Marketing

What makes a dancer, singer, or speaker great? I mean really great, like genius-level great?

There are three things that make the great different:

First, they stand out.  They break conventions. No one gets excited if they play it safe.  In fact, they know “playing it safe” is one of the most dangerous options around because at best, no one even notices your existence.

Second, they perform with confidence. When a performer takes the stage and is reserved about their performance, hoping for greater acceptance by not going too far into the extreme, we sense the tension, and it makes us all feel uncomfortable.  As a result, it feels like an amateur performance — someone who wants to be great, but simply isn’t.

Third, it requires polish and class. It’s amazing how often you see someone go out and try to push the boundaries, but something is missing and as a result, they fail, and usually, they fail badly. When someone without skill tries something new, they lack the experience to add polish. On the other hand, the genius has an intuitive sense for why the convention exists, and thereby knows how to circumvent it with class. We still find their rule breaking shocking; but we are also extremely impressed.

Sometimes it’s easy to tell the great from the amateur and enumerate why, but most of the time, there is a fine distinction between the two. Its something we sense when we witness it, but can’t exactly put our finger on it — you know it when you see it.

As the world increasingly moves toward commoditized ho-hum, we must instead be great at our jobs like any great performer: Pushing the limits, not settling for safe, and breaking the rules with both confidence and class. However, we must be careful of becoming excited simply because we are breaking free of convention.  Too often people think that being different is enough and as a result, they get lazy about their execution.  Being different is not enough.  You have to be different and you have to do it well.

[Side note: Even though dancing is not really my thing, I've found the videos by the LXD pretty incredible.  The mixture of the extraordinary dancing coupled with storytelling is very compelling.  In case you haven't seen any of their performances, here was their presentation at TED this year.]

“If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward”
Thomas Edison

Science requires thousands of failures in order to find a success. Following the success, we look back and rationalize why that one success was obviously the solution to the puzzle. Prior to finding it, we could not see it. This retrospection however, can cause us to think that we just need one brilliant idea to be successful.

The reality is that you are more likely to succeed if you can try a lot of things and the Internet is a great playground for that. It’s inexpensive to try different experiments and it’s easier to measure the effect. In many ways, you’re better off running as many experiments as you can, fail quickly, learn, and try again rather than trying to figure out the exact right strategy before you even start.

There is still an art to experiment design that should be consider, but trying to achieve perfection in this, often means that you lose out on serendipitous findings that come from trying lots of different combinations.  Again, there is much beyond our purview including whole groups of people we’ve never interacted with.

This means, if you can provide a successful service or marketing message to a small niche, the internet’s scale is able to make it be successful. One realization that shocks me is that there are THOUSANDS of successful products that we’ve never heard about. Products that are making a lucrative living for someone. Because we tend to ignore those things  beyond our view of the world, we believe we know of all of the successful things (or at least most of them), but this is simply not the case.

This ultimately means that your small idea may find a big tribe.

Got an idea? Try it out.

In the process of learning Spanish, I’ve had a lot of thoughts regarding the nature of communication. When we are communicating, we know what we are trying to say and so whatever we say sounds completely unambiguous. The “Made To Stick” authors talk about this concept as “The Curse Of Knowledge” and it’s extremely present in learning a new language. Sometimes, I will say the same word with slightly different vowel sounds to my teacher until I see her face finally go from a scowl of incomprehension to a look of enlightenment. The whole time, I know exactly what I’m trying to say and it makes perfect sense to me.

The same thing can happen to us when we are trying to explain something to our customers or our colleagues.  It makes perfect sense to us, but not to the person you are trying to communicate with.

If a child walked up to you and said, “Tea Bog Beet Knee”. You might look at him perplexed, or take the expression I have become very experienced at using – smile and nod. The words all sound remarkably close to the meaning but not quite right. You can even add the correct pronunciation to some of the words without adding much value: “The Bog Beet Me”. Still it’s not easy to understand.

Perhaps if you saw teeth marks on the child’s arm, and saw a dog running down the street you might put together that he was saying “the dog bit me”. But before that, as you are smiling and nodding, the child is likely to say the same sentence with greater earnestness, slower, and louder. None of which actually help in the comprehension.

Yet how often do we take the same approach and get frustrated when we get looks of confusion from the people we are trying to explain ourselves to? This problem is one of the main sources of miscommunication that we have has people. The speaker already knows all about what he is trying to say. There are no ambiguous pronouns in his sentences and there is only a single connotation in all of his words. When the listener doesn’t understand, saying the same phrase more emphatically doesn’t work.

All of us as communicators should remember that the mere fact we are expressing something verbally to our audience means they don’t know what we want them to know and as such, we would do well to remember it is our responsibility to communicate with them. Not their responsibility to guess what we are thinking. Remember, as the speaker, you are cursed with knowledge, and this is the first obstacle you have to overcome.

Yesterday, I talked about the importance of embracing failure. The second aspect of this is the speed of failure. There are many projects for which feedback is very slow and this can cause two problems. First, not being able to see the entire system and how decisions that were made earlier create a failure much later. Second, you have a very limited number of experiments that you can run and find the way to succeed.

No one has an infinite number of experiments – it is limited by time, by money, or by some other consumable. The key is to find environments where you can fail and recover quickly.

Consider the plane pilot, we don’t want him failing while flying in a plane. Moreover, one failure and he has extinguished the consumable most important to his learning (his life). We do want him failing in a flight simulator though over and over and over again. Learning what to do when it’s raining, your gauges aren’t working right and the left engine is broken.

Many companies don’t spend enough time figuring out how to fail quickly and safely. They make the entire enterprise a grand experiment which allows only one shot. They hire 15 engineers and 5 sales people and consume their capital like they were in a hyperinflationary market. They get one chance to get it right, the problem is that if they get it wrong (they probably will), they can’t use the learning to get better. It’s done.

People can do the same things in their careers and in their life. They can easily become so convinced in the direction of their actions that they cease to consider whether they are investing in the right things. The goal always out of reach.

It is important for every company and every leader to find ways to fail quickly and to learn how to change quickly. This is what leads to learning and perfecting the very actions that we are doing. You can only learn as fast as you can fail and recover