You can’t start with great.
You might start with average, decent, ok. Or more often, you will start with poor, näive, ineffectual.
And that’s where you will have to continue from. One step after the next. From horrible to passable, from decent to respectable, from good to fantastic.
You can’t start with great.
You can, though, end with legendary.
Who owns customer research? is a misleading question.
A better one is: Who can aggregate customer research and plan actions?
Research does not end with someone sitting down with a customer and asking a bunch of questions. Research is about putting the pieces together, identifying patterns, anticipating trends, sharing the knowledge and the insights, and eventually enabling everyone interested to access all this at their own convenience.
If you do not have someone responsible to aggregate customer research, you are not doing customer research at all.
Herding information will eventually keep you from doing.
Articles, white papers, eBooks, webinars, podcasts, online classes, books, live and virtual events, tutorials are great resources, when they serve your higher purpose. But they can quickly become a self-serving treat: “just as our brains like empty calories from junk food, they can overvalue information that makes us feel good but may not be useful” (Assoc. Prof. Ming Hsu).
And clearly, the whole space (physical and mental) you occupy while you feed on information is space you cannot use otherwise. Is space you are taking away from focus, care, delivery.
There will be times in your digital life when you will be subscribed to plenty of newsletters, getting updates from a wealth of podcasts, consuming bottomless blogs, and recycling all of that in social media posts of doubt relevance.
Stop that now.
Find the bare minimum you need and bring the focus back to doing.
For your own sake.
In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
Herbert A. Simon
Motivation, inspiration, and creativity are resistance in disguise.
If you wait to be motivated to start going, you won’t get far.
If you wait for inspiration to struck before doing meaningful work, you’ll soon be out of a job.
If creativity is what you seek when sitting down to write, the page will stay empty most of the time.
There is nothing sudden in people’s achievements, no overnight success will surprise you.
Go do what you are supposed to. Every day.
Remember to balance your ability to get things your way with the fact that, on the other side, there is somebody who has just lost the trust in the relationship and their capacity.
You can push, you can order, you can yell, you can bypass, you can threaten, you can boss around. And you’ll eventually make it happen exactly how you wanted it to be.
There’s little future after that though.
You've got this 