Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (32 page)

After the fact, it’s so easy to say, “of course it worked …” and then make up a reason for the success of whatever it is that just succeeded.

The practice, then, is to start making predictions. In writing. You don’t have to share them in public, but the habit will push you to understand your instincts and to sharpen your ability to see what works (and what doesn’t) without the easy out of having to explain what already happened.

Look at start-ups or political campaigns or new products or ad campaigns … plenty of places to practice your predicting skills.

I predict you’ll learn two things:

1. It’s really difficult to make predictions, because success often appears to be random.
   
2. Based on #1, it’s probably smart for you to initiate more projects that aren’t guaranteed winners, because most winners aren’t guaranteed.
   

And a bonus: the more you practice your predictions, the better you’ll get at discerning where the science is.

How much are you paying for the privilege of having someone else tell you what to do?

Example: if you go to your gym and work out for an hour, the cost of that session is zero.

Hire a personal trainer to follow you around and give you instructions and that’s $70.

If you take a job as a freelance writer doing short service pieces on assignment to a local paper, you might earn $3 an hour. Which is about 97% less than you’d earn if, like some writers, you dreamed up amazing pieces, wrote them on spec, and turned them into blogs, books, or films. This writer doesn’t wait to get hired. He hires himself.

If you do publicity for an agency, working hard and precisely following the VP’s and the client’s instructions, you might earn $25 an hour. On the other hand, when you do your own PR, when you build a sensation and turn it into a following, you might earn many times that. (And enjoy it more.)

Work for a coal mine and make minimum wage. Discover a coal mine and never need to work again.

We happily give up our freedom and our income in exchange for having someone else take responsibility for telling us what to do next.

How much are you giving up?

Of course it’s not done. It’s never done.

That’s not the right question.

The question is: When is it good enough?

Good enough, for those that seek perfection, is what we call it when it’s sufficient to surpass the standards we’ve set. Anything beyond good enough is called stalling and a waste of time.

If you don’t like your definition of “good enough,” then feel free to change that, but the goal before shipping is merely that. Not perfect.

Every now and then, a creative act comes out of nowhere—a giant leap, a new way of thinking apparently woven out of a brand-new material.

Most of the time, though, creativity is the act of reassembling many elements that are already known. That’s why domain knowledge is so critical.

The screenwriter who understands how to take the build that went into the classic Greg Morris episode of
The Dick Van Dyke Show
and integrate it with the Maurice Chevalier riff from the Marx Brothers … Or the way Moby took his encyclopedic knowledge of music and turned it into a record that sold millions … If you don’t have awareness and an analytical understanding of what worked before, you can’t build on it.

That’s one of the reasons that the recent incarnation of the Palm failed. The fact that the president of the company had never used an iPhone left them only one out: to make a magical leap.

It’s not enough to be aware of the domain you’re working in—you need to
understand
it. Noticing things and being curious about how they work is the single most common trait I see in creative people. Once you can break the components down,
you can put them back together into something brand new.

The rearview mirror is one of the most effective motivational tools ever created.

There’s no doubt that many people speed up in the face of competition. We ask, “how’d the rest of the class do?” We listen for someone breathing down our necks. And we discover that competition sometimes brings out our best.

There’s a downside, though. Years ago, during my last long-distance swim (across Long Island Sound … cold water, jellyfish, the whole nine yards), the competitiveness was pretty thick. On the boat to the starting line, there were hundreds of swimmers, stretching, bragging, prancing, and working themselves up. By the time we hit the water, everyone was swimming someone else’s race. The start was an explosion of ego and adrenaline. Twenty minutes later, half the field was exhausted, with three hours left to go.

If you’re going to count on the competition to bring out your best work, you’ve surrendered control over your most important asset. Real achievement comes from racing ahead when no one else sees a path—and holding back when the rush isn’t going where you want to go.

If you’re dependent on competition, then you’re counting on the quality of those that show up to determine how well you’ll do. Worse, you’ve signed up for a career of faux death matches as the only way to do your best work.

Self-motivation is and always will be the most important form of motivation. Driving with your eyes on the rearview mirror is exhausting. It’s easier than ever to measure your performance against others, but if it’s not helping you with your mission, stop.

Fledgling sushi chefs spend months (sometimes years) doing nothing but making the rice for the head chef.

If the rice isn’t right, it really doesn’t matter what else you do, you’re not going to be able to serve great sushi.

Most of the blogging and writing that goes on about marketing assumes that you already know how to make the rice. It assumes that you understand copywriting and graphic design, that you’ve got experience in measuring direct response rates, that you’ve made hundreds of sales calls, that you have an innate empathy for what your customers want and think, and that you know how to make a compelling case for what you believe.

Too often, we quickly jump ahead to the new thing, failing to get good enough at the important thing.

Two things every business and nonprofit needs to know:

• How much does it cost you to get one new customer?
  
• On average, what’s that customer worth during the relationship you have with her?
  

The Internet revolutionizes both sides of the equation.

Facebook and Twitter are marvels because for each company, the cost of a new customer is vanishingly close to zero. When you can get people into a relationship for nothing, you don’t need to make much money on each one to be delighted with the outcome.

Note that the ongoing, digital connection with a customer can dramatically increase the lifetime profit as well. Netflix is far more likely to have a higher average lifetime value than the local video store. Musicians are moving from making a dollar per listener from CDs to making hundreds of dollars per true fan from collectibles and concert tickets—things that musicians can deliver only because they know who their best customers are.

On the other hand, legions of unsophisticated marketers are getting both sides of the equation wrong.

They invest a lot in hoopla, spin, and hype to get strangers to notice
them (once), making the cost of a connection high, and then, once they borrow a little attention, they put everything into a one-shot transaction, which few people engage in. And those that do engage, create little value because the permission asset is then discarded.

Dates, not singles bars. Subscriptions, not Veg-O-Matics.

Whenever you start a project, you should have a plan for finishing it.

One outcome is to declare victory, to find that moment when you have satisfied your objectives and reached a goal.

The other outcome, which feels like a downer but is almost as good, is to declare failure, to realize that you’ve run out of useful string and it’s time to move on. I think the intentional act of declaring becomes an essential moment of learning, a spot in time when you consider inputs and outputs and adjust your strategy for next time.

If you are unable to declare, then you’re going to slog, and instead of starting new projects based on what you’ve learned, you’ll merely end up trapped. I’m not suggesting that you flit. A project might last a decade or a generation, but if it is to be a project, it must have an end.

One of the challenges of an open-ended war or the Occupy movement is that they are projects in which failure or victory wasn’t understood at the beginning. While you may be tempted to be situational about this, to know it when you see it, to decide as you go, it’s far more powerful and effective to define victory or failure in advance.

Declare one or the other, but declare.

The purpose of the modern organization is to make it easy and natural and expected for people to take risks. To lean out of the boat. To be human.

Alas, most organizations do the opposite. They institutionalize cowardice
.
They give their people cover, a place to hide, a chance to say, “that’s not my job.”

Our organizations are filled with people not only eager to dehumanize
those they serve, but apparently instructed to do so. In the name of shareholder value or team play or not rocking the boat …

During times of change, the only organizations that thrive are those that are eager to interact and to change as well. And that happens only when individuals take brave steps forward.

Giving your team cover for their cowardice is foolish. Give them a platform for bravery instead.

Techniques and skill and even a point of view are often handed down, formally or not. It’s easier to get started if you’re taught, of course.

But art, the new, the ability to connect the dots and to make an impact—sooner or later, that can come only from one who creates, not from a teacher and not from a book.

The fine-art market continues to generate headline-making sales. This year, paintings by Warhol and Munch are expected to sell for more than $50 million each.

What makes a painting famous enough to sell for that much money?

Consider the Mona Lisa. The reason that it’s the most famous (and arguably the most valuable) painting in the world is that it was stolen in 1911. (Even Pablo Picasso was questioned as a possible suspect.) For two years, it was a media sensation—precisely when newspapers were coming into their own. For two years it was front-page news. As the world media-ized itself, we needed an icon to stand for “famous painting” and the Mona Lisa was it.

Media cycles have gotten shorter and shorter since then, and ironically, it was Andy himself who predicted that one day we’d all be famous for 15 minutes. The thing is, being famous for 15 minutes isn’t sufficient to make your painting worth $80 million.

Andy never had his own TV show, wouldn’t have had the most viral video on YouTube, and wasn’t focused on the fast pump of fame. It
turns out that getting big fast (and then fading) doesn’t build a reputation that pays.

Media volatility makes more people and more ideas famous for ever shorter periods of time. What the fine-art market shows us, though, is that real value isn’t created by this volatile fame. Consistently showing up on the radar of the right audience is more highly prized than is reaching the masses once, then done. This strategy works for every career, even if you’ve never touched a brush.

At the local gym, it’s not unusual to see hardcore members contorting themselves to fool the StairMaster machine into giving them good numbers. If you use your arms, you can lift yourself off the machine and trick it into thinking you’re working yourself really hard.

Of course, you end up with cramped shoulders and a lousy workout, but who cares, the machine said you burned 600 calories …

The same thing happens with authors who put themselves and their readers through the wringer to get a spot on the
New York Times
best-seller list. Danielle LaPorte built a huge campaign around putting her book,
The Fire Starter Sessions
, on the list. She succeeded in selling a huge number of hardcover copies in a week (far more than most other books), but she didn’t make the list because of a secret editorial decision that she’s not privy to. At the same time, other authors who do a better job of decoding the secrets end up on the list with far fewer books sold.

The point isn’t that the list is crooked and unfair (though it is). It measures how good you are at getting on the list, not how many copies of the book your readers buy. The reason to avoid the false metric is that it messes with your shoulders, with the way you approach the work, with the real reason you did the project in the first place.

A third example: many car brands now go to obsessive lengths to contact recent car buyers and ask them to rate their buying experience on a scale of one to five. The car manufacturers use these rankings to allocate cars to dealers, ostensibly to reward the good dealerships. Of course, the dealers are in on the game, and instead of doing the intended thing—
providing a great experience—all they do is work hard to get people to give them a five when a drone in a call center makes the call. Many of them will clearly state to a customer, “If anything has happened today that would prevent you from giving us a five when they call, please tell us right now.”

The system of false metrics doesn’t create a better buying experience, it creates a threatened customer with pressure to give a five.

And my last example: the Arbitron radio rating system used to rely on diaries in which it asked radio listeners to write down which station they had listened to during the day. Several consultants came along with a service that they guaranteed would raise the ratings of any station that hired them. The secret? Repeat the station’s call letters twice as often. It turned out that more repetition led to better recall, which led to more people writing down the call letters, which led to “better” ratings.