Mark McGuinness - Resilience: Facing Down Rejection (11 page)

As well as new clients and customers, I receive unexpected offers and opportunities. I’ve been offered several book deals. (I decided to publish this one myself, but it’s always nice to be asked.) I spent two years running a business in partnership with Brian Clark and Tony Clark, two partners in
Copyblogger Media
, a successful online marketing business. Brian and Tony are in the States and I am here in the UK. We’ve never met in person, but I’m sure we’ll get round to it at some point.

None of this would have happened if I hadn’t decided to take the initiative and build myself an
opportunity magnet
—which in my case was a blog.

If you are truly sick of rejection and want to make it irrelevant in your life, then I suggest you start building your own opportunity magnet.

An opportunity magnet has several characteristics:

• It’s a self-started project. No one will give you the incentive of a reward or a deadline.
  
• It takes time.
  
• It will feel like a waste of time some days, and demand plenty of resilience.
  
• It will become more valuable as time goes on—bringing you more and better opportunities with less effort.
  
• It will take on a life of its own, because of the contributions made by other people.
  
• It will connect you up with a vast network of people and possibilities.
  
• It will connect you with your sense of purpose.
  
• It will be one of the most rewarding things you ever do.
  

So what shape will your opportunity magnet take? A blog is an obvious format—it’s served me well and I would encourage you to consider it. It helps if you’re good at writing, but you don’t need to be Shakespeare—you can go a long way with enthusiasm, something valuable to share, and a willingness to learn. If you’re a better speaker than writer, maybe podcasting or videos would work better for you.

But it doesn’t need to be an online project. Maybe you’d rather put on a live event, or series of meetings or classes. Maybe you want to write a book, or record a film or album, or make a piece of software as your calling card. And opportunity magnets are not just for the self-employed. You could build one to help your career, by establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry.

A great example of an event-based opportunity magnet is Speaking Out, started by Laura North in London:

“Speaking Out helps people, particularly women, get more comfortable and confident with public speaking. I started it because I was terrified of public speaking and avoided it for many years. But I realized that I was missing out on opportunities and saw that there were a lot of other people in the same boat. I also noticed that there were far more men than women speaking at the conferences that I was going to.

“Running Speaking Out has illustrated my theory that if you speak in public then you attract opportunities. A woman who worked for the Mayor’s Office was in the audience at my first event. She really enjoyed it and invited me to put on my second event at City Hall. On another occasion, I did a presentation about Speaking Out and was offered funding to develop a new project, even though I wasn’t pitching for any funding.

“I keep getting requests to do public speaking - ironic as it’s the one thing I was avoiding for so long!”

Laura North, Speaking Out,
http://speakingoutevents.com

Whatever format you choose for your opportunity magnet, make sure it has these three essential qualities:

1. Sustainability
   —you are passionate about it, and can see yourself doing it for a long time.
   
2. Visibility
   —it will get you on the radar of the right people.
   
3. Significance
   —it will make a positive difference to your field, over and above the opportunities that come to you personally.
   

When you start building your opportunity magnet, you stop waiting to be invited, accepted or rejected, and take the initiative. You throw your hat in the ring, announce your presence to the world, and ask it to pay attention. You lift your head above the parapet. And when you do that, of course, you expose yourself to criticism…

Your next steps:

1. Are you up for the challenge?

Consider the facts that there are no guarantees, you will have to invest a lot of time and effort up front, and you will probably have to go up a few blind alleys before you find a way to make it work.

Do you still want to build an opportunity magnet?

2. Take the lead

This is the most important step. When you start building something of your own instead of applying to others, you stop being an applicant and start becoming a leader. Like all the best things in life, it’s both exciting and scary.

Becoming a leader is partly an attitude of mind—instead of waiting for others, start thinking what needs to be done. It’s also a habit of action—once you have an idea you are passionate about, start planning and doing to make it happen.

3. Bring something new to the table

Ask yourself:

• Who do I want to reach?
  
• What difference do I want to make to them?
  
• What’s in it for them to join me on the journey?
  

Once you’ve identified the ‘tribe’ of people you want to help, do some research about the kind of publications they subscribe to (magazines, newsletters, blogs etc.) and the kind of events they attend (gigs, exhibitions, conferences etc.).

As well as noting what is already popular with this group of people, ask yourself what’s
missing
: is there an obvious gap in the market that you could fill by offering something new?

4. Pick a platform that suits you—and your audience

I’m a writer. I also have a young family and want to spend as much time as possible with them. So blogging is a natural fit for me. My audience love to read, it’s a great way to rise up the search engine rankings, and it allows me to reach a worldwide audience of tens of thousands a week from my home office.

But maybe you’re a better speaker, musician, or artist than a writer. Maybe you think there’s no substitute for meeting face-to-face. Maybe you want to reach people who prefer watching video to reading, or who do their networking in person, not online.

In choosing the format of your opportunity magnet, look for the best fit between your talents (writing, speaking, singing, coding, etc.) and what your prospective audience likes to do (watch video, read, socialize, play games etc.).

Here are some of the options:

• blog
  
• newsletter
  
• podcast
  
• videocast
  
• webinar
  
• online forum
  
• live networking event
  
• conference
  
• live workshop
  
• book
  
• recorded music
  
• film
  
• software app
  

5. Give more than you ask for

Generosity is key to making your opportunity magnet work. Make it freely available, or at least have a low-cost version of it. And give away something of real value—your knowledge, skills, ideas, contacts. As Brian Clark of Copyblogger.com likes to say, if you feel like you’re giving away too much for free, you’ve probably got it about right!

At my website
lateralaction.com
I not only publish a free blog, I give away a free 26-week careers course for creative people. Of the thousands of people who sign up, most will never buy anything from me, but enough of them do to keep my business growing. You could say it’s an inefficient way to grow a business, but I’ve always made my living by helping people, and I love the fact that the technology allows me to achieve my goals by helping thousands of people to reach theirs.

An opportunity magnet has a two-way current
—you create opportunities for yourself by doing it for other people first. When you do it right, it takes on a life of its own. It starts pulsing and creating unexpected connections. Opportunities come to you, as surely as iron filings line up in the force field of a magnet.

So when in doubt, err on the side of giving too much—when it comes to an opportunity magnet, it’s less risky than giving too little.

6. Connect people

Opportunity magnets attract something more valuable than iron filings: people. So make it part of your mission to facilitate connections and conversations and relationships between members of your audience, not just with yourself and them.

If you’re organizing a live event, this will happen naturally. If you’re working online, there are several public venues where you can host and contribute to conversations, such as blog comments, forums, and social networks. And make it your business to connect people behind the scenes as well, by looking out for people who could benefit from knowing each other and making introductions via email.

7. Get permission to stay in touch

There’s no point attracting people if they just go away again. You need a way to stay in touch. Which means you need to earn people’s trust and gain their permission to contact them.

Marketer Seth Godin describes
permission marketing
as: “the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal, and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.” In other words, you should be sending them messages that are so valuable (to them) and so relevant (to them) that they will be happy to hear from you—and they’ll miss you if you stop contacting them.

When it comes to getting people to pay attention to your messages, it’s hard to beat email. Most people check their email every day, even at weekends. They will at least scan the subject line of every email that lands in their inbox. The same cannot be said of every tweet or Facebook post from their ‘friends.’ So if you really want people to come to your event, or read your blog post, or take any kind of action, it pays to get permission to contact them via email.

Because email is so powerful, it is easily and widely abused. Here are some essential tips for building a mailing list that adds value for
everyone
who comes into contact with it:

• Never add someone’s email address to the list yourself!
  Apart from being rude, this is illegal in many places. Always ask for permission first.
  
• Include a one-click ‘unsubscribe’ link in every email you send.
  
• Use a professional email service
  that will automate the signup and delivery process and help you manage the list. See the
  Resilience
  resources page for recommended services:
  http://lateralaction.com/resilience-resources
  
• Invite people to sign up to the list
  and explain what’s in it for them—on your website, when you speak in public, when you meet them in person.
  
• Remember: give more than you ask for!
  Send them valuable information, tips and advice; share the news that matters to
  them
  ; surprise them by delivering more than you promised.
  
• Don’t just treat it like a sales channel!
  (Or a ‘request channel’ if you’re not selling anything.) Sales messages and requests are fine, as long as they are super-relevant and they aren’t all you send. Otherwise people will unsubscribe in droves.
  
• Write compelling subject lines.
  Most people scan their inbox, so a message like ‘April newsletter’ is hardly going to inspire them to open your email. Give them a reason to open it, with a subject line that explains (a) what’s inside and (b) why it matters to them. For example, ‘Tango for beginners—free class Monday 12th April,’ or ‘Four simple strategies for tackling any problem.’ To learn how to write better subject lines, read Brian Clark’s series on Writing Magnetic Headlines:
  http://www.copyblogger.com/magnetic-headlines/
  

8. Make it sustainable

Building an opportunity magnet takes time, and the rewards are not immediate, so you need three things to sustain your efforts long enough to see them bear fruit:

• Passion
  You MUST be passionate about the subject and about connecting with your audience, in order to put in the time and effort required to make it a success.
  
• Organisation
  Finding time for a medium-to-long-term project is rarely easy. To do it, you’ll need to be good at organizing your time—my free ebook Time Management for Creative People will help you:
  http://www.wishfulthinking.co.uk/2007/12/03/time-management-for-creative-people-free-e-book/
  
• Support
  As your project grows, it may well get to the stage where it’s impossible for you to run it all by yourself. Fortunately, this can only happen if you’re attracting plenty of enthusiastic people who share your passion—so don’t be too proud to ask for help!
  

9. Brace yourself…

You will be doing something wrong if you don’t get plenty of praise and enthusiasm from the people you have set out to help. Enjoy it. And brace yourself for the inevitable criticism—we’ll look at how to handle that in the next section…

Notes:

Speaking Out,
http://speakingoutevents.com

Seth Godin,
Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers
, (Pocket Books, new edition 2007)

Criticism

23. Dare to be a tall poppy

The seventh and last King of Rome was Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, known as Tarquin the Proud. According to the historian Livy, one day the King received a messenger from his son Sextus Tarquinius, asking for advice on how to deal with the city of Gabii, east of Rome.

Tarquin said nothing to the messenger, but went out into the garden and swept his stick in an arc, cutting off the heads of the tallest poppies growing there.

Puzzled, the messenger returned to his master and reported what he had seen. On hearing the story, Sextus grasped his father’s meaning and ordered the deaths of all the most powerful men in Gabii.