ga('send', 'pageview');

amy mccloskey tobin

You Don’t Know More Than Your Customer

By

Quiet person

There is a line of thinking in sales that believes you should always know more than your customer. That somehow you will win their business by making them feel that they just don’t understand the subject matter and you, the expert, are what they need.

That is a deeply flawed way of thinking and the sure route to losing your client in the long-term. You need to be your client’s trusted adviser, not their know-it-all lecturer. Of course, they will learn as they go with you – as you help them overcome challenges and fix problems. But if you talk down to them and don’t hear what they’re saying they won’t come to you with the very problems you need to help them fix in order to remain their trusted partner.

What It Looks Like When You Know More

He had his own opinions.

He did it the way HE wanted.

He didn’t see it the way we do.

These are the very words a client used to explain to me the problem she was having with the primary contact from her web development team. They were well into a website redesign and still not finished because her developer kept creating what he thought she needed instead of listening to her clearly express her needs. Sadly, this happens every day to customers everywhere.

Stop Being Your Client’s Problem

My client and “Sales Psychotherapist” wrote a post yesterday called Who Killed Customer Loyalty that lays out the problem with business/client relationships today. Many business people like to believe that society has changed, that customers are no longer what they once were, that it isn’t their own fault they don’t have loyal customers. But as Anthony points out, that isn’t the truth at all.

When you stop listening to what your customer really wants, there is no way  you are going to deliver it.

If you’d like to receive updates for new posts please subscribe here:

 

Photo credit: meteor shower via photopin (license)

Become More Comfortable With Conflict

By

cats at war

Fear is the number one thing holding people back from career success, better relationships, and pretty much anything they want out of life. Every year The Chapman University studies what Americans fear most. Rejection and the negative judgment of others continually rank near the top of personal life fears.

This fear expresses itself in myriad ways, but in business, it usually rears its ugly head in situations that require negotiation. It holds people back from turning leads into opportunities, closing sales, negotiating employment terms and salaries… the list goes on and on. Conflict is often avoided, especially by women and young career professionals. It hampers their ability to get ahead and have a fulfilling career.

In our personal life, the fear of conflict means we stay in toxic relationships, allow people to make decisions that negatively impact us, and behave as poor parents and friends. If the people closest to us won’t tell us the truth, who will?

What is Conflict

Before you change the way you approach conflict it helps to understand what it is and what it looks like when you avoid it. For most of us, any time we must speak up to disagree or push for our ideas can feel like conflict. It occurs when our family members take advantage of us or ask for too much and we don’t set boundaries. It happens when we don’t ask for the raise we know we deserve, or when we allow a co-worker or boss to push ideas that we don’t believe are the best ones. So many of us remain quiet because the anxiety caused by fear of rejection or failure is too great for us to overcome.

Avoiding conflict takes a toll on organizations and on our personal lives. I don’t need to tell you this because you already know, but I want to spell it out. When you avoid conflict out of fear you:

  • Avoid tough conversations with your partner because you don’t want to fight. That means you put up with a situation that drains your soul and stops you from having the relationship you want.
  • Avoid drawing boundaries with love ones and friends. You end up abused and taken advantage of, only doing harm to your relationship with these people you care so much about.
  • Avoid drawing boundaries at work. Your self-respect diminishes because you, and others, see that you won’t stand up for yourself.
  • Avoid contradicting co-workers and managers. You keep your great ideas buried

How We Learn to Be Comfortable with Conflict

If I had a nickel for every time someone told me they wished they could have a ‘strong voice’ like me, or be as ‘direct’ as me I’d be fabulously wealthy. I know that behind my back other less charming terms are used to describe my willingness to speak up. I wasn’t born this way; I learned to speak up. Anyone can if they set their mind to it. Here’s how you start:

  1. There is a difference between being comfortable with conflict and seeking it out. You know the difference, so stop worrying that you’ll look like you enjoy combat. If you know that you are speaking up for the right reasons, embrace that and be satisfied with that knowledge.
  2. People don’t like you already. It’s ok. A recent study showed that half of the people we consider our friends don’t consider us friends of theirs. Let that sink in for a minute and then reflect on the fact that it doesn’t matter. You know who you can turn to when you need a reliable friend. You do not need the world on your side. Absorb and embrace the fact that everyone won’t like you and it won’t impact your life at all. Not so much is at stake.
  3. Speaking up is a very positive thing in the long run. You already know the discomfort you have from allowing the status quo to endure. You already look back on the times you wish you had said something when instead you remained silent. Think about what could have been different if only you’d said what you wanted to say.
  4. Becoming comfortable with conflict is a process. Don’t fear, you cannot flip a switch and become an altogether different person overnight. Just as with any change, the process is what will get you there. Check out the Harvard Business Review’s Conflict Strategies for Nice People.

Most importantly, stop thinking of conflict as an emotional minefield. You can confront issues head on without anger or fear. And like learning any new skill, what at first makes you nervous becomes more and more comfortable as you practice.

If you’d like to receive updates for new posts please subscribe here:

 

photo credit: The dumb, bald mediator is playing with his smart phone via photopin (license)

 

 

No One Else Will Sell You

By

Fear

Every year The Champman University does a survey on the things Americans fear most. Fear of rejection is always one of the top 10 things we fear in our personal lives, usually not far below the fear of heights and public speaking. Knowing that, it won’t surprise you that the number one obstacle to success in sales is fear. None of us like rejection, but the hard truth is that if you want to do anything of meaning in life, you must be able to sell. No one else will sell you.

I’ve talked to thousands of business owners and decision makers in my career; the successful ones all have one thing in common – they embrace the act of selling. This may or not mean they have a lead role in selling what their company offers, but they do take a lead role in creating a compelling story that sells their offering.

If You Want to Lead, You Must Sell

If you want to lead, you must sell, in language and by your actions. Leading is by its nature the act of persuading and inspiring others to follow you. You can’t do that if you can’t sell your ideas to others.

If you want to change the world or your small corner of the world, you must sell. Whether you are in politics or the non-profit world working on a passion project, you can’t make an impact by yourself. You must persuade others to embrace your ideas.

Where People With Great Ideas Fall Down

I’ve been involved in enough start-ups and small businesses to recognize one of the key diseases that cause good people with good ideas to fail. When they aren’t successful at selling, instead of honing their selling skills and business acumen, they decide to hire someone else to sell for them – usually as an outside sales rep. They convince themselves that their offering is great, it’s simply not their forte to sell. They decide “if I bring in a sales professional they’ll open the floodgates and I’ll be on my way.” It never works.

Top level sales professionals have the world by the tail. A salesperson worth their salt is not going to work on a commission only basis – which is usually what the lean startup or small business is offering. Someone who already knows how to sell is most likely working for a company that provides them with a great base salary, plenty of perks, and administrative tools and personnel that allow them to focus on doing what they do best. Or they’re working for themselves selling their own ideas.

Even if you can afford to bring in a top level salesperson, how does that fix your long term problems? Are you going to turn to them to sell your ideas to your team? To clients? If you do, guess who owns the relationship with the person who buys in? And guess who can walk out the door with it? Smaller businesses can’t afford that risk – they need to own the relationship because they can’t afford to lose it.

The Good News Is That Sales Is a Skill

You can learn to sell. Anyone can learn to sell, that’s not the hard part. The hard part is pushing past your fear, or rather, learning to live with that fear. Yes, you will be rejected regularly when you ask for the sale. But you will never get the sale if you don’t ask for it. You can learn sales skills and business acumen. You can learn how to sell in a way that presents you as a trusted partner and not a slimy, self-centered sales person. All of this is doable if you’re willing to put the effort in and accept rejection as part of life. Otherwise, you might as well hang it up and go take a job where someone else is in charge of selling their ideas, and you just work for them.

If you’d like to receive updates for new posts please subscribe here:

 

Photo credit: Timothy Ferriss What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do via photopin (license).

Raising My Daughter by Any Means Necessary

By

Girl and Horse

Last month  a young woman in her twenties posted a set of pictures/memes on Facebook describing her distaste at being hit on by men old enough to be her father. I found it hysterical and  refreshing. No one seems to bat an eye when older men in the public eye date women young enough to be their daughters, but it’s a different story altogether when the woman is the December to the man’s May.

When I shared the young woman’s post an interesting conversation took place. A male friend accused me of “male misogyny,” if there is such a thing. His argument was that my laughing at men being called unattractive was not in line with my resenting women being judged on their looks. His line of thought is that if you want to stop sexism you can’t be sexist in return. I get that… I do, but I’m not a pacificist. I am living in the real world raising a daughter who, if things don’t change at a much faster rate than they have over the past 100 years, can look forward to making less for the same job, being judged on her looks, and being told by society in countless ways that she is not equal to a man.

Raising My Daughter with Realism

I don’t believe that sexism or pay inequity is an excuse to not succeed. I navigated an extremely male dominated industry for a more than a decade and did very well in sales and management. Although I have experienced being paid less for the same job, I have never felt like a victim, and I have never felt voiceless. But I am a realist, and I know how tough the world is for women leaders in business; women represent just shy of 23 percent of directors on Fortune 100 boards. I know how hard my daughter will have to work to get to a position of power if she chooses the business world for her career path.

It is my duty to arm her with weapons to overcome the additional obstacles that will lay in her way. I intend on doing that by filling her with enough confidence to make it through her harrowing teenage years. I talk and think a lot about what happens to girls as they age – what society does to crush their souls and take away their voice. It is my goal to build my daughter’s confidence up around her voice as much as I can so she can somehow make it to adulthood with it. I don’t want her to have to spend 10 years trying to find it.

That means that I continually tell her how superior women are. How smart, intuitive, and able to lead teams. I talk to her ad nauseam about standing up for what’s right and against what’s wrong. I tell her that some people won’t like her for doing that. I am very, very honest with her about the people who don’t like me for doing exactly that. And I show her that it is FINE to live with some people not liking you… even if it’s the sexist prick that lives across the street who loves to talk to others about what a bitch I am. When he slinks by our house, head down, I fix my gaze on him. She watches him afraid to make eye contact with me. I let her see me be ok with making men like him uncomfortable.

I make sure she knows the good men too. Because her father is so sporadically in her life, I make sure that she has plenty of good men, good fathers, men who respect women, in her life. I make sure that she spends time around couples who mutually respect each other because she isn’t witnessing that at home in our single-mom family. I spend too much money for her to follow her passion, horseback riding because girls who ride horses gain confidence in their physical strength.

I’ve been called out for teaching her that girls are better than boys, and I’m ok with that too. At 8 years old she’s already been told countless times on the playground that girls aren’t as good as boys. Little boys she has grown up with – one who was her very best friend – have told her that she isn’t “tough enough,” or as smart as they are because of her gender. I arm her to counterbalance the waves of sexism that are already lapping at her self-confidence and will build into a tsunami by the time she reaches college. I am arming her by any means necessary with enough confidence and self-belief to battle through her late teens and early twenties and come out the other side as an adult woman who doesn’t have to spend years dissecting her own self-esteem issues in order to have a healthy self-image.

There are those who are critical of my approach. They tell me that I am reinforcing the gender divide – that we won’t get to true equality if women take my approach. After 25 years in the workforce where mansplaining is still going strong and women make .76 on the dollar for equal work, I’m ok with that. I’m raising my daughter to succeed in this world, not the one we, and our mothers and grandmothers, have been dreaming of for so many, many years.

If you’d like to receive updates for new posts please subscribe here:

Photo credit: Boots via photopin (license).

There Are Great Minds Being Overlooked and Ignored

By

Ostrich looking the other way

I’ve been doing a lot of work lately on my own business psychology. Just like in our personal lives, if left neglected our business psychology can turn to business psychosis. I’ve been refocusing my business goals and strategy and cleaning up any dysfunctional client or vendor relationships. When I’m in this mode I usually turn to great thought leaders in business and in life, and I go in search of new ones. That’s when I discovered Jay Abraham.

I’m sure many of you will be shocked, but I had never heard of Abraham… there are so many business greats and so little time. I came across him on a copy editor Facebook group and went to his site. I (naively) found myself shocked. Look at his home page… do you see anything shocking? Perhaps you don’t, but I was dismayed that every single business leader lauding Abraham’s talents is a man. All but one were white men, so perhaps I should be pleased that there was a wee bit of diversity with Daymon John in there, but give me a break.

The reason it turned me off to such a degree is that there are tons of brilliant women thinkers in the business world. Here are just a few of them.

Donna Dubinsky. A key Apple employee in the early days, a big advocate and brain behind Palm’s success, with many more successes that helped transformed the digital word.
Sheryl Sandberg. Facebook CEO and Lean In author.
Mara Swan. Executive Vice President, Global Strategy & Talent, ManpowerGroup. Swan is executing a women’s leadership diversity push that is working and enthusiastically backed by both genders.
Inda Nooyi. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of PepsiCo.
Irene Rosenfeld. CEO of Mondelēz International
Jill Kronath. Sales Thought Leader, Speaker, Author
Virginia Rometty. Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of IBM
Ursula Burns. Chairman & CEO of Xerox
Meg Whitman. President & CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Oprah. I am sure that there is no need for a description.
Marissa Mayer. Chief Executive Officer of Yahoo! The amount of negative attention Mayer gets is unnerving, considering that she was brought into Yahoo! to do exactly what she has done. And people call Trump a business success after 4 bankruptcies.
Anne Sweeney. Former co-chair of Disney Media, President of the Disney–ABC Television Group, and the President of Disney Channel
Brene Brown. Scholar, Author, and Public Speaker
Susan Cain. Speaker and Author of the non-fiction book Quiet.
Kelly McGonigal. Health Psychologist and Ted Speaker
Elizabeth Gilbert. Author, Essayist, Biographer, and Novelist

Why It Matters to You If These Minds Are Ignored

I speak and write about diversity as part of my regular work life and life mission. The reason I chose it as one of my focuses is because I am a champion of fairness, but the reason people listen to me is because studies show that diversity makes businesses better. U.S. Senator Bob Menendez conducted his own research into diversity in the workplace and how far we still have to go. In his study Menedez sites a 2014 McKinsey report that researched hundreds of companies globally:

Companies in the top quartile of racial or ethnic diversity were 30% more likely to have financial returns above the national industry median.

The diversity of gender, race etc. creates a more creative, less group-think culture. It creates a more engaged culture too.

If you distil it down it is this simple: diversity in business has positive ramifications on employee engagement, productivity, and in the end, the bottom line.

What Is the Next Step?

If we recognize that a lack of diversity in leadership positions throughout the business and thought leadership space is a fact. And if we recognize that we are doing our businesses a disservice by leaving women out, there is only one thing to do: stop doing it. But it won’t happen by simply making a general commitment to think about women leaders more often. It will only happen if we build this commitment into our daily and weekly business practices.

My own next steps are to learn more about the women on this list who I’m not familiar enough with. That includes subscribing to their blogs and email newsletters and reading some of the books they’ve written. Just keeping them in my thought leadership radar means that their way of thinking will seep into my work life. I am also intent on writing about the thought processes of women leaders while working in my professional capacity as a writer. I will recommend more women as keynote speakers and interview more women for the various series I am involved in. I will encourage all of my clients to do the same.

If just a percentage of business leaders read this post and decide to incorporate similar practices into their work life, they will be working in the interest of fairness, but even more to the point, they will be making their businesses stronger, more competitive, more creative, and more profitable.

If you’d like to receive updates for new posts please subscribe here:

Photo credit: Ignore mode via photopin (license).

What Great Writers Know: You are Not that Interesting.

By

looking outward

As an editor and content strategist, I work with writers daily. I copy edit at least 50 blog posts per week, and I’m always working on a substantive editing project. I work with great writers who inspire me and aspiring writers who have a way to go. Working with all of these authors gives me insight into what makes a blog post or article compelling. Of course, the answer can be multi-faceted, but there is one common denominator in the work of the handful of clients I would call great writers:

Their writing is not about themselves.

The reality that most of us don’t want to face is that we simply aren’t that interesting. Of course, we are to ourselves, and to the people who love us, but for the stranger who finds their way to our blog? Not so much.

Think about what you like to read. Think about the posts that have been most compelling to you – the ones you bookmark and re-read. Here’s my shortlist:

Mark Manson – Fuck Yes or No
Jonathan Fields – Death by Hourly Wage
Kareem Abdul-Jabar – The Coming Race War Won’t Be About Race

None of these posts are about the writer. Instead, they contain advice, insight, or information that I (the reader) find useful and enlightening. These are my personal choices – the posts I return to again and again. But if you look at the short list of anyone who actually has a short list of posts like this, I bet my bottom dollar that the articles selected won’t be about the author.

Autobiographies are wonderful – two of my favorites are Katherine Graham’s and Ben Bradlee’s. What made them so interesting isn’t necessarily the details about the authors, but about their involvement and experiences during Watergate. Normally, we are only interested in the biographies or autobiographies of those who have lived a significant life or accomplished something phenomenal. For many bloggers, this isn’t the case… or at least it isn’t yet.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ever write about yourself; there are times when your stories can tie your post to something more universal – something many of us have experienced or can relate to. But in those cases, it’s the universality, not the details of the writer’s personal life, that makes the story compelling.

The trick to making your writing less narrative and self-absorbed may not be in the initial draft. Sometimes you just need to get the ideas out and onto paper or screen. Then give your post breathing time – perhaps a day or two. You can then return to it with fresh eyes and try to experience it from the vantage point of your reader, and eliminate some of the autobiographical details that are only important to you. With practice that window of time to gain distance will shrink and writing for others instead of about yourself will become second nature.

 

If you’d like to receive updates for new posts please subscribe here:

Photo credit: Art via photopin (license).

Disrespect at Work Usually Stems From Lack of Communication

By

workplace communication

In the past week there has been a tremendous PR buzz around the departure of co-host Michael Strahan from Live with Kelly Ripa and Michael, ABC’s flagship morning show. Ripa was upset about the way she was told of Strahan’s departure – at a meeting Strahan called to let her know after everything had been decided, with very little notice as he’s leaving in two weeks.

This late notice caught Ripa off guard, and the show unprepared to replace him; she was, unsurprisingly, unhappy. So unhappy that she disconnected from everyone, including her co-host, and didn’t return to work for 7 contentious days (two of those days were pre-planned vacation days).

Upon Ripa’s return, she was greeted with thundering applause so prolonged that she had to quiet the audience down before speaking. That applause was a very clear indication that her audience felt her pain. In her opening dialogue she addressed the fact that she’s stayed away from work saying that she needed a couple of days to gather her thoughts, adding:

After 26 years I earned the right.”

Ripa said that in her time off she gained some perspective and that her staying away had started something much bigger, a conversation about

communication, and consideration, and most importantly, respect in the workplace.”

Ripa said that she didn’t consider her show simply a workplace, but a second home. She talked about her co-workers and their loyalty to each other.

The Lessons

It appears that ABC, Ripa, and Strahan worked our their difficulties, at least enough to smooth things over and continue working together until Strahan’s departure. Lesson number one is that things can be worked out. But there are deeper lessons here….

  1. Taking a deep breath is sometimes essential. Not all of us have the star power or rank to take 7 days off when workplace tension gets so high that we can’t trust our own voice, but all of us have the right to take a time out to avoid saying something we will regret later. Despite the popularity of the concept that business isn’t about emotion, it actually is. Humans work in business – business by its very nature is a very human endeavor. We, humans, are emotional creatures and when we’re passionate about what we do there will be times that frustration, anger, or hurt will creep into our jobs.It is not only ok – it is sometimes essential – that we give ourselves the space to feel before we react to workplace pain.
  2. Employees often see their place of work as their second home – even if they are tense or struggling second homes. If employers expect and want the people who work for them to feel passionate about their business, they need to treat them and their business as if it is a community, a second home.
  3. The lack of communication is crippling. Often employers leave difficult issues undealt with for so long because they are afraid to tell their employees bad news, but the lack of communication is so much worse than facing up to it. In Ripa’s situation, the lack of communication blindsided the star and left her unprepared. Her interpretation of that lack of communication was disrespect, which is understandable.

What you are telling your employees when you don’t communicate with them is that they don’t matter. Their feelings don’t matter. Their opinions don’t matter. And in the end, THEY don’t matter.

Bad things happen in business. Difficult decisions must be made. Employees will be disappointed. These are facts that all of us accept when we go to work each day. But what is unacceptable is a lack of communication about the difficult issues. It smacks of cowardice, but even more, of disrespect.

 

Photo credit: road trip CA_03 via photopin (license).

Real Marketing versus Bullshit

By

As you may have read, Prince’s death threw me way off balance. Me, and most of the social media-sphere. While my social streams teemed with tributes and personal stories, one brilliant Tweet by Chevrolet stopped me in my tracks.

Chevy Tweet Prince

It was simultaneously touching and reverent, and it made viewers feel as if Chevrolet felt a deep loss too. It was powerful and very, very human. I have no doubt that the brilliant mind behind the image had been moved by Prince and experienced real emotion over his death. That mind resided at Chevy ad agency Commonwealth/McCann. And as much as we might not want to acknowledge it, that ad sprung from the mind of a marketer.

We don’t want to think of it as marketing because it wasn’t intended as such (even though it will raise Chevy’s image quite a few notches for many of us). Which brings me to my point: great marketing never appears to be what it is. It never appears to actually be selling to us.

My background is in sales, but many moons ago I read somewhere that great marketing does one of the following:

  • Plucks your heartstrings
  • Teaches you something
  • Solves a problem

Chevy definitely plucked our heartstrings. But the reason marketers are one of the most distrusted professions on the planet is because most marketing does none of the three things I listed. Instead, so much marketing assumes that we are fools and it pushes its bullshit at us assuming we’ll think it smells like roses.

Tonight, while wasting time on Facebook I came across a social media guru speaking to an audience about the power of social media. ALL of the standard cliches were in there:

The consumer has power they never had before.

Brands have lost control of their message and image.

Engagement is what you seek.

Community is the key.

The key to WHAT?

I love social media. I spend hours on it. I’ve met a ton of brilliant minds in the space, and I have used it effectively for helping clients market in ways they never could before its rise. But the jig is almost up on the ninjas out there selling their social media elixir. The reality is that shit is shit in any medium. If you write powerful copy it will touch hearts on Twitter and in the New York Times as a print ad, which is just what Chevy did with their brilliant image.

If you sell absolute shite on Livestream, Snapchat, Blab or whatever the social media de jour is, it will still be shite. Mediums do not make a great message. Great storytelling, great branding, respect for your audience, and hard work that creates brilliance is what great marketing is made of.

I’ve often said I hate marketers, but that’s not really true. I stand here with my hat off to Commonwealth/McCann; stellar work ladies and gents. What I hate are bullshit artists parading around like nouveau marketers. No matter how much lipstick you stick on your bullshit, we all still smell it.

Why Prince’s Death Rocked Our World

By

prince

Like so many of my friends who came of age in the 80’s I was floored by the news of Prince’s death. I had an insanely busy day to get through so I forced myself to tune out of social media and suspend my reaction until I got finished with an online interview I couldn’t miss. When it was over and I checked in again I had a text from my old high school boyfriend that simply read:

Prince is dead.

With an unexpected fury, I burst into tears and couldn’t stop. That text, Prince’s death… it was as if a light went out on my youth. I mean, I’m 47, I know I’m not young anymore but there is something about watching the artists of our younger years die that smashes us in the face with that fact. It is the stunning, shocking realization that our youth, our teenage years, our innocence is decades past us. The people we loved then, the people we were then are no more; at least not altogether in that special moment and place in time.

I am blessed to have friendships that have lasted 40 years plus. Friendships formed in my teenage years that are as deep as family. Today I reached out to the closest of them even though I had no idea what to say.

For all of us the music of our youth meant a lot, but Prince, there was no one like him. Apart from his insanely great musical ability, he stood for something in the 80’s – something that told us we all could be different. It’s difficult to recall now, but the 80’s, the greed-is-good-Gordon-Gecko-Ronald-Reagan-80’s – they weren’t a friendly place for people who were different. Gay people, people dating interracially, anyone who was in any way different… but Prince was different, and he was worshipped. More than that he was respected, because his genius was transcendent.

In my mind his greatest song will always be Purple Rain, but only because it had such a personal meaning to me. There were so many, many great songs – even songs on the B-side  that were that special to others. This year has seen a torrent of greats leave too soon. Bowie was tough, but Prince? We’ll never lose another like him because there was no other like him.

Photo credit: The Great Prince… Rest in Peace via photopin (license).

The Myth of Working Smart

By

genius Albert Einstein

Reading Originals by Adam Grant is one of those transformative experiences you hope for every time you open a new book. Adam has me thinking about many important issues, but this one has stuck with me: is the theory we’ve been feeding ourselves about working smart rather than working hard actually total rubbish?

Everyone I know struggles with work/life balance, especially women who are career focused. Some years ago I finally gave up on the concept altogether and accepted the idea that for me, some days I’d be a great mom and a sucky business owner; other days it would be the reverse. I’m at peace with that fluctuating state now, but it took a while.

Many of those struggling with that same issue have embraced the idea that they can have it all if only they learn how to work less, but work smart. That is an easy idea to embrace – if I’m only better at what I do and better at managing my time, I can be an incredible success with lots of free time.

But Adam Grant has a very different idea:

It’s widely assumed that there’s a tradeoff between quantity and quality – if you want to do better work, you have to do less of it – but this turns out to be false. In fact, when it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality. “Original thinkers,” Stanford professor Robert Sutton notes, “will come up with many ideas that are strange mutations, dead ends, and utter failures. The cost is worthwhile because they also generate a larger pool of ideas – especially novels.”

There was a time when I just didn’t want to believe this. As a lifelong workaholic, I’d finally reached a point where I was letting myself work less. But I know Adam Grant is right. Over the course of my career, I have spoken to thousands and thousands of business owners and entrepreneurs about how they run their business. It is undeniable that the ones who work the hardest are generally the most successful.

A precise example is my friend and client Anthony Iannarino. Before I worked for him as an editor, I regularly badgered him about being more strategic, using an editor, implementing an SEO strategy etc. Yet he persisted with his focused strategy of writing, and writing. Last week he published his 2500th blog post. For most of that time, it was just Anthony, on his own, writing. No editor. No SEO strategist – just a man churning out lots and lots of great content.

Where did it get him? He has 58,000 email subscribers, a massive social media following, and a lead generation machine others would kill for, and it’s built on all of his thought leadership published in the form of blog posts. Of course, he’s been out there consulting, speaking, and active on social media, but the foundation of his lead generation is that blog.

Does this mean that in order to succeed you should give up any chance of a personal life and work 80 hours per week? No, certainly not, but what my experience and Adam Grant’s book have made clear to me is that great work and great ideas do not usually come in the form of genius that strikes special people with a Eureka moment. Genius comes from trying, and trying, and trying again… with many dead ends and bad ideas as part of the process of doing great work. It also means that you will do mediocre work often, but that’s ok, because mediocre work is part and parcel of the pathway to genius work.

 

Photo credit: Basel-9901.jpg via photopin (license).