Category: New Business Development

I’ve been presented
with another great
writing (business building) opportunity.
This opportunity requires
another month of crazy writing hours
and it might not pay off for years,
if at all.

This project is challenging.
It is much easier
to spend my day
answering email
than it is to work on this project
but answering email is short-term thinking.

As Mark McGuinness
shares

“Those who get swept off track
do so
because they are thinking short-term:

The phone is ringing now,
so I need to answer it.
The email has just arrived,
I need to get rid of it ASAP.
I’ll just get this one out of the way,
it shouldn’t take long…

When you think like this,
the pressures of the moment
will always feel more urgent
than settling down to wrestle
with something truly important
(and difficult).”

Do the truly important work first
even if it is more difficult.

Right now,
each one of your competitors
is doing something better than you.
It could be a small something.
It could be a different something
for each competitor.
But they are excelling at something.

As Mike Michalowicz
shares
(this entire post
is a must-read for innovators)

“Sam Walton once said,
“I believe I am Kmart’s best customer.
I have visited almost every
one of their stores.”

He constantly evaluated other retailers
and copied what they did best.
Among the many innovations
he extracted from his competition
was the centralization
of the checkout process.

Instead of having a checkout
in each department of the store,
he centralized everything
to one checkout line
at the front of the store.

Walmart leaped forward
and set a new standard
that we see everywhere today.”

Savvy business owners
learn from their competitors.

Building a brand,
a business,
a career
is difficult.
There are times
when we’ll want to quit
and if we give ourselves a choice,
we WILL quit.

Kimberly of
The Band Perry
shares

“When it came to college,
it was kind of like role reversal.
Being the oldest,
it was my decision to make
whether to pursue music
or have a fallback plan.
In discussing that with Mom and Dad,
their only comment was always very consistently,
‘If you have a fallback plan,
you are going to fall back on it
at some point.
So we need to remove Option B
and go full-throttle toward Option A.’
I don’t think we’d be here
had we not done that.”

If quitting is an option,
we WILL quit.

Charlaine Harris has written
her last book
in her VERY popular
Sookie Stackhouse series.

Wrapping up a series is always hard
but it is even harder
when so many people,
including the mentally fragile,
are emotionally invested in the series.

As Charlaine Harris
shares
“I’m very fortunate that
people are so invested in the series.
At the same time,
it can be a source of some anxiety
to get emails that say,
‘If Sookie doesn’t end up with Eric,
I’m going to kill myself.’ ”

I have a much smaller readership
yet I receive at least
one brutally graphic threatening email
a day.

It is not just writers receiving threats.
When Coca-Cola launched New Coke,
the executive also received death threats.

According to the Oxford dictionary,
fan is the shortened form of fanatical.
These fans are fanatical in healthy ways
and in unhealthy ways.

When you’re successful,
you WILL attract the crazies.
It is one of the costs of success.

A loved one is NOT a morning person.
His brain is in a fog
for the first 30 minutes of the day.
This doesn’t mean
he isn’t functional.
He has a morning routine
he doesn’t need his brain
to accomplish.

As Rieva Lesonsky
shares

“I’m not the most organized person,
but I’ve observed a lot of people who are,
and they have one thing in common:
a routine.

Hey, it’s morning,
your coffee hasn’t kicked in yet,
you’re not thinking totally clearly
and you need to get things done
without really thinking about them.
Having a routine helps you
auto-pilot yourself
through the basic tasks of the morning
(what to eat, what to wear)
before you really dig into
the tough stuff.”

Routines allow us
to get things accomplished
when our brains aren’t working.

When I wrote my first story,
I put every plot device I loved
into that single story.
I didn’t know if I’d write a second story
so I wanted to do it all.
The story ended up
as a complicated mess.

Independent artist
Macklemore hit it big
with his song Thrift Shop.
The video was simple and charming,
a work of art.

His second video,
for Can’t Hold Us,
is a complicated mess.
He clearly put every plot device
he could think of
into that video.

I see this happen again and again
with artists
and with product developers.
They do it all
because they can do it all,
not because it benefits the product.

We’ll hopefully be living, writing, creating
for a long, long time.
We will eventually do all of the cool things
we long to do.

Pace yourself.
If you can’t pace yourself
(I know I can’t),
then appoint someone to control pacing
and listen to that person.

The board of a not-for-profit
was rolling out
an automated payment system.
To test the system,
they need a credit card
to put a $40 charge on.

One by one,
the board members offered up
their credit cards.
One by one,
the credit cards were declined
for having an insufficient balance.

These board members were sophisticated women
with immaculate nails and hair,
designer outfits,
and expensive purses.
They appeared successful
yet they weren’t surprised
about their financial situation.
They made jokes about their balances
and brushed it off as unimportant
but it was an eye-opener for me.

Eventually, I said f*ck it
and offered my credit card.
The charge went through.
The system passed the trial.

The point is…
we can’t judge success by appearances.
This not only holds true
for people
but for companies also.
Delve deeper
before you form partnerships.

My July release
is the best story I’ve ever written.
My editor loved it.
I can’t, however, guarantee
that other readers will love it.
That’s out of my hands.

I CAN guarantee
that someone will hate it
with a fiery passion,
giving it a one star review on Amazon.
That’s a certainty.

Why?

Because someone always hates my stories.
Someone always hates anything I do.
I suspect that
someone always hates
that I’m doing.

Someone will hate that
you’re doing also.
They’ll sh*t all over your work.
But don’t let that stop you.

As Seth Godin
shares
(this blog post is
a must-read for any creator)

“No one has ever built a statue
to a critic,
it’s true.
On the other hand,
it’s only the people with statues
that get pooped on
by birds flying by.”

Build something,
a statue,
worth pooping on!

You’re likely doing something
that is sabotaging your career
or your business.
This something isn’t a big something.
You’d notice a big something.
It is small.
You might think it is trivial.

Unfortunately,
other people DON’T see it
as trivial.
For them,
it is a big deal
and it is preventing you
from landing that big deal.

This is why you need someone,
call her a spy, a mentor, an insider,
who is comfortable enough
to point this out.

As Rajesh Setty
shares

“Have someone else on your side
(mentor, confidant)
ALWAYS.
That someone MUST be competent
AND candid with you.
That someone must be one
who can call you out
on your micro-deviations
along the way.
It is also important
that you trust that someone
without judging them
or justifying your actions.”

Don’t let a ‘trivial’ thing
sink your success.

I have a huge book release in July
(a three novella series
releasing from a New York Publisher)
and I’ve been working like crazy,
getting my promotion material ready.

I’ve written 50 guest blog posts,
60 blog posts for my own site,
daily tweets for three months,
and
have contacted
book bloggers and reviewers.

This combined with my writing
and promotion for my regular releases
translates into long hours.

But as
restaurateur
Tyler Florence
says
success isn’t easy
and it isn’t free.

“I have a couple hundred employees
and I love each
and every one of them.
My crew is really tight.
I manage them from text and emails.
I work all the time;
success is not easy
and it is not free.
The second you take a day off,
that is the second
that the wheels get shaky.”

Time to get to work!