The faster way for you to build a story is to record what you do.
Do it daily and consistently, and after a while, as you look back, you will find threads that already are the seed of a narrative. Put them together, water them, double down on recording, and you have everything you need to stand out from the masses.
The best time to start doing this was yesterday. The second best time is today.
Hard work, they say, will lead you to success.
But hard work is not working 14 hours a day, weekends included, allowing yourself little sleep, few acquaintances, overworking your team members, writing three paragraphs when one would be enough, replying to all incoming emails within minutes, taking more tasks than you can handle because a promotion is in the air, eating crap because you have no time, a constant status of busyness.
We should stretch the idea of hard work along time and understand that hard work is consistency, determination, showing up with no regard for the reward. Hard work is long term.
Hard work is practice.
Life is not about avoiding problems, for the simple reason that problems, challenges, difficulties are an intrinsic part of life itself.
Life is more about identifying problems and finding the courage to stand right in front of them saying: “I will get past you”. And it is true both for the problems that surround us and for those who are within ourselves.
By the way, the better we are at dealing with the latter, the stronger and more effective we are when we tackle the former.
Just because something is easy, it does not mean it should not matter.
Easy has a tendency to go unnoticed, to not be motivating enough, to be left out of curricula, cover letters and history, to be frowned upon, to be looked at with skepticism, to be considered as something anyone can do, to be the last task on the list, to be left behind.
The truth is, regardless of how easy something is, it still needs to get done.
And doing does matter. Always.
As I have cleaned up the mess that was (still is) my personal inbox, I have grouped together few resources that are worth checking out if you are interested in any of the topics below.
Leadership
Seth Godin’s blog – Delivers daily, and rarely fails. It might be considered “marketing” by most, but I personally consume Seth’s content mainly to keep my practice and work on track.
David Cancel’s The One Thing – Delivers weekly, fairly short messages, loads of wisdom from a guy who has built three multi-million dollars companies and witnessed a good deal of B2B and Saas development in the past decade. Without losing sight on what is important.
Dave Stachowiak’s Coaching for Leaders – This is a weekly podcast, but by subscribing (for free) you are getting weekly episode notes full of great content. Always one of my first recommendations when it comes to a more modern approach to leadership.
Marketing Strategy
Forget the Funnel – Gia and Claire’s customer-led program is all you need to come up with a complete and growth-oriented marketing plan. For free, you still get weekly workshops and a resource library that is basically endless.
Sharebird – For different reasons, I consider Product Marketing has being the strategic foundation of modern marketing, and Sharebird puts together AMAs from Product Marketers of companies such as Salesforce, Adobe, Zuora, Hubspot, and more.
Content Marketing
Animalz – Their weekly newsletters are pretty much a lesson in how to do content marketing themselves. I crave for their “What we’re reading” section, and I recommend joining the Slack community to get feedback and insights on best practices, or just have a chat.
Velocity Partners – I wrote about how much I love Velocity’s messaging, and that is in itself a great reason to get their semi-regular newsletter. And if you want a second one, here is what they did when everyone in marketing was panicking about the covid situation back in April. Brilliant.
This is definitely more content than I can consume in a lifetime, and it is pretty much my final newsletter reading list.
What do you read?
You've got this 