Most people have a business they need to build a brand for.
I had brand I needed to build a business for.
This was never my intention. I never made a formal decision to approach my enterprise in this manner. But ten years into it, I’m now starting to realize how much more lucrative it is to work from the inside out, as opposed to the outside in.
When we start with who we are and what we love – then let everything flow from there – the work we do is truer. When we start with the why behind our idea – not the how of who is going to buy it – the work we do is richer.
I was never stopped by not knowing how. I was simply sparked by knowing why, and sustained by knowing who. And although I never had a plan, I always had a process.
Now, I’m just getting paid to be myself.
Now, because it’s impossible to fail at self-expression, because nobody can criticize a life that belongs to me, nobody can tell me that I’m doing it wrong.
Not a bad way to build a business.
Do a great job and wait for the phone to ring is a broken business model.
It’s complacent, passive and largely unsustainable. And unless you’re incredibly famous, independently wealthy or impossibly lucky, you need to find a strategy that provides surer footing. Otherwise your name will disappear.
Not knowing any better, I actually tried this broken model for a while. And although I found moderate success, I knew I had to make a change or risk falling off the radar.
So I made a decision.
Instead of sitting in the office, waiting for the phone to ring, I stay in motion. I keep creating art, keep sticking myself out there and keep making a difference, every day. That way, when the phone does ring, it’s a surprise. I actually have to reach back to answer it.
That’s the greatest feeling in world. When new opportunities find you through the attraction of working, not the arrogance of waiting.
Sure beats sitting in a quiet office all day with my fingers crossed.
The rub about hiring yourself is the absence of blame.
When it’s just us, there’s nobody to point fingers at.
Should we fail to discipline ourselves, fall short on our goals or ship mediocre work when we know we could do better, there’s no assistant to hide behind, no intern to scapegoat and no coworker to blame.
No matter what happens, it’s our fault and ours alone.
This is the best thing that ever happened to us. Instead of playing another game of blame roulette, we enable a daily practice of taking responsibility. We paint ourselves into an accountable corner. And we build the emotional muscle of ownership that is sorely needed to endure the entrepreneurial journey.
I’ve left a lot of money on the table.
When I think back to all the projects, pitches, partnerships and potential opportunities I said no to over the years, I’m it sure it adds up to a nice chunk of change.
But why dilute the enterprise? Why create something just for the money? Why say yes to a project just because it’s easy, popular or worst of all, monetizeable?
It’s just another cash grab.
Besides, just because the path is paved with gold doesn’t mean the destination will make me any happier. In my experience, the less passion it takes to start, the less meaning it creates in the end.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m too picky. Maybe stubbornness is getting expensive.
I guess what’s reassuring is, the more distance I get from the opportunities I rejected, the more thankful I become that I held out. Especially when I see the look of regret in the eyes of someone who got seduced by the power of the quick buck.
That’s the power of a positive no.
We are identified by what we do, but we are defined by what we decline.
The speed of the response is the response.
In an impatient world where everything matters and everybody’s watching, the smartest thing we can do is get back to people promptly, not just when we can.
Even if the answer is no. Even if the answer is I don’t know. That we actually responded immediately is rare enough to be remarkable. That we actually showed up and dared to care is enough to make most of us happy.
Most people would rather hear no than hear nothing.
There’s an inverse relationship between size and surrender.
I learned this from my friend Devon, a veteran of the landscaping industry.
He tells a story about running the marketing department of a large organization. Like many corporate behemoths, his company leadership scrambled to stay in control of what every employee said. Every time they logged on, checked in linked up, there was always some manager looking over their shoulder, screening tweets and monitoring status updates for potential risks.
Which might sound smart from a liability standpoint, but it also sounds like a lot of work, constantly turning the volume up and down like that.
When the reality is, it’s easier to assume the volume is always up.
To go about our days knowing that everything matters, everybody’s watching and everything’s a performance, and that we’re always in danger of becoming known for what we’re about to do.
That way, instead killing ourselves trying to edit every word we publish, we simply act from a place of integrity and class, hoping that our language will follow suit.
Peter Drucker was right.
Trust is always cheaper than control.
Thought leadership is not an accident.
If you want to position yourself as a person worth paying attention to, you have to bring some original magic to the table. Fearlessly giving your gifts to the world, breathing rarified air into people’s lives, through every piece of content you publish.
Start by having a stance on why the world doesn’t make sense. Take time each day to rant about the injustice of the world. Start by doing so privately. Use dissatisfaction as your ember of initiative. Then, make it worth publishing by attaching practical suggestions to pessimistic thoughts. Otherwise you’re just complaining.
Continue by infusing a modern sensibility into a classic context. Show your audience something they might reject instantly, but then tell them to look behind it. Build a beautiful reminder of what could be, still capture the universal human experiences we all share, and you’ll thrill people’s imaginations forever.
Accentuate by making passion palpable and recurrent. When you see something and can’t wait to share it, don’t hold back. Through your online messaging, insist that a whole new world is bursting forth and everyone everywhere can be a part of it. That’s how you equip people to spot the new story with their own eyes.
That’s thought leadership, and it’s not an accident.
Because it’s one thing to have something to say.
It’s another to just have to say something.
The pile never gets to zero.
When we choose to go our own way, take the road less traveled and hire ourselves, there will always more to do, all the time, forever, until we die. Or go out of business.
It’s an infinite regression. Like two opposing mirrors, Parkinson’s Law proves that the list of stuff to do, things to learn and people to contact will continue to refill itself in perpetuity. And there’s nothing we can do to stop it.
Initially, it’s overwhelming. We feel like we’re never making any progress with our enterprise, or, worse yet, moving in reverse. Not exactly motivating.
But over time, we learn to honor the pile. We make peace with it. We even joust with it. And we give thanks to the small business gods for it because, unlike most of the world, our job is rarely boring. There’s always something to be done.
Certainly makes the day go by faster.
I don’t remember not knowing what my passion was.
Since I was four years old, I always had an honest understanding about what I loved, what I was good at and where I was born to invest meaning. Unlike a lot of the world, passion was never something I had to search for. It was just there. Waiting for me.
But it’s not because I was special, it’s because I was surrounded.
By my family, who kept the door of opportunity open. They created an artistic home life that fortified, fostered and challenged creativity. And they never asked me to edit myself about whatever captured my imagination.
By my teachers, who spotted the trends early. They knew I was motivated by multiple passions, and they always let me keep them in play and in communication with each other. And they never told me that what I was obsessed with was wrong or weird.
By my mentors, who took me under their wings. They saw something in me that someone once saw in them, pulled me aside, pulled me in close and gave me a front row seat to my own brilliance. And they never let me bury my music.
By my friends, who nurtured my insanity. They affirmed and encouraged my most idiosyncratic personality traits, even if it got us into trouble. And they never asked me to be anyone other than me.
That’s why I never had to look far to find my passion.
The people who surrounded me crushed the walls that usually obscured it.
They helped me remember who I was before the world told me who I was supposed to be.
Because of them, passion was never a search, it was just a checklist.
There are four words we need to hear.
“It was worth it.”
Whether we’re interacting with customers, employees, students, vendors, fans, readers or listeners, the ultimate goal is to be worth it in their eyes.
Worth noticing, worth crossing the street for, worth standing in line for, worth taking a picture of, worth paying extra for, worth showing off, worth socializing around, worth blogging about, worth sharing with others, worth being tired for, worth getting yelled at for, worth being sore for, worth sitting trough traffic for, worth coming back for, and worth saving forever.
Is your brand worth it?
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