boring stuff — until author Steven Levitt used a story about daycare centers to show how some incentives backfire. Since parents were showing up late frequently, the daycare center started a policy of a $3 fine to incentivize parents to show up on time. Unfortunately, the fine wound up incentivizing parents to pay $3 for an hour of babysitting and not feel guilty for showing up late! Giving your reader’s these “aha” moments is a great way to keep them reading a so-called boring topic and have them asking for more. Headlines still matter Even with all of our shiny social media tools, good ol’ standby skills like writing a great headline still matter. You can be a masterful storyteller and write killer posts, but you still lose if no one reads them. Titles are the closest thing us writers have to a “silver bullet.” Don’t waste ‘em. Do you think that Freakonomics would have been a New York Times Bestseller with the title Aberrational Behavior and the Causal Effect of Incentives ? The quickest way to give your boring blog a facelift is to put some eye-hijacking power into your headlines. In fact, write your headline first , before you even start the rest of the post. It’s that important. Numbers are a blogger’s best friend One common complaint of blogs is that they can’t be taken seriously. We are accused of playing fast and loose with the facts and being weak on proof. It’s easy to avoid hard numbers and focus on writing the soft stuff, but Freakonomics shows that this is a mistake. Many bloggers are afraid that statistics, equations, and hard facts will scare away our readers, but that’s not giving our readers enough credit. The problem isn’t the numbers — it’s that we stick numbers out there without a story. Freakonomics uses numbers to reveal a hidden story. Levitt looked up the numbers on standardized tests for Chicago students. On the face of it, this was pretty boring data. This district got such-and-such a score, this district got such-and-such a score. Yawn. Until those numbers revealed that teachers were cheating. In some districts, teachers received salary boosts when their students performed better on standardized tests — motivating them to fill in a few additional correct answers for their students. The story makes the numbers interesting. The numbers make the story credible. Give it a try. Everyone loves a mystery Why would a successful sumo wrestler throw a match? The obvious answer would be that he’s getting paid to do so, but Levitt quickly discovered there was a much more mysterious motivation that drove who won and who lost in Japan’s sumo contests. The answer is buried in psychology, probability, and incentives, but the only thing that I care about is that there’s a mystery. Any mystery begs for gumshoe detective work. We can’t leave well enough alone and we want to know why — especially if someone else is going to do the legwork of figuring out the answer for us. That’s why the CSI series has spun off more offspring than a jackrabbit. You can use this quirk of human nature to make your topic enticing. Look closely at your topic and uncover some old-fashioned mysteries. Now write a post that presents the mystery and leads your reader through the investigation to its incredibly satisfying conclusion. Provide a better way to solve common problems Freakonomics uses a powerful set of tools to explain the way the world works. By the end of the book, you can’t help but think that every problem imaginable can be solved with the right incentive, data analysis, or storytelling. When you’re finished you feel that there is a better way to tackle your problems. This is what “added value” means. Simply restating a problem is boring. Offering new tools and perspectives to solve problems helps your reader get closer to their goals — and that makes you someone whose content they’ll want to read every time you come out with something new. Freakonomics: The Movie is coming out soon, and I’ll be first in line — because reading the book was so valuable to me I can’t wait to see what else the authors have to offer. To get devoted fans who’ll anticipate your every output with the same enthusiasm, give them some solutions. Time to get freaky Have you ever used any of these techniques to make your content sexier? Can you see how to apply some of them to your own blog? And if you read Freakonomics yourself, tell us in the comments about any other blog-enhancing tips you picked up! Stanford obsesses about how to get passionate people’s blogs noticed and promoted at Pushing Social , except when he’s fishing with his boys. Follow him to get the latest about his new ebook “Get Noticed.”

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The Key to Innovative Business Ideas: Cross-Pollination

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Gather round, everyone. It’s time to have “The Talk.” You know the one I mean. You’ve started asking lots of questions and I can tell you’re ready for it, so make yourselves comfortable and let’s go over the basics. Because if you’re in business, you need to know about this. It’s crucial to your success. Mastering this technique will put a spring in your step, and bring new life to your ventures. Plus, it’s actually pretty fun. Birds do it, bees do it The birds and the bees do this naturally, and we can, too. It’s called cross-pollination . They fly from one flower to another, or one tree to the next, picking up bits of one plant and carrying it to the other. The plant on the receiving end of this pollination is hardier and able to reproduce with greater variety. It meets environmental challenges more successfully because it’s genetically diverse. In the same way, when you cross-pollinate ideas, you make your business stronger. You’ll be better able to weather the difficulties that every business and brand has to face to survive. Keeping your eyes open to sources for ideas is the first step. Having a system for gathering and using these ideas is important, too. Really great ideas can be found where you least expect them. Get started here First, the obvious sources. Cross-pollinate your business with innovative new ideas by: Reading books, magazines and websites outside your field. Talking to people in different industries. Find out what their challenges are and how they’ve met them. Ask yourself how you can apply their solutions to your own business. Learning from your customers. Design thinking is a concept that is built around staying in close touch with your customers’ needs, and building your products and services around meeting them. Look for love in all the wrong places You can find great new ideas in places you never expected, too. Get inspiration from your fiercest competition. Your competitors are fighting the same battles you are. What are they doing that you can learn from? How have they solved the same challenges you face? What techniques do they use to succeed? What are some problems they don’t solve particularly well, where you could fill in the gap? Learn from your own failures. The School of Hard Knocks can teach you more than anything else. Look back on your projects and learn from what went wrong, so that you can get it right the next time. Keep the innovative ideas flowing Finally, it’s easier to keep the new ideas flowing in to your business if you have a structure in place that allows cross-pollination to happen on a regular basis. Here are some techniques: Create an informal Board of Directors . Gather a group of 3-5 people who are willing to support your efforts. Meet with them in person or by phone at least four times a year. Update them on your goals, the progress you’re making, and your struggles. Let the ideas flow, and take good notes. Join a Mastermind group . Many groups meet monthly, some more often. Some Chamber of Commerce organizations coordinate them, but you can also find virtual Mastermind groups with a quick web search. The group supports each member, so you’ll both offer and receive encouragement and ideas. Join a virtual private community . Sites like Third Tribe are great places to connect with like-minded people and to generate exciting new business ideas. Consider working with a coach . Because business coaches speak to many different clients, they’ll naturally cross pollinate your conversations with ideas they’ve picked up from helping other people. Small business, big ideas We all want a more resilient business, and a lot of Copyblogger readers have very small organizations. Letting ideas flow freely between your small-scale operation and the larger world will build a business that withstands the challenges of the marketplace. How about you? Are you gathering and applying ideas from all over? Buzz down to the comments and cross-pollinate them with some thoughts of your own. About the Author: Pamela Wilson has been in the same Mastermind group since 2004. She cross pollinates her Big Brand System site with ideas to help small businesses use the power of design to grow.

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The Cure for Analysis Paralysis

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You try to kick someone under the table and your leg stays as inert as the table’s leg. Your toes are unwiggleable. Your eyebrow won’t arch wryly in disdain. You want to make something happen, but that desire isn’t translating into movement. Your muscles don’t obey the signals from your brain. That’s paralysis. Analysis is pretty much the same thing. You analyze your business all the time. You decide that it would be smart to start an email campaign, or change the direction for your blog posts. You decide whether to run a promotion for your consulting business or launch an information product. You’re thinking about something happening. But you’re not making it happen. When analysis paralysis is beneficial It turns out that sometimes it’s good to be paralyzed. Every night, when you go to sleep and drop deep into that REM state that lets you wake up all refreshed in the morning, you are, medically speaking, paralyzed. This is a good thing. When you get tired, your ability to act is impaired. You’re more likely to get lost, to drive poorly, to call the ex you swore you’d never speak to again. Get paralyzed by sleep for a couple of hours, and suddenly everything improves. When your spouse throws the car keys at you a little too hard because they haven’t forgiven you for calling your ex last night, you catch them effortlessly with catlike reflexes. Analysis can be like this. Sometimes we have too much going on in our businesses. It can help to take a moment to stop everything and hold completely still, moving nothing but our brains, just thinking about the problem. We don’t have to take action yet. We don’t have to move a muscle. We just have to think about what we’ll do when we’re ready to move. Analysis can be a refreshing pause for our brains. It can also be a serious problem. When analysis paralysis Is detrimental The kind of paralysis you experience in REM state every night is good for you. You probably didn’t even know you were paralyzed. (If you weren’t freaking out about it before, don’t start now. Whatever you do, don’t think about the xkcd comic that points out that dreaming means going comatose, hallucinating vividly, and then suffering amnesia. Adding paralysis to that list doesn’t sound so bad now, does it?) It’s okay for your legs (and the rest of you) to be paralyzed for a couple hours a night. If it goes on for more than a day, though, you’re going to start to be pretty concerned about some of the logistics. Analysis can be like this, too. When you’ve taken the time to hold still and analyze your business for a couple of hours — even a full working day — before you take action, that’s perfectly healthy. It has probably improved your ability to move forward confidently and with good judgment. If you find yourself analyzing for weeks or months at a time without moving, it’s time to be concerned. How to cure analysis paralysis To cure real paralysis, you generally need the sort of miracle doctor featured prominently in many a popular medical drama, but not so prominently in real-life hospitals. To cure analysis paralysis, though, you just need to check out the recent Third Tribe seminar featuring Sonia Simone and Chris Garrett , where they talk about how to take action on that product launch you’ve been meaning to do, thinking about, analyzing, and never doing. You’ll learn: The product development technique that kills paralysis, moves you to a fast launch, and creates great value for your customers Why “thinking big” can stop you dead in your tracks, and how to get moving again How to use your own “weaknesses” as strengths that move you forward What to do if you don’t have thick skin (and how it can work to your benefit) How to create products that move your customers farther and faster toward their goals. While you’re listening, you’ll find yourself analyzing how to use these techniques in your business. You may also find yourself lulled into a soporific state of bliss, because Sonia’s voice is extremely soothing. And that’s okay. To make sure you don’t get stuck there, though, there’s a Next Action worksheet to help you move forward. Use it. Make your business stronger through movement. Otherwise, I’d have to explain what “atrophy” means. And no one wants that. About the Author: Taylor Lindstrom is a freelance copywriter and the new Assistant Editor for Copyblogger . This is her first Copyblogger post. P.S. To snag Chris and Sonia’s interview, and instant access to 15 more cutting-edge seminars that will move your business forward (with new seminars added every month), join the Third Tribe today .

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