Joy comes from doing something you would do independently of the outcome.
Success – i.e., the outcome – comes from sticking with that something for long enough.
Simple, not easy.
Tag: entrepreneurship
Not a support function
Don’t go to marketing with tasks. Go to marketing with ideas.
As marketing owns many of the communication channels of a company, marketers often find themselves swamped with (last minute) requests to push out this or that message. An upcoming webinar. The latest integration. A landing page. A logo to add somewhere. The next newsletter.
Approach marketing with ideas, instead. Ideas are broader, they give marketers the possibility to prioritise, plan, create. They stimulate ownership and foster better organization.
Marketing is not a support function.
Give before you ask
You have to give before you can ask.
Lead with your expertise, your point of view, your research, your data, your guests, your knowledge before you actually ask to sign up. Even better, never ask. Set up a vision for your world so unique and appealing that people will want to be part of it without you even having to ask.
Sometimes you might get lucky. You might have people onboard before you have to do anything. That “free trial” banner might get enough curiosity for it to actually have an impact on your top line.
But don’t let luck misdirect you.
You have to give before you can ask.
Back to work
You can’t know the effect that a negative news – a lay-off, a missed goal, a demotion, a change in responsibilities – will have on the team you are leading.
But you can, and you should, create the space for people to talk about it. Both among themselves and with management.
Going back to work as if nothing had happened is forceful.
Tension
We live in the tension between a version of us we despise and a version of us we would like to become.
And we also live in the tension between our failures, which we see so vividly, and other people’s successes, which we fantasise a lot about.
When we get going, we often reach for the positive extreme. We are at our best and we aim to emulate those who have succeeded before. We know we can. Then we meet criticism, bad weather, rejection, difficulties of various kind, and we fall to the negative extreme. We are suddenly incapable to complete the most trivial task, unworthy of anybody’s attention, care, empathy.
Most reality, though, happens in the middle. And that’s also where we can anchor to achieve real and incremental progress.
It’s when we embrace the version of us we are today and the work we are doing today – neither bad nor good – that we get rid of the tension and we can start enjoying the journey.
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