More than Money

Self-motivation is worth more than money
If you have the MONEY to hire the best advisors, but lack the motivation to actually use their advice, you will quickly lose the money. However, the person with the self-motivation to take intelligent action can have as much money as he or she is committed to earning. This is why people can go from rags to riches and why many rich people, end up not only broke – but broken.

In my business, I work hard to avoid people, who want to hire me as their marketing coach, just so we can have lots of interesting conversations. This is because I know that unless someone is motivated enough to get off their butt and work with the ideas and answers I provide to them, they won’t achieve anything. However, a self-motivated person working to a great plan, is simply unstoppable!

Faith is worth more than money
No matter how rich a person is financially, if they lack faith in; them self, their spouse, their friends, their company or product etc – they won’t feel very wealthy. Personally, I find that during the crunch times in life, and we ALL have those times, it’s also great to have faith in something that’s bigger than we are. In my case, that’s faith in God.

It’s impossible to move forward, unless we have faith in others and ourselves; from faith that the brakes on your car will work, to faith that if you work hard enough doing the right things, your business plans will work.

Knowledge is worth more than money
If someone dumps a million or two into Bob’s bank account, he better quickly learn how to be a millionaire! Otherwise, Bob won’t be a millionaire very long.

The reason lottery companies provide financial experts to work with the lottery winners, who win the major prizes, is that they were worried about all the negative stories, of multi-million lottery winners, who went broke and often ended up with less than they started with. That’s because money without knowledge, tends to disappear very quickly. A fool and his money, and all that! Of course, many lottery winners still went broke after getting great financial advice, because they lacked the self-motivation to use what they were told.

My mentor, the late Jim Rohn, used to say that the real value of building a million dollar business is NOT the million dollars. It’s the learning and knowledge we acquire earning that fortune. Take a million away from a millionaire, who made that money themselves, and they can make another million. This has been proven again and again to be true.

Levels of Participation

1. Consult
This is when the mass market looks at your content, accessing it most likely through a search. In the same way we consult a brochure for information, people consult websites for information. This person is not part of your community and not a regular reader or participant.

This is important to clarify, as most blogs are designed and written for those who consume their content on a regular basis. I’ll be quite honest – if the above, non-regular mass market person visited my website, it would not be so easy to get around. I need to sort that out and make it ‘consult friendly.’

To provide a consult level of participation, you must focus on making it findable, and useable to first time visitors.

2. Consume
In the same way we regularly consume food, this is where we enter some form of regular readership. Regular is the key word here. For early adopters, this is easy – we get our readers to plug the feed into their reader. But for the majority, we have to think of simpler ways to deliver regular content to their door step. (Remember: the door step might not be email, or even Facebook for some people.)

The distinction between consult and consume is frequency. Consultations are few and far between, based on need. Consumption is regular, first based on interest and then based on ongoing usefulness and a certain degree of loyalty and trust.

To provide a consume level of participation, you must provide regular content (whatever your content is) and make return visits easy by delivering to the door step.

3. Connect
This is formalising a relationship by securing some kind of connection – creating an account, joining a newsletter, ‘liking’ a Facebook page or joining a group, using Twitter of Facebook to sign into a website. Less people do this than consume your content. I have about 3,000 unique visitors a month who consult or consume my content (50% are new visitors), but only 200 subscribers through connect Feedburner, of which 50 get my blog emailed daily.

Connect is really about an exchange. I give you this, you give me that. This doesn’t have to be an email. It could be that I give you some of my photos, and in return, you showcase them on your website. I win because my work is online, you win because I tell all my friends to look at it. The trick is to make a win-win scenario.

To provide a connect level of participation, provide ways for buy-in and exchange of data and other social connections, and demonstrate how they create a ‘win’ for the end user.

4. Compete
One of the pillars of participation is competition. Since the beginning of time, the lure of competing (and winning) has generated the most participation – siblings know this well!

On one level this is about building games – FarmVille’s participation base is currently 20% of all Facebook’s users! Max Control is a competition that merges online and offline activity (disclaimer: they were a client.) Alder And Alder’s Advent Quiz competition was a great low-buy in game for busy people.

On the other hand, this is about creating competition in things that aren’t games. The main motivation for getting Facebook friends a few years ago was a competition (“who has the most Facebook friends?”) In fact, Facebook used to even number your wall posts, so you could compete on who has had the most wall posts.

When Ashton Kutcher reached 1 million Twitter followers, that was a competition. Even now, people compete over Twitter followers – if not with one another, then certainly with themselves!

Gowalla, Foursquare and other location apps are competitions - “who is the mayor?” “how many items do you have?” “how many checkins have you made?” – the whole drive that makes Foursquare bigger than Gowalla in my opinion is that they made it more of a competition that Gowalla did.

Even tagging, sharing and bookmarking can be a game. It’s a competition that you play against yourself.

To provide a compete level of participation, just show a scoreboard and rank your users. That’ll create competition immediately.

5. Comment
Most early adopters are in the habit of commenting, but if you think back to the first time you did, you’ll get an idea of where the early majority are. I remember thinking “why bother?”, which is what most of the early majority feel about this level of participation, which is why most don’t make it here. It’s a motivation issue.

Commenting has reached a higher level of adoption inside Facebook, but even then it is done less, and by fewer people, than all the other levels.

The reason why this is, is because commenting represents the shift from getting more to giving more. The other levels often give up front (consult and consume), or they give back immediately (connect and compete). Commenting however does not immediately give back, so the motivation has to come from a deeper level of investment and involvement.

One of the issues here is that when someone wants to comment, they think that 1. they have nothing to add, and/or 2. there’s already conversation that they find intimidating and hard to break into.

Example: Those who you see commenting in your Facebook stream are probably the same group of 50. In fact, those who comment on this blog are mostly the same people, who give very insightful and intelligible comments from a place of knowing me outside of this blog. It’s hard for a newbie to break into that!

To provide a comment level of participation, provide a way for users to add their angle to the content (review, share, rate, etc) and attach getting to their giving – the more immediate and visible, the better.

6. Create
The user generate content realm is actually touched upon with compete and comment, because every action generates some kind of content as a by-product, however the create level is distinguished because the content is being intentionally and specifically created by the user.

Forums are a memorable example for me – I used to write a wealth of information in then. Guest blogging, custom reviews, crowd-sourcing all tend to fall into this category.

The motivation to participate at this level, I have found, is usually because of the benefit of identity the user gets by being associated. This has to be compelling in order for people to take time out and custom make content for you.

To provide a create level of participation, show the identity benefits of association with your organisation, with examples of others who have done it.

7. Curate
The highest level of participation goes beyond creating content to curating it, similar to the difference between a writer and an editor. The curator / editor knows the bigger picture well, and now nurtures the participants under them on behalf of the organisation.

I’m drifting a little into metaphor and tech speak here, so let me paint a community example. With Like Minds, there are a number of people who help us at a very high level with bringing the event together. They not only have ‘ideas’ (which are a dime a dozen), but they talk closely with us and work through the kinks, whilst bringing the best of the ideas out there to our attention. I met one of these curators this week, where we spent an hour talking through the concepts and bigger picture repercussions of our next events.

Key for me here is that these people are builders, not bulldozers. Curators build with you – the benefits of which are the intimacy they share with you, and the self actualisation they get.

When I think of this level, I think of people like Robert Scoble who live and breathe the industry they are in and shape it by virtue of their grasp of the bigger picture, and being at the elbow of every conversation. These people are thermostats, not thermometers. They set the temperature and create culture.

To provide a curate level of participation, be open and provide whatever they need to curate. They will rise to the top and show themselves to you as long as you do this.

Tom Waits Reads Charles Bukowski

The Laughing Heart
your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

More poetry reading here and here

Copying success is more difficult than you may think

There are 2 major problems with trying to achieve success, by copying what you see others doing.

1.You might be copying what does not work. It’s easy to see a blog with lots of comments or lots of retweets / facebook “likes” etc – and assume this means the blog is also commercially successful. It doesn’t!

All those measurements show you is that there are people who commented there or retweeted the post.It tells you zero about how commercially effective that blog is at generating new business for it’s owner.

Many of my clients come to me with large social networks and active blogs that they have worked really hard on, with nothing to show for it. You know what? People will have been copying THEIR approach too, because it looked successful from the outside!

2.Not only may you be copying what does not work, but even if you found a blog that was doing things right, the untrained eye will miss it completely.That’s because the many differences between a blog that’s an income generating machine and one that’s not, are extremely subtle.

For example, I don’t know much about golf, so when I see a golfer hitting a golf ball, that’s all I see. When a professional golfer sees that same guy hitting that same ball, they can identify exactly what’s happening – what’s failing, what needs removing and what needs to be added to the golfer’s swing etc.

When it comes to marketing, a blog is like any other tool. If used correctly, it can easily become your best source of new, targeted business. However, just like every other marketing tool, only a tiny fraction of small business owners use blogs correctly, for what they want to achieve.

The rest just dabble and as a result, it costs them a fortune in lost business and YEARS in wasted time.

In short, if you want to enjoy better results you need a better strategy. You need an effective strategy that’s been developed for; you, your business, your industry, your unique resources and what you want to achieve. Whatever you elect to do, if you are not currently getting the regular stream of new business from your blog that you deserve, please change course.

As I have said here many times before; if you are rowing your boat in the wrong direction, no matter how hard you row, you will simply end up further and further away from where you want to be. You deserve far better than that!

Zen and the Art of Design

A carpet of clouds flows over the mountains, sending sheets of rain into the valley. I am staring at a painting that’s come to life, like a Sumi-e masterpiece. In this rendition, however, power lines extend across a far-off peak, and an unused baseball diamond is exposed through a break in the evergreens. Half-visible through the branches is the top edge of the Daimon, an ornate red gate built and then rebuilt on the spot where Kobo Daishi, founder of the Shingon sect of Japanese Buddhism, was said to have first entered the community of Koyasan, led by a black dog and a white dog that were lent to him by a manifestation of the hunter-god Kariba-myojin.

I yearned to capture the scene in a photograph or a rough pencil sketch, but I had hiked up the muddy path with only my passport and an umbrella. My wife had sent me out into the rain while she napped in our room at Hoon-in, one of the many monasteries that allow travelers to rent lodging and to observe their daily practice. During our first week here, she had watched me take almost a thousand photographs and journal obsessively while we wandered through many of the places I’d idealized after taking an abiding interest in Buddhism, from the popular Shingon sect rooted in Koyasan to the more direct practices of Zen Buddhism that I have been studying over the past few years. But that afternoon, weary of seeing a camera glued to my eye socket, she noted that I seemed to be more focused on shooting photos than experiencing each place and taking pictures when so moved.

She was right. I had been a glutton for images during our first days on Mt. Koya, as I took in the staggering beauty of it all: the ringing of prayer bells from more than 70 temples at dawn, noon, and dusk; the feel of centuries-old wood continually tested by brutal winter months when the mountain roads become impassable; the morning meditation with syllabic chanting of the Diamond Sutra leavened by the pungent waft of incense; and the small shops selling pink and blue tea cakes or mochi expelled from large machines designed to pound rice flour into hand-wrapped treats. This place could not be captured in my sketches and raw files — and yet there I was, blindly recording what I had not even taken the time to sit with, to observe and understand in mind and body.

This was an ongoing problem in my life, one I had hoped the trip would help me resolve.

Thinking is Work
I was traveling through central Japan on a brief sabbatical from my work as a designer. But being a designer is something that one cannot easily escape. Everywhere I go, I long to reshape what's around me into some new and improved (albeit imagined) form. While riding the Tokyo subway, I could not stop myself from filling my notebook with ideas for all sorts of things that would help these sleepy-eyed salarymen, such as briefcases that doubled as pillows and fit perfectly into the seat gaps on the green JR Line, and a series of vending machines that would sanitize and refill bottles with drinks commuters could carry and reuse on their daily commute, thereby saving millions of plastic bottles and aluminum cans from being produced and recycled. (Of course, I was not naive enough to believe that the latter innovation would be accepted without cultural friction.)

Design is work. Thinking about design is work. Pondering what should be thought about in order to design is work. Back at home, cutting vegetables for a stir-fry dinner, gears continued to whir in my mind regarding the problems my masters had set before me. It wasn’t until I’d been meditating for some time that I understood, on a fundamental level, how work — and its analog, design — is closely intertwined with thought and reflection.

Observing Is Not Work
As a designer‚ I have spent an increasing amount of time observing others. This includes my clients, as they wrestle with difficult business problems; my subjects, as I guide them through usability tests, empathizing with their frustration and delight; and my colleagues, as they cast off failure after failure in search of the most elegant solution to a thorny design challenge.

Observation, however, is not work. It is direct experience, which does not necessarily require a critical eye to appreciate. “What can be met with recognition is not realization itself, because realization is not reached with a discriminating mind,” the Zen master Dogen once wrote. Or, as poet and Zen Buddhist priest Norman Fischer noted in Beyond Thinking, an introduction to a collection of Dogen’s teachings: “In our daily zazen [meditation] practice, we entrust ourselves to the wholeness of our experience, to all of experience, moment by moment. ...We sense it, feel it, are it, as it is true of everything else which we come into contact throughout the course of our lives; and yet as soon as we think we know it as an object or an experience and begin to define it or take credit for it, we lose track of it.”

In our busy lives, it is often a struggle to tease out the act of observation from that of reflection (thinking and pondering). In practice, we routinely skip reflection to arrive at a design idea in one lightning-fast gesture. But the germ of the idea is always the observation — that is what leads to genesis. Glimmers of great ideas usually emerge from seeing the relationships between seemingly disparate things, without distraction. In Matthew E. May’s book In Pursuit of Elegance, and in the article he wrote for this issue on page 72, he relates an anecdote about the use of observation as a tool in Toyota’s factories: “…a new associate in a Toyota plant is sometimes asked to observe a particular operation while standing within a circle drawn on the floor known as an ‘Ohno circle,’ named for the engineering pioneer Taiichi Ohno. Ohno often would draw a circle on the floor in the middle of a bottleneck area and make a line employee stand in that circle all day to watch the process, directing them to observe and ask why over and over. ...Because you can't move or take action, you start to ask, ‘Why is this occurring?’ ...When the person would report to Ohno any observations made, problems discovered, and solutions recommended — as well as the rationale for them — Ohno would just look at the person and say, ‘Is that so?’”

I find Ohno’s final question quite telling, because it strikes at the heart of the issue: If your observation is not true to the situation, then all of the problems and solutions that you’ve derived from that experience are inaccurate.

Questioning Our Patterns
This, to me, is the secret to the greatest leaps made in design. Human ingenuity is only bounded by what we can identify as an opportunity through unmediated experience. The act of identification with what you observe is not work — but observation itself is the surest path to discerning human intent. Design then follows from that intent, and with it, our work begins.

This may sound reductive, but we are too often caught up in the patterns that shape our daily lives to question them. We must learn to observe them without filtering everyday moments through our preconceptions. We can submerge our hands in the river of lived experience, but as soon as we try to grab hold of the water, it flows out of our grasp. Some may feel sly and cup their hands to trap the water, but they will only see what the liquid reflects. Others stare into the river, but only see what rocks and creatures struggle beneath its surface. But those who choose to observe the river without preconception can shift their idea of self out of the way of what they observe. They become the river. Then, in that observation, they can capture more directly what they have experienced and share it with others. It can become the work.

The words of Dogen glimmer in my memory: “Do not treasure or belittle what is far away, but be intimate with it. Do not treasure or belittle what is near, but be intimate with it. Do not make light of or a big deal of what you see with your eyes. Do not make light of or a big deal of what you hear with your ears. Rather, illuminate your eyes and ears.”

Back on Mt. Koya, I’m standing in a cloud. A path stretches up the slope, bounded by small prayer gates that vanish into the distance. Part of me wants to continue on, to explore what might be visible from a higher elevation. I could wait until the wind shifts the cloud mass into the next valley or hope for the sun to emerge and burn off the moisture. Or I could return to the near-empty streets of the Buddhist community down the path I have already tread. None of these choices will exist past this moment. No matter which one I choose, it will be appropriate. Life must be experienced first, then designed.