Today, I took a day trip to the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site, the Val-Kill Cottage near Poughkeepsie, NY.
On the plane ride back from Taiwan, one of the movies I watched was The Founder (2016), the Ray Kroc and McDonald’s story. I highly recommend it.
Here are random lessons I took away from the movie:
I caught this absolutely beautiful bit of foreshadowing from Robin Black a few months back. There was something magical about it, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. So I saved the interview and kinda forgot about it.
It wasn’t until recently I connected the dots when reading other old interviews.
This first interview they recorded a day before Conor McGregor knocked out Jose Aldo in a record 13 seconds.
Robin is talking about how certain fighters have learned to adapt to Jose Aldo’s leg kicks. Basically, you have to keep your weight off your front foot.
It gets interesting when he points out that Conor probably WON’T do that, and why (around the 2-minute mark):
OK, well that solves that problem, but it also creates a whole bunch of new problems that we don’t normally deal with.
And takes away all these great things that we do.
And I know philosophically that they do not adapt for you. They make you adapt for them.
That’s SBG, that was Coach Kavanagh, who I’m a big fan of his thinking. And so they will not be dealing with that.
I love crunchy, tactical how-to articles. We know we SHOULD:
- Network more
- Ask for a raise
- Build our brand
Fine… show me “how” to do it. (It’s no wonder I’ve spent 3 years working with Ramit Sethi, who is one of the masters of teaching people the “how.”)
So when Gary Vaynerchuk walked through how to do business development on Instagram, I broke down the examples (“the how”) and the principles (“the why”).
Then I posted it below. (You can listen to the whole audio here.)
Here we go:
How to Biz Dev Through Instagram Direct Message
Example 1 – Plumbers
Let’s say you want to sell websites to plumbers. You go right up here. You hit send message.
And then here is the key, the key here is to jab, jab, jab, right hook.
[blockquote]
Love what you’re doing.
Would love to be able to bring you some value are you doing anything around marketing?
Let me know.
Have a great day.
XOXO, heart.
[/blockquote]
Send.
Theory 1 – Hand-to-hand combat
Here’s the key.
What I just did is something that I’ve been doing for years.
Back in 2006 and 7, Twitter, I would do that except I would reply publicly ’cause it was a different platform–different cadences–different acceptable social norms.
The thing that blows me away is how many of you are so hungry.
How many of you are asking for how do you do things and the reality is it’s very simple. It’s hand to hand combat. It’s business development. It’s handing out virtual business cards, but the reality is so many of you don’t want to do it, cause it’s hard.
What I just did if you’re hungry–if you want to win–you have to do for 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, hours a day.
Example 2 – Fitness
Ok, the fitness hashtag. You know only 168 million. Breaks it into top posts and most recent .
So, you go to a top post. He’s go 546 thousand people right. I see he’s a musician and he’s a band–but let’s say–and he’s in Cairo.
Let’s just say for whatever reason I want to do product placement and I have a new shake or energy drink or hoodies.
Or for example, this is what everybody should be doing with me if they want me to wear their sneakers or their beanies–I wear beanies; I wear hoodies; I wear sneakers.
I would hit this person up–I would hit them up and say:
[blockquote]
Zap, love what you do.
Would love to connect.
Or, would love to send you my favorite wines if I was in the wine business.
Or, would love to make 3 to 4 videos for your Instagram account on me.
Or, would love to send your friends some beef jerky.
[/blockquote]
Theory 2 – “I would like to give you”
And that’s the key, it’s “or” and “I would like to give you.”
What I get all day is–Gary can you give me a shout out on my account? Gary can you make me famous? Gary can you do this? Gary can you do that?
I’ve got the leverage not you. If you’re asking, you don’t have the leverage. So, anytime I’m hitting somebody up regardless of whether I’m bigger or smaller than them –I’m asking. So, I’m trying to give them love. Right?
That’s the key. People don’t give love. When we’re hitting up other artists–both hip hop–what have you–we’re trying to give them love. Hey we’d love to give you exposure. Would you like to give us the opportunity. Everybody is trying to — like last night, I hit up a couple of people that followed me that are really really big and they both replied to me.
The key is providing other people more value. I just don’t see people doing it. It blows me away and it is absolutely going down on Instagram DM. The key is do you know how to jab, jab, jab, right hook on Instagram DM.
Search hashtags, click them. Look at the account then see how you can bring them value. DM them. Go in soft. Bring value. Rinse and repeat–two, three, four, five thousand times.
Theory 3 – Biz dev is a pillar of success
Business development, it’s one of the pillars of my success.
The reason I’m good at business development is I try to bring more value to the other person first. It’s always gonna be the same thing. Fifty years of content–it’s going to say the same thing. Provide the other person with more value. Right? More value than they give you.
If someone has a million followers and you want them to give a shout out to your work, you stuff, you need to overwhelm them with value first.
Example 3 – Hip hop
So, let’s say you do, let’s say you love hip hop –let’s say and let’s say you love Chance the rapper, right?
So, you go to Chance the rapper. The guy’s got 2.9 million followers. He’s getting hit up a million times a day. When you send him a thing:
[blockquote]
Chance I make videos.
I’ll make you the best Instagram videos for free for an entire year.
Your account will go to 7 million let alone 2.9.
I won’t bother you. I’ll just work. I’ll need access at times but you control that. Let me know.
Look at my work on my Insta.
Much love.
[/blockquote]
Over and over and over.
Gotta make sure your Instagram account is on point. If you got that, if he or one of his boys actually look at it or somebody’s who’s controlling the account, they need to see those videos and think they’re fire. That’s the key, but you go over and over.
Man you should do this 15 times a day 24 times a day.
Example 4 – Manny the Barber
So, the thing Manny should do is go upper east side, right, so he’s going by location and so he sees top posts right.
Well this looks like an account. I guess this is a blogger. I’m trying to see–it looks like she’s just visiting and keep looking, right. Keep looking at most recent.
Keep looking–good-it looks like this guy took a picture–a selfie on the upper east side. Comes here–he’s got 41 thousand followers–he looks like a model.
So, Manny should go here: Send message.
[blockquote]
Hey G.
Thrilled to give you five free haircuts over the next six months.
Let me know if you’re interested.
[/blockquote]
This is what Manny should do to get–Manny sits here on Tuesday from 2:30 to 3:30 while he’s waiting for a client and he sits on his fucking ass.
And instead, what he should be doing — he should be going into Instagram searching the upper east side and DMing people 20, 30, 40 times a day offering free haircuts, cause he just started his business.
He needs exposure. He shouldn’t even ask that model that has 46 thousand followers to make a–he shouldn’t even say in the first contact–Hey, I’ll give you a free haircut–you give me a shout out. Because then that person knows that he’s just doing it for that.
It’s jab, jab, jab, without the right hook.
He should just say, I like your Instagram account; I just opened my barber shop; I’d like to give you six free haircuts or two or whatever you know–I don’t know how busy Manny is right now.
Over the next three months guy comes –even if he never asks–I went to Manny for two years–he never asked me then I took the picture on the Snapchat that and you build a relationship.
Theory 4 – Hustling on Instagram DM is the 2017 Opportunity
When doing the right thing you always do the right thing, but to me it’s — I think about it like sawdust. If you’ve got down time, why not business develop.
The fact that you can business develop through this thing now is insane and if you offer something in return, three out of 30 people will take you up on it. He may not but the next person might and then you business develop and business develop and things start happening.
Hustling 24/7 on the Instagram DM; it is the 2017 opportunity.
My Takeaways
- Don’t be romantic about the medium. Hand-to-hand combat used to work on email. As Hiten Shah points out, it used to work on Twitter, too. Now the attention is on Instagram, Snapchat
- Do things that don’t scale. People who I admire who are great at this: Ramit Sethi (reads all his email and responds to a crazy amount), Sumeet Sahni (replies to every comment on Instagram and Snapchat), and of course, Gary Vaynerchuk
- Offline ← → Online. Start thinking how each works with the other, and where the intersections lie.
(Looking for more? Here are my notes from Gary’s interview about the Advertising Industry.)
Photo Credit: MaxDeVa
Damn, Gary Vaynerchuk gets me fired up.
Here’s an interview he did about the state of the Advertising Industry.
I loved this so much, I asked a VA to transcribe it for me, so I don’t have to relisten for the nuggets.
Major theme: Be the one to put yourself out of business. If you don’t someone will do it for you.
Business that killed businesses
- Craigslist killed classifieds
- Dollar Shave Club should have been done by Gillette
- Business Insider should have been created by WSJ
- Sports Illustrated or ESPN should have built Bleacher Report
- Conde Nast → Refinery29
- Marriott → AirBnb
- Why did IBM let Microsoft happen?
- Why did Microsoft let Google happen?
- Why did Google let Facebook happen?
- Why did Woolworth’s let Sears happen?
- Why did Sears let Kmart happen
- Why did Kmart let Walmart happen?
- Why did Walmart let Amazon happen?
Favorite quotes
“This is capitalism. This is historical. What happens is we wake up one day and major media companies that we grew up with are gone.”
“The Wall Street Journal and Sports Illustrated and USA Today and the New York Post, they killed somebody else too. We’re just living through it now as mature adults when it’s happening to them.”
Want the full thing?
- Go listen on SoundCloud
- Download the podcast episode.
- Or read the transcript below (bolding mine).
Enjoy!
I imagine most cyclists pump Skrillex or Sevendust through their headphones during their rides.
Currently, for me it’s a choice between Katy Perry’s new album PRISM or Seth Godin’s Medicine Ball Sessions. I chose the latter today because I can turn on the former when I get to work.
The Medicine Ball Sessions clarified this sense of urgency I’ve been having in the pit of my stomach. At one point, I attributed the urgency to my age and societal pressure and the effects of social media. I thought:
- At this age I should have more affect on the world
- I should be ready to start thinking about marriage and family
- Why is everyone on Facebook having more fun than me?
Not that these emotions and feelings weren’t real.
But they didn’t fully encompass the range of emotions I felt about my work and career.
It’s more nuanced than age
It’s subtler than how fast one can ascend the ladder in an industry.
After listening to Medicine Ball Sessions, I realized the urgency came from the speed at which entire industries rise and fall… so anytime we waste in a career space that isn’t “right” for us is dramatically heightened.
In other words, it’s not so much the race up the ladder, as much as choosing the right ladder to climb.
Here’s the part that resonated with me (transcribed with ease thanks to Transcribe, by wreally):
“The record industry was perfect. There were a lot of reasons. I’ll name a few. If I bought an LP because I liked it a lot, I would wear it out. So I’d have to buy another one.
If I loaned it to her, I don’t have it anymore, so I have to buy another one. If I have to buy another one, I have to get in my car and drive to a store.
In my car, I turn on the radio, the only thing to do in the car, and the radio, is devoted almost entirely to promoting this product, which the record industry doesn’t have to pay for, not legally anyone.
Then I get to the store, which the record industry doesn’t have to pay for, and the store has 100s or thousands of titles all in big containers, vying for my attention. So I might buy more than 1 when I’m there.
Then I get home, and my high school kid is going to the senior prom. The senior prom is not about shoes, it’s not about industrial equipment, it’s about music.
Then, I check my mail, there’s Rolling Stone magazine, all about the music industry.
Then I turn on MTV, an entire cable network devoted to this perfect industry. Oh, and if you want to start a music career, you need $100K to get into a recording studio because there’s limited means of production, you can’t afford that so you better do a deal with a record company if you want distribution through Tower Records.
You can’t do that by yourself, you better have a record label to do it, and radio, and on and on. The record label gets to keep all that money.
There’s only six or eight big record labels so it’s an oligopoly, there’s a lot of price-fixing, and its perfect…
Money, money, money. Consistent, planned. Show me the map, I know the artist will change, but the method doesn’t.
Then you all know what happened. How long did it take? 36 months? For the record industry to go from perfect to broke.
There’s more music than ever before, performed by more people than ever before, listened to more people than ever before, more widely available than ever before, but the music industry — gone. 3 years, maybe 5, that’s it. Over. That’s what happens.
Revolutions destroy the perfect, and then they enable the impossible. And it’s going to happen to your industry, whatever you do.”
What’s the “Right” Industry For You?
We can define “right” many number of ways:
- Is your education taking drastic jumps every day?
- Are you surrounded by the best people in your industry?
- Are you leveraging the most impact you can have at your current level?
What Are the Excuses We Give Not To Leave
They all come back to complacency and comfort. We’re comfortable with:
- The work required from us on a daily basis
- Giving 70% of what we’re capable of because that’s enough to get by
- With a steady paycheck that lands every two weeks, like clockwork
We tell ourselves, why rock the boat? We’ve got a good thing going. I can take my time, because this job and this market isn’t going anywhere.
This is Where We’re Wrong
Just because we’re relevant today doesn’t make us relevant tomorrow.
The record industry proves that just because an industry is perfect yesterday doesn’t mean it won’t be a shell of its former glory tomorrow.
The world changes quickly.
If we’re already not happy with the work we’re doing, things will get worse faster than we think.
If we’re complacent to plod along, moving without urgency, how will we remain relevant in whatever version of the world that exists after the fallout?
If we’re complaining that “no one’s giving us the opportunity to succeed” but we’re not creating our own opportunities… well, why should they?
Photo Credit: serakatie
I’ve upped biking to work to 3x’s a week – which has been freaking fantastic for clarity of mind, but made it tough to listen to self-development shiz at the same quantity as before. I did find time to slip in this short interview last week: it’s Marie Forleo* interviewing Ramit Sethi on her show, about selling. My notes below as usual. The main message is a good one, and both Ramit and Marie lay out great examples: niche down on “who is your customer?” like a motherf*cker. Ask “who are you targeting?” and “who aren’t you targeting?”
01:35 – “One of the things you’ll find is that we’re not specific enough, with who we’re going after and what your product does. For example, I have a course called Earn 1K on the side… It took us 6 months to get that name.”
02:24 – He breaks down why he chose the name “Earn 1K on the Side”:
Earn 1K – many successful students earned more than that, but he set a goal that people would find achievable.
On the Side – to combat the idea you’d need to start the next Google or quit their day jobs if they wanted to start their own business.
03:21 – “Alot of your students are using very similar phrases, and are in the relationship or financial area… and not many of them were as specific as they could have been. If you are trying to help your customers with their relationships, who are you targeting? When I asked this question, many people said, ‘women.’ That’s not specific! How old are they? They said, ’25 to 54′. Okay, there is virtually nothing identical to a 25-year-old woman to a 54-year-old woman. In fact, if you’re talking about love, they think of love totally different. What if they went to an Ivy League college? She thinks of love differently. You have to get really specific. For example, I’m targeting 24-to-29-year-old women who are interested in X,Y,Z and this is what they’re doing.”
04:27 – “The second question to ask is, ‘Who am I not targeting?’ That brings us to a whole other question, on why we don’t get specific.”
04:50 – MF “Not drilling down, not getting specific, from a business and marketing perspective, is shooting yourself in the foot.”
04:59 – “In a world of infinite choices, when you see something that is not directly for you, you close the window and move on. When you try to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one.”
06:38 – “Put yourself in the mind of your client. If they’re 24, what language do they use, what are they looking for, how much are they going to be willing to pay? When you can reach directly to what they want, you’ll find that not only will your clients be happier, but your business will dramatically grow because price will become a mere triviality. You’re actually solving a problem by getting specific.”
07:45 – “So they want to empower women to live the life of their dreams? Okay, let me tell you five ways… buy a nicer shirt, better haircut, nicer car, make more money, find the life partner they deserve… Okay? So are you selling cars or are you selling shirts? What exactly is it that you’re selling? Empowering is a good word, but it’s so general, without additional positioning it’s meaningless. What happens is, we’ll look at really large companies and say, wait a minute, Coca-Cola is selling happiness! Well they’ve been around for a 100 years and they have a multimillion dollar market cap. People know what Coca-Cola represents. When you’re starting out, no one knows who you are.”
09:07 – “One of the best things you can do when you’re getting specific is to show three or four testimonials of before and after. P90x does this really well. You see ultimate specificity.”
I remember listening to David Siteman-Garland interview Marie Forleo on The Rise to the Top. She was telling him that her production value used to awful, a far cry from the polish it has now. That’s how you get started though… put out what you can, slowly develop your skill sets, and build upon what you created yesterday.
Photo Credit: Jared Goralnick
Work has been giving me an emotional beat down with fists wrapped in quarters lately. Last month, I’ve nearly torn out my eyebrows over the bullshit monotony of scheduling, rescheduling, and emailing. It’s an assistant’s mental equivalent of “I-pick-stuff-up-I-put-stuff-down.” At the end of a day, I’ve spent 90 percent of my time pushing around paper, minus the paper.
This isn’t a rant against who I work for, my role, or my industry. I understand this shit has to get done, and why I’m the one shoveling it. My “win-days” have become those when I manage to carve out 30 minutes of my own to do Deep Study of Literary Option Agreements. For example, last week I sat down and studied Force Majeure and Claim Extension language until I understood it.
Typically my eyes rolled into the back of my head every time I reached any Force Majeure language. Now I understand that while a claim can be capped at 12 months (meaning someone has 12 months to sue or get off the pot) once a claim enters litigation an Option is suspended until it’s settled or litigated — there is no cap.
Everyday, people must engage in an emotional joust against the minutiae. Is there any question to why people stop caring about creating extraordinary work? Apathy is the result of getting ground down by the bullshit tasks we endure, and there are two ways it’s going to go:
You either let it stomp you flat.
Or you grind back.
Surrounding myself with self-development helps with the latter.
I finished PURPLE COW by Seth Godin. A remarkable book about being remarkable, covering facets from nearly every industry (though, now that I think about it, I’m not sure if entertainment was covered). Nonetheless, it’s something to inoculate us in our quest to develop into who we want to be and achieve our own goals.
As always, below are noteworthy sections from the book. Bolding is mine.
Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing right into your product or service. Not slapping on marketing as a last-minute add-on, but understand that if your offering itself isn’t remarkable, it’s invisible.
The new rule is: Create remarkable products that the right people seek out.
The marketer of yesterday valued the volume of people she could reach. Mass marketing traditionally targets the early and late majority because this is the largest group. But in many markets, the value of a group isn’t related to its size — a group’s value is related to its influence. In this market, for example, the early adopters heavily influence the rest of the curve, so persuading them is worth far more than wasting ad dollars trying to persuade anyone else.
I don’t think there’s a shortage of remarkable ideas. I think your business has plenty of great opportunities to do great things. Nope, what’s missing isn’t the ideas. It’s the will to execute them. My goal in PURPLE COW is to make it clear that it’s safer to be risky – to fortify your desire to do truly amazing things… One of the best excuses your colleagues will come up with, though, is that they don’t have the ability to find the great idea, or if they do, they don’t know how to distinguish the great idea from the lousy ones.
If a product’s future is unlikely to be remarkable — if you can’t imagine a future in which people are once again fascinated by your product – it’s time to realize that the game has changed. Instead of investing in a dying product, take profits and reinvest them in building something new.
It’s not an accident that some products catch on and some don’t. When an idea virus occurs, it’s often because all the viral pieces work together. How smooth and easy is it to spread your idea? How often will people sneeze it to their friends? How tightly knit is the group you’re targeting – do they talk much? Do they believe each other? How reputable are the people most likely to promote your idea?
Cheating
- Jetblue – low-cost structure and underused airports give them unfair adv
- Starbucks
- Vanguard – low-cost index funds makes it impossible for a full-service broker to compete
- Ducati – they don’t make motorcycles for the entire market, they can specialize in high-profit, amazing bikes, which sell out every year
- To their entrenched but nervous competitors, these companies appear to be cheating because they’re not playing by the rules. Why aren’t you cheating?
It’s easy to look at the idea diffusion curve and decide that the juicy, profitable, wonderful place to be is right in the center, where all the people are. However, that’s rarely true. Often, the valuable slices are located to one side or the other. What this bank might realize is that b focusing on these innovative customers, the bank may be able to bring in even more highly profitable risk-seeking customers, leaving the slow and declining sector to seek other (less profitable) banks. Differentiate your customers. Find the group that’s most profitable or most likely to sneeze. Figure out how to develop/advertise/reward either group. Ignore the rest.
We’ve been raised with a false belief: We mistakenly believe that criticism leads to failure. From the time we get to school, we’re taught that being noticed is almost always bad. It gets us sent to the principal’s office, not to Harvard. Nobody says, “Yeah, I’d like to set myself up for some serious criticism!” And yet… the only way to be remarkable is to do just that. You do not equal the project. Criticism of the project is not criticism of you. The fact that we needed to be reminded of this points to how unprepared we are for the era of the Cow. Will you do some things wrong in your career and be justly criticized for being unprepared, sloppy, or thoughtless? Sure you will. But these errors have nothing at all to do with the ups and downs you’ll experience as a result of being associated with the Purple Cow.
Lionel Poilane: French bread baker who did extensive research, interviewed more than 8,000 French bakes about their techniques. His sourdough bread is are with just loud, water, starter, and sea salt, and it’s baked in a wood-fired oven. At first, the French establishment rejected his products, considering them too daring and different. But the overwhelming quality of the loaves and Poilane’s desire to do it right finally won them over. Last year, Lionel sold more than $10 million worth of bread.
A the same time, the marketplace is getting faster and more fluid. Yes, we’re too busy to pay attention, but a portion of the population is more restless than ever. Some people are happy to switch their long distance service, their airline, their accounting from — whatever it takes to get an edge. So while fewer people attempt to become the Cow, the rewards for being remarkable continue to increase! At work is the ability of a smaller portion of eager experimenters to influence the rest us. It’s too easy to sit out the next round, rationalizing that you’re spending the time and energy to build on what you’ve got instead of investing in the future.
The opposite of “remarkable” is very good. Very good is an everyday occurrence hardly worth mentioning.
The Magic Cycle of the Cow – it’s the sneezers we care about:
- Get permission from people you impressed the first time to alert them the next time you might have another cow. Not permission to spam them or sell them leftovers or squeeze extra margins from them.
- Work with the sneezers in that audience to make it easier for them to help your idea cross the chasm. Give them the tools (and the story) they’ll need to sell your idea to a winder audience.
- Once you’re crossed the line from remarkable to profitable business, let a different team milk it. Productize your services, servicize your products, let a thousand variations bloom. But don’t believe your own press releases. This is the inevitable downward slide to commodity. Milk it for all it’s worth, and fast.
- Reinvest. Do it again. With a vengeance. Launch another Purple Cow to the same audience. Fail and fail and fail again. Assume that what was remarkable a last time won’t be remarkable this time.
Where does remarkable come from? Often, it comes from passionate people who are making something for themselves. The Burton snowboard, the Vanguard mutual fund, the Apple iPod, and the Learjet, Starbucks coffee, people working at Patagonia.
Robyn waters is the person who persuaded Michael Graves to make a teapot for Target. She’s the one who searches out amazing cheap (but cool) flatware, and little pens with float in targets in them. Instead of spending time and money trying to buy market share with a advertising, Target has realized that b offering exclusive items that would be cool a any price — but that are amazing when they’re cheap – they can win without a big ad budget. If a big-box retailer like Target can obliterate Sears and Kmart, what’s stopping you from being many degrees cooler than your bigger competitors?
Photos Credit: Dallas Moore
I finished Dennis Lehane’s MOONLIGHT MILE recently. It’s disheartening to say, but I felt he didn’t bring his A-game on this one. It was as if he tried so hard to be relevant, to cover every iota of modern day society, from adoption to Twitter to unemployment, that he lost sight of the razor sharp characterizations that made Patrick and Angie novels so enticing.
I can’t say I’m the foremost expert on Dennis’s writings, though I’d like to think I’m in a pretty good position to comment on his work — at least in the top 5 percentile of “critics who should keep their opinions to themselves but can’t help sharing anyway.”
Having read LIVE BY NIGHT, THE GIVEN DAY, DARKNESS TAKE MY HAND, and A DRINK BEFORE THE WAR, I’m slowly working through his body of work in the novel form.
But I’ve readhis short story, ANIMAL RESCUE. The film adaptation which recently wrapped production in Brooklyn, starring Tom Hardy and Noomi Rapace. I’ve also read every draft of the screenplay.
THE CONSUMERS, another Lehane short, I’ve read. I also read the treatment that Dennis allowed a young, up-and-coming writer to write. I read another person’s script adaptation of another short story, RUNNING OUT OF DOG.
I’ve read the spec pilot for MOONLIGHT MILE, which he co-wrote. I’ve read his proposals, when his ideas are still raw and incubating, and watched them not so much as grow into treatments and scripts, but explode off the page like a hormonal teenager on the brink of puberty. I’ve read Dennis at every stage, which is why I can respectfully say, this wasn’t his best.
So what’s the takeaway?
That LIVE BY NIGHT, which is probably one of his best works, he wrote after MOONLIGHT MILE. The point is it doesn’t matter what you created yesterday, what you create today is how you’re be measured. Every new project is your opportunity to find your A-game.
My notes on the book below after the hashtags, which mostly consist of choice language that Dennis used, but first, a quick plug for piece of audio I’ve been listening to, Bryan Elliott’s interview with Seth Godin and their discussion of Seth’s new book, ICARUS DECEPTION. As with most of Seth’s material, if you’re an artist, you should check it out:
“Hey, Patrick.” The breeze was sharper up top and she dealt with it by burrowing into a flimsy jean jacket, the collar pulled up to her earlobes.
“You look good,” she said.
“You, too.”
“It’s nice of you to lie,” she said.
“I wasn’t,” I lied.
The lines in her face were deep enough to hide gravel in. She had the air of someone clinging to a wall of soap
Monument High was the kind of school where kids studied math by counting their shell casings.
Beatrice watched them go and their happiness shrank her. She looked light enough for the breeze to toss her down the stairs.
I exited South Station and shook my arms and legs… I walked over to Two Interantional place, a skyscraper as sleek and heartless as an ice pick. Here, on the twenty-eighth floor, sat the officesof Duhamel-Standiford Global.
DS didn’t’ tweet. They didn’t have a blog or pop up on the right side of a Google screen when someone typed in “private investigation greater Boston.” Not to be found in the Yellow Pages, on the back of Security and You magazine, or begging for your business at two AM between commercials for Thighmaster 6000 and 888-GalPals. Most of the city had never heard of them. Their advertising budget amounted to the same number every quarter: 0.
And they’d been in business for 170 years.
They occupied half of the 28th floor of Two International. The windos facing east overlooked the harbor. Those facing north peered down on the city.
After I was buzzed through that door, I entered a wide anteroom with ice-white walls. The only things hanging… frost glass… it made you want to put on your coat.
Behind the sole desk in the vast anteroom sat a man who’d outlived everyone who could remember at time he hadn’t sat there
He buzzed me through the next set of doors. Dove-gray carpet.
Dent carried whatever had chased him out of the service like a nail in the back of his neck.
“I’ll kill you just for being short,” Bubba said.
While I’d slept, someone had seeded the folds of my brain with red pepper and glass.
She nodded. It was barely a question, really. Angie could tell Bubba she needed him yesterday in Kathmandu and he’d remind her that he was already there.
I flicked the dead cigarette butt from the center of my palm as Violeta Borzakov said, “Kirill, you’re blocking the TV.”
Photos Credit: ALA The American Library Association
As I mentioned, I’ve been reading Sheryl Sandberg’s LEAN IN. There are parts that feel too much like a gender studies class (though, what did I expect?) but there are more than plenty of insights into the mind of Facebook’s COO for us to apply at work and at home. This is doubly true if both partners in a relationship (I hate to use the phrase, “Type-A”) have ambitious career trajectories.
My highlights below, with my notes in italics.
We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in.
*how many times in a pitch, or in talking to someone, did I feel this way? The moment I felt like I may be imposing, I pulled back. Lean in more.
I rarely heard anything, however, about the ways I might hold myself back. These internal obstacles deserve a lot more attention.
*her message is: work on yourself, too. It’s not just the institution. Work on what you can control and it’ll reflect in the world around you. Similar to what Ramit says about getting a job — don’t focus on the state of the economy. Focus on how you can have good skills and can convey your value.
I do not believe that there is one definition of success or happiness. Not all women want career. Not all women want children. Not all women want both.
*After discussion with Amy: having an equal 50-50 split on household chores or whatever, isn’t what’s important. Instead, focus on having a common goal. Working towards a common purpose and both people having a clear understanding what that is and working towards. Also, respect and gratitude for the work that the other person does.
I have heard these criticisms in the past and I know that I will hear them — and others — in the future. My hope is that my message will be judged on its merits. We can’t avoid this conversation. This issue transcends all of us.
*On dealing with criticism. You will deal with it, because your message will not resonate with everyone. But you can only hope that the message will be judged on its merits, no more no less.
By the age of twenty-five, I had managed to get married… and also divorced. At the time, this felt like a massive personal and public failure. For many years, I del that no matter what I accomplished professionally, it paled in comparison to the scarlet letter D stitched on my chest.
*She suffered this major personal failure (in her eyes) at such an early age, yet she learned to overcome it.
pg. 46 “Damn it, Sheryl! Why are you going to make less than any man would make to do the same job?”
On how Sheryl wrapped her head around the idea that she needed to negotiate against Zuckerberg during her FB negotiations.
pg. 51 Mark and I sat down for my first formal review. One of the things he told me was that my desire to be liked by everyone would old me back. He said that when you want to change things, you can’t please everyone. If you do please everyone, you aren’t making enough progress. Mark was right.
pg. 54 Sheryl discusses her career trajectory which is pretty interesting
pg. 58 Eric Schmidt covered my spreadsheet with his hand and told me not to be an idiot. Then he explained that only one criterion mattered when picking a job — fast growth. When companies grow quickly, there are more things to do than there are people to do them. When companies grow slowly or stop growing, there is less to do and too many people to not be doing them.
First and most important, I set targets for what my team can accomplish. Second, I try to set more personal goals for learning new skills in the next eighteen months. It’s often painful, but I ask myself, “How can I improve?”
Oprah Winfrey once explained, “I mentor when I see something and say, ‘I want to see that grow.'”
The men were focusing on how to manage a business, and the women were focusing on how to manage a career.
We need to stop telling them, “Get a mentor and you will excel.” Instead, we need to tell them, “Excel and you will get a mentor.”
Every so often, Clara Sihih would contact me, always with an interesting point or a thoughtful question. She never asked to get together to “catch up.”
Josh Steiner told me to figure out what I wanted to do before I went to see the people who had the ability to hire me. That way I wouldn’t waste my one shot seeking general guidance, but would be able to discuss specific opportunities that they could offer.
pg. 77 On communication
Molly Graham’s approach: Molly joined FB in 2008 and held a number of jobs throughout the company in communications, human resources, and mobile products. She performed extraordinarily well in all of these very different trolls because she is always learning… I praised her effort. She paused and said, “Thanks, but you must have ideas for me on what more I could have done.”
“How can I do better?”
“What am I doing that I don’t know?”
“What am I not doing that I don’t see?”
I understand how easy it is tostop asking yourself this question. You get frustrated with your bosses and your work.
Which is why if you’re even doing this just once a month, for the rest of your career, how much more of an impact will you have over the next person?
pg. 99 Leaving work force statistics
pg. 105 “How is Dave? Is he okay with, you know, all your [whispering] success?”
pg. 126 “up until the day they left, they did everything McKinsey asked of them before deciding that it was too much. Larry implored us to exert more control over our careers. He said McKinsey would never stop making demands on our time, so it was up to us to decide what we were willing to do. It was our responsibility to draw the line.”
pg. 131, General Colin Powell “rejects busy bastards… In every senior job I’ve had I’ve tried to create an environment of professionalism and the very highest standards. When it was necessary to get a job done, I expected my subordinates to work around the clock. When that was not necessary, I wanted them to work normal hours, go home at a decent time, play with the kids… I am paying them for the quality of their work, not for the hours they work.
pg. 134 Stay-at-home Mom statistics. In 1975 SaH Mom spent 11 hours / week with kids. Today, a working mother spends that much time, and a SaH spends 18 hours with kids / week.
pg. 146 Inside FB, few people noticed my TEDTalk, and those who did responded positively. But outside of FB, the criticism started to roll in. ‘Why are you giving more speeches on women’s issues than on FB?’ ‘This is your thing now?’
If you do anything different, criticism will roll in. Accept that idea now. Just accept that the criticism is going to come in, so that you can go back to doing important work.
Photo Credit: Dan Farber