Striving to write software, well...
When you spend all your life in one industry, all you know well are the common success practices of just your industry. You only understand how people in your field market, sell, advertise, or promote. And almost everyone in your industry probably markets, sells, advertises, and persuades pretty much the same way as everyone else.
When you have an audience, everything changes. Instead of chasing opportunities, they come to you. Instead of proving your expertise, people already know what you’re good at. Instead of starting from zero with each new project, you have thousands of people ready to support what you build next.
Pick a topic you’re obsessed with. Post about it every day for 100 days. Learn as you go. Stay focused on that topic.
If you’re doing good work, start talking about it.
From: Nathan Barry in The Audience Shortcut
Whenever you run into a problem, document it.
Whenever you find a solution to the problem, document it.
Whenever you find something helpful, document it.
You might think you will remember it when you see it again, but you probably won’t.
Pale ink is stronger than the sharpest memory.
Document everything.
Trust is worth more than attention.
Helping people get to where they seek to go is more effective than hustling people to persuade them to go where you’re going.
Choose your customers, choose your future.
Tell ten people. If they don’t tell others, make a better product.
Creating the conditions for the word to spread is the job of the marketer.
Customer service is free.
“You will pay a lot but get more than you paid for” is a useful motto.
Act like people are watching. They are.
From: Seth Godin in Eight marketing maxims
I don’t think agencies are bad, but for most work I’ve ever needed I think just hiring a freelancer first, seeing if they’re good, then hiring them some more is far more effective than going with an agency.
For big companies I understand why a giant agency makes sense, but in my opinion in the modern world a very very small group of people can far outwork a large group of people.
From: Neville Medhora’s newsletter
When you don’t know you next step…
When you’re feeling unmotivated…
When asking someone to help you…
When you’re ready to make a dream come true…
Get more specific about what’s needed.
Write down every detail you know.
Research what you don’t know.
Take the time to get specific. It helps you to take action, and beats procrastination.
From: Derek Sivers in Get Specific
Charlie Munger once talked about how sensational Costco founder Jim Sinegal’s career was.
Podcaster David Senra asked Munger: Why are there so few speeches or interviews with Sinegal?
“He was busy working,” said Munger.
The most impressive people don’t spend their lives on social media or managing their publicity.
Source: Morgan Housel
The big “doers” in life tend to be those who are consistently working, piece by piece, on at least one or two big projects at any one time. They get it done. Not in a week of caffeine-fueled frenzy, but in a half-year of small, frequent steps forward.
From: Cal Newport
Specifically, how to spread word about a book and gather a following for it, potentially even before you’ve written a single word.
Knowing the industry very well. Most people think it’s all about the idea. It’s not. EVERYONE has ideas. The hard part is doing the homework to know if the idea could work in an industry, then doing the preparation to be able to execute on the idea.
Create compelling content, find a way to be discovered, and then generate value from the resulting traffic. Whether that was through ads or subscriptions or selling things or just the ego of knowing that someone is consuming what you created, traffic generation has been the engine that powered the Internet we know today.
The road hasn’t been easy. It took over 16 months to bring a product to market. When we launched no one cared and 24 months after starting we had only 10 paying customers and revenues of $99 per month. We moved into my parents’ basement for 3.5 years. But despite all the evidence pointing to our failure, we carried on. Why? We loved our customers, our company and working together, and we’d discovered a passion to serve others.
From: Mike McDerment at An Open Letter from FreshBooks Co-founder
There’s nothing at all wrong with honing in, developing your craft, making variations of things you’re good at, and getting better each time. Nothing small about it. Nothing unfulfilling about it.
Getting the same few things right in different ways is a career’s worth of work.
From: Jason Fried
Agentic AI means that anything you know to code can be coded very rapidly. If you know just what code needs to be created to solve an issue you want, the AI will give you that code at the cost of a prompt or two. The problem is that most people don’t know what code needs to be created to solve their problem, for any but the most trivial problems.
Most people stop drawing at six years old and while still in school. Often, those stick figures are their only memory. It’s also why most of us draw like six-year-olds. To improve your memory, you have to reference something.
Matt Paulson, who is the founder of MarketBeat has some great business advice.
From: Matt Paulson in Reflecting on 17 Years of Blogging and Online Business
In the early 1080s, mutual funds were a relatively small phenomenon, and there was no single source of information on them-performance, holdings, and the like. The only way to get that information was to order each fund’s prospectus individually, which Mansueto did. One night in his one-bedroom apartment at Clark Street and Wrightwood Avenue, as he looked through all those prospectuses spread out across his dining room table, the idea hit him.
Also, I think obscurity is your friend when you’re just starting out. People want to get rid of the obscurity so everyone knows who they are and what they’re doing, but it’s nice to have that cushion of being able to mess up without anyone knowing or caring so that you can learn without the spotlight on you.
Once the spotlight is on you, there’s a lot of pressure and you don’t need that kind of pressure early on. Take it easy, have a long-term view on things, build on little successes, and learn more before you try to go out and change the world.
From: Jason Fried
The history that was never written down, the thoughts that were never spoken, the beliefs too controversial to share. We have so much information, and we know so much about the world. But no matter how much we ever know it will always be dwarfed by what we’re blind to.
Use the existing goodwill and strong-bonded relationships that other companies have already established with people who are prime prospects for your product or service.
Shows off expertise:
With each piece of content you write, your audience should become more confident in your core skill.
Builds authority
Authority is a little different than expertise.
Authority is when someone mentions your area of expertise, and your name is the most likely one to come up.
Authority is the result of showing off expertise (#1) over a long period of time.
Creates trust
Every time you write, record, comment, or publish you either create a stronger or weaker case for trust.
That’s why thoughtful, supportive content goes a long way. It’s why rooting for others will always be “the way”. It’s why being honest wins long-term.
It’s amazing how many people and companies will say and do whatever it takes to make a one-time sale rather than taking the time to understand the clients’ desired outcome. And then having the courage and the concern to tell that client that what they really need is much less than what they told you they wanted.
You may, when you take this approach, end up with a smaller initial sale, but you will have just made a new friend, someone who will remember you the next time. And who will, no doubt, tell his friends about you and your company.
Become a trusted advisor who protects your clients.
From: Jay Abraham in Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got
Get a client as a freelancer. Do an amazing job. Get a few more clients. Keep doing consistently great work. Start finding your unique strengths and special skills.
Refine who that customer is. Keep getting another customer until you have more work than you can personally handle yourself—and that you’re charging enough with recurring and predictable revenue that you can afford help. Start small—part time or freelancers vs FTE. Keep building, keep growing. Don’t rush. You’ll avoid a ton of headaches and mistakes if you scale smart.
An agency is not a get rich quick scheme, and running one can’t be taught in a book or course.
Source: Reddit
Just about everything was headed in the wrong direction. In Apple’s fiscal year ending September 26, 1997, the company lost a whopping $816 million. Its annual revenues had shrunk to $7.1 billion, down precipitously from a peak of $11 billion in fiscal 1995. The steady erosion of Apple’s business had punctured investor confidence, and the stock price since 1995 had lost nearly two-thirds of its value: a block of shares purchased in late 1995 for $3,000 was now worth roughly $1,000.
Every night I would take home a different software manual, and I would read them. Of course the reading was captivating. Peachtree, PFS, DBase, Lotus, Accpac… I couldn’t put them down. Every night I would read some after getting home, no matter how late.
Although I don’t think the above quote is true, it’s bothered me ever since I started this blog.
After over a decade of commercials and guest appearances on other people’s shows, Tom Selleck finally got his big break. In 1980, he won the part of Thomas Magnum in the new series, Magnum P.I. But it came at a cost; although he was offered the part of Indiana Jones in The Raiders of The Lost Arc, his producers would not release him to play that part, so it ended up going to Harrison Ford.
By launching as a temporary “pop-up,” entrepreneurs and business owners will be able to see potential problems and inefficiencies at a smaller scale before it’s too late. It also gets around any reputational issues on social media by making it easier to quickly pivot to a new location, concept, or name.
“Set up a mini version of what you want your business to become, and do almost a pop-up of what you want to do,” Ramsay said. “Whether it’s a new location, an art gallery, whether it’s a restaurant, run it for 48 hours only, and set up a small, limited time, limited version of what you’d like to become. It’s a great way of testing.”
From: Gordon Ramsay in Entrepreneur
If you’re willing to put in the work, a newsletter can be one of the most powerful ways to convert readers into customers.
I am now at a real impasse, towards the end of my career and knowing I could happily start it all again with a new insight and much bigger visions for what I could take on. It feels like wining the lottery two weeks before you die 🙂
I am now re-examining some of the other things I often thought were too complex or too far above my abilities for hobby projects, and, so long as I can afford them, give them a go. It is an exciting time to be alive.
The higher up you climb the corporate ladder, the more subservient you’ll have to become. If you strongly dislike being told what to do, the stress of high ranking employment will erode you inside out.
There are few things more exciting than starting a business and getting things rolling. The fear, the adrenalin, the excitement, the hope that every entrepreneur feels, are all intoxicating. In fact, very often they are TOO intoxicating. Very often, along with some success comes the feeling of invincibility. I have been in situations where I have told myself that Im smart, I know what Im doing, that I will figure things out as I go, so it’s OK to take on this new opportunity.
Did you know that when you plant Chinese bamboo seeds in the ground, that it can take up to 4 or 5 years for the first shoots to show? And did you know that as soon as the first shoots emerge, it then only takes about 6 weeks for the plant to grow to reach 90 feet in the air?
The trick here though, that you still have to nurture and care for those seeds through all those years of not being able to see anything above ground. Otherwise you won’t get that dramatic growth spurt at the end.
Imagine your life as a book. What title would you give to the current chapter, and what is going to be the next?
It didn’t take long for me to figure out that I should start to build my own content brand instead of getting paid a flat-fee per article to build someone else’s brand.
From: Matt Paulson at Starter Story