It Was a Fast-Straight-Road Weekend
May 31, 2010
It’s been a hectic Memorial Day weekend totally consumed by… let’s just call it extended-family-madness. I planned to have a little time over the last couple of days to put together a post but life interrupted my plans. But I’m home now and the chaos is left behind.
Fortunately I found a powerful and brief analogy for my recurring warning about focusing on chasing the latest new marketing tactic before figuring out your marketing plan. It was a link in a recent blog post by Seth Godin.
Seth referenced a post by Rich Goidel, blogging at “The Back of the Napkin,” titled Playing with turtles. The core message here is to focus on the important thing — marketing message — and not get distracted by secondary things — playing with marketing channels.
I’m writing a corollary. When someone else has written a beautifully concise post that conveys a valuable message to your audience, call it good, link to it, and shut up.
(Bonus to me: I don’t really have time to write a post, much less edit one to make it good.
Bonus to you: You don’t have to read that meandering post I don’t have time to write!)
May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,
Steve Coxsey
After Mowing It Over…
May 23, 2010
For years I had a commitment to post something here weekly related to my career journey. A few months back I decided just to post things when I was inspired or moved or had indigestion or something like that. My productivity fizzled.
A couple of weeks ago I decided to get back in the habit of posting weekly again to the Travel Log category, which is the descendant of my original blog. If Ken can post often about doing something daily and Darcy can keep trying to write something regularly to see how it works for her, I figured I could easily go back to doing something I was able to do for years.
Last week it was easy. This week I was left drumming my fingers next to the keyboard for days instead of dancing across the keys. Thank God for mowing!
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Writing sdrawckaB
May 14, 2010
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been spending a lot of time writing articles and pulling together ideas I’ve collected for an information product for people considering self-employment. I enjoy writing because it’s a slightly new experience each time.
Sometimes things just flow, but the next day I reread what I wrote and it looks like… it flowed, alright, but for a very different reason. Sometimes I wrestle and fight with a piece and don’t like it very much, but other people give me great feedback. Considering that, I might just be writing some of my best stuff ever right now, because I’m having to unscramble things I originally wrote backwards.
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Godin 05-13-10: Cowabunga!
May 13, 2010
Some call the new pattern of working from project to project the “gig economy.” Instead of having a predictable job, more and more people are contractors working with a particular person or company for the length of a project. Cool idea in the world of self-directed careers, because it allows people to have more control over their schedules.
But the phrase doesn’t even come close to capturing the joy of experimenting and playing and expanding our minds and our abilities that we experience as the creatively self-employed. That’s what Barbara Winter calls the “Joyfully Jobless life.” It’s joyful because it’s an adventure of self-discovery.
Leave it to Seth Godin to capture this wonderful idea in a high-octane analogy: surfing. In this recent post he compares the joy from work that grows us by developing our gifts and talents with the intoxication of the next wave for the surfer.
I can see the surf breaking in the distance with the sun rising on the horizon behind it as I round the corner on the Twisting Road.
Godin 05-07-10: The Future of Media
May 7, 2010
A very cool friend pointed me to a vivid poem yesterday. I enjoy poetry that uses concise and precise word choice to compose a scene or evoke a complex response.
I thought about the condensed communication of poetry when I read Seth Godin’s
blog post on the future of media. It’s like a mystical parable, maybe even a zen koan, in that grasping all that it teaches will change your outlook on a lot of things.
Seth Godin’s core messages are contained in this post: find what captivates you, explore it and share it with the world, and your tribe of like-minded and like-hearted people will gravitate to you and provide you with opportunities to receive their gratitude as payment.
There’s also this other lesson we solo entrepreneurs need to catch. Print media is withering, especially if it’s not published daily. It will be replaced by timely digital publications sent to smaller, more narrowly targeted audiences. Heard that for a while, right? But read Seth’s post carefully. Then think about what you’ve heard about having an e-mail newsletter or a blog to build your business. I think as this new paradigm of digital media takes over, our blogs and newsletters are likely to wither, too.
Audiences will be getting compelling, detailed information from sources who immerse themselves in exploring, understanding, and explaining a topic. “5 Quick Tips” won’t be compelling to that sort of audience. It will work to capture the attention of the newbies joining the tribe, and they might sign up to learn more. But in order to keep the tribe’s attention we’re going to have to provide much better content. I’m betting the format of a personal note, a soft content article, and two or three sales messages won’t work in the coming years.
How will you adapt?
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