Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (5 page)

1. Delete 120 minutes a day of “spare time” from your life. This can include watching TV, reading the newspaper, commuting, wasting time in social networks, and going to meetings. Up to you.
   
2. Spend the 120 minutes doing this instead:
   
   • Exercise for 30 minutes.
     
   • Read relevant nonfiction (trade magazines, journals, business books, blogs, etc.).
     
   • Send three thank-you notes.
     
   • Learn new digital techniques (spreadsheet macros, Firefox shortcuts, productivity tools, graphic design, HTML coding).
     
   • Volunteer.
     
   • Blog for five minutes about something you learned.
     
   • Give a speech once a month about something you don’t currently know a lot about.
     
3. Spend at least one weekend day doing absolutely nothing but being with people you love.
   
4. For one year, spend money on only the things you absolutely need to get by. Save the rest of your money, relentlessly.
   

If you somehow pulled this off, then six months from now, you would be the fittest, best-rested, most intelligent, best-funded, and most motivated person in your office or your field. You would know how to do things that other people don’t, you’d have a wider network, and you’d be more focused.

It’s entirely possible that this effort won’t be sufficient and you will continue to need better luck. But it’s a lot more likely that you’ll get lucky, I bet.

The thing is, it’s far easier than ever before to surface your ideas. Far easier to have someone notice your art or your writing or your photography. Which means that people who might have hidden their talents are now finding them noticed.

That blog you’ve built, the one with a lot of traffic … perhaps it can’t be monetized.

That nonprofit you work with, the one where you are able to change lives … perhaps turning it into a career will ruin it.

That passion you have for art … perhaps making your painting commercial enough to sell will squeeze the joy out of it.

When what you do is what you love, you’re able to invest more effort and care and time. That means you’re more likely to win, to gain share, to
profit. On the other hand, poets don’t get paid. Even worse, poets that try to get paid end up writing jingles and failing and hating it at the same time.

Today, there are more ways than ever to share your talents and hobbies in public. And if you’re driven, talented, and focused, you may discover that the market loves what you do. That people read your blog or click on your cartoons or listen to your MP3s. But, alas, that doesn’t mean you can monetize it, quit your day job, and spend all day writing songs.

The pitfalls:

and

I think it makes sense to make your art, your art, to give yourself over to it without regard for commerce.

Doing what you love is as important as ever, but if you’re going to make a living at it, it helps to find a niche where money flows as a regular consequence of the success of your idea. Loving what you do is almost as important as doing what you love, especially if you need to make a living at it. Go find a job you can commit to, a career or a business you can fall in love with.

A friend who loved music, who wanted to spend his life doing it, got a job doing PR for a record label. He hated doing PR, realized that just because he was in the record business didn’t mean he had anything at all to do with music. Instead of finding a job he could love, he ended up being in proximity to, but nowhere involved with, something he cared about. I wish he had become a committed schoolteacher instead, spending every minute of his spare time making music and sharing it online for free. Instead, he’s a frazzled publicity hound working twice as many hours for less money and doing no music at all.

Maybe you can’t make money doing what you love (at least what you love right now). But I bet you can figure out how to love what you do to make money (if you choose wisely).

Do your art. But don’t wreck your art if it doesn’t lend itself to paying the bills. That would be a tragedy.

(And the twist, because there is always a twist, is that as soon as you focus on your art and leave the money behind, you may just discover that this focus turns out to be the secret of actually breaking through and making money.)

The single most important marketing decision most people make is also the one we spend precious little time on: where we work.

Think about this for a second. Your boss and your job determine not only what you do all day, but what you learn and whom you interact with. Where you work is what you market. Work in a high-stress place and you’re likely to become a highly stressed person, and your interactions will display that. Work for a narcissist and you’ll develop into someone who’s good at shining a light on someone else, not into someone who can lead. Work for someone who plays the fads and you’ll discover that instead of building a steadily improving brand, you’re jumping from one thing to another, enduring layoffs in between gold rushes. Work for a bully and be prepared to be bullied.

And yet, there are plenty of books about getting a job, but no books I know of about
choosing
a job. There are hundreds of sites where job seekers can go to find a new job, and virtually none where you can find reviews of bosses or companies or jobs.

Ted Zoromski really needed a job, so he took one doing human spam (outbound telemarketing). That was his first mistake. That kind of work isn’t a stepping stone to something better, it doesn’t teach you much, it grinds you down, and it doesn’t make you more marketable. When he found that he was also making calls he found offensive, he quit.

Years ago, when I had ten people working for me at my book packaging company, one client accounted for about half our revenue. They were difficult, constantly threatening litigation, sending lawyers to otherwise productive meetings, questioning our ethics, and more. It was clearly the culture of their organization to be at war. So I fired them. I gave them
the rights and walked away, even though it meant a huge hit to our organization. Why do it? Because if we had stuck with them, it would have changed who we were, who we hired, and how we marketed ourselves going forward. We would have had a lifetime of this.

How many job offers with good pay have you turned down in your lifetime? How many clients? Compare that to how many times you’ve been rejected. That’s totally out of whack. Great marketing involves having a great product, and not every job (or every client) is worth your time or attention or love.

If you want to become the kind of person that any company would kill to have as an employee, you need to be the kind of employee that’s really picky about whom you align with.

Most knowledge workers spend their day doing one of three things:

• Reacting (badly) to external situations
  
• Responding (well) to external inputs
  
• Initiating new events or ideas
  

Zig taught me the difference between the first two. When you react to a medication, that’s a bad thing. When you respond to treatment, that’s a plus.

So, think about your team or your front-line staff or your CEO. Something happens in the outside world: an angry comment on Twitter or a disappointed passenger on your airline or a change in the stock price.

Do you react to it? How much of your time is spent reacting to what people say in meetings or emails?

The rest of your day may be spent responding. Responding to a request for proposals. Responding to a form in your inbox. Responding to emails or responding to status updates on Facebook. Responding is gratifying, because you go from having something to do to having something done. There’s a pile in a different spot on your desk at the end of the day. You responded to the needs of the tribe you lead, or you responded to password-change requests or you responded to the boss’s punch list.

And that’s it. You go home having done virtually nothing in the third bucket.

We tend to reserve the third bucket, initiate, for quiet times, good times, down times, or desperate times. We wait until the inbox is empty or the new product lines are due (at which point the initiative is more of a response). It’s possible to spend an entire day blogging and Twittering and Facebooking and never initiate a thing; just respond to what’s coming in. It’s possible to spend an entire day at P&G (actually it’s possible to spend an entire career) doing nothing but responding.

Take a look at your Sent folder. Is it filled with subject lines that start with “RE:”? Consider your job at the university—do you actively recruit people who don’t even apply for professorships? What about your blog—does it start conversations or just continue them?

What did your brand or organization initiate today?

What did
you
initiate?

Think about the changes you’d have to make (uh-oh, initiate) in your work day in order to dramatically change the quantity and scale of the initiatives you create.

Some marketing jobs are about responding. None are about reacting. The best ones are about initiating.

Make money: not by building an Internet company, but by using the ’Net as a tool to create value and get paid. Use the Internet as a tool, not as an end. Do it when you are part of a big organization or do it as a soloist. The dramatic leverage of the ’Net more than overcomes the downs of the current economy.

The essence is this:
connect
.

Connect the disconnected to each other, and you create value.

• Connect advertisers to people who want to be advertised to.
  
• Connect job hunters with jobs.
  
• Connect information seekers with information.
  
• Connect teams to each other.
  
• Connect those seeking similar.
  
• Connect to partners and those that can leverage your work.
  
• Connect people who are proximate geographically.
  
• Connect organizations spending money with ways to save money.
  
• Connect like-minded people into a movement.
  
• Connect people buying with people who are selling.
  

Some examples? I think it’s worth delineating these so you can see that the opportunity can be big, if that’s your taste, or small, if you don’t want to invest heavily just yet.

Connect advertisers to people who want to be advertised to.

Dany Levy did this with Daily Candy, a company she recently sold for more than a hundred million dollars. Daily Candy uses simple email software; there are no technology tricks involved. Instead, it’s a simple permission marketing business: hundreds of thousands of the right people, getting an anticipated, personal, and relevant email every day. (Note! This works only if you earn true permission, not that sort of fake half-and-half version that’s so common.)

Connect job hunters with jobs.

My friend Tara has made hundreds of thousands of dollars (in good years) working as an executive recruiter. But what did she actually do all day? She stayed connected with a cadre of people. She kept track of the all-stars. She connected with the right people, investing time in them that her clients never thought was worth it. So, when it was time to hire, it was easier for them to call Tara than it was for them to start from scratch. The best time to start a gig like this is right now, when no one in particular wants to connect with and help out the superstars. Later, when the economy bounces back, your position will be extremely valuable. (Note! This works only if you have insane focus and if the people you interact with are the true superstars, not just numbers.)

Connect information seekers with information.

At a large scale, this is what Bloomberg did to make his fortune. Spending $$$ on a Bloomberg terminal guarantees a user at least a 15-minute head start on people who don’t have one. But consider the number of micro-markets where this connection doesn’t occur. Michael Cader offers it to book publishers and does quite well. Which industry needs you to channel and collect and connect?

On a micro level, there are now people making thousands of dollars a month running their pages on Squidoo. That’s almost enough to be a full-time job for a curious person with the generosity to share useful information.

Connect teams to each other.

How much is on the line when a company puts ten people in three offices on a quest to launch a major new product in record time? The question, then, is why wouldn’t they be willing to spend a little more to hire a team concierge? Someone to manage Basecamp and conference calls and scheduling and document source control to be sure the right people have the right information at the right time? I don’t think most organizations can hire someone to do this full-time, but I bet this is a great specialty for someone who is good at it.

Connect those seeking similar.

Who’s running the ad hoc association of green residential architects? Or connecting the hundred CFOs at the hundred largest banks in the U.S.? It’s amazing how isolated most people are, even in a world crowded with people. I know of a guy who built an insanely profitable business around connecting C-level executives at the
Fortune
500. After all, there are only 500 of them. They want to know what the others are doing.

Connect to partners and those that can leverage your work.

Freelancers had no power because they depended on the client to hook them up with the rest of the team that could leverage their work. But what if you do that before you approach the client? What if you, the graphic designer, have a virtual partner who is an award-winning copywriter, and another partner who is a well-known illustrator? You could walk in the door and offer detailed PDFs or other high-impact viral electronic media in a turnkey package.