So he goes over and asks him if he can help.

The guy says

Yeah, I lost my keys

He responds

Okay I’ll help you look, where did you see them last?

The guy on his knees under the street light points over into the dark and says

I saw it over there…

The guy who came out of the bar said

Why aren’t you looking there?

The guy responds…

Well the light is much better here I can see better.

Only one question…

Are you looking where you can see or are you looking where you are most likely to find success?

…in whatever you do.

In this interview he mentioned something that really became a revelation. He said he only really has one idea. He could spend a lifetime working on figuring out this one idea. Approaching it from different angles and different thoughts. He said…

[I] Write about the same thing, but each time it is a different application. The black swan is not the central idea. The central idea is convexity. Convexity is when you lose a penny to make a dollar; when being wrong doesn’t cost you as much as being right. Jensen’s inequality: an average of expectations is not the expectation of the average. In lay terms: convexity is knowing where the lack of knowledge is going to lead you. In other words, an option is a convex instrument.

One Idea

While what Nassim is talking about is economics with some bond trading concepts rolled in I see this has a deeper meaning. Quite often I meet someone who is looking to take their business or what they do online. The first step we go over is defining their unique perspective. How they can take that and create content and value.

We first start with defining their power ideas. These are ideas or content that they know in and out. These are things that if you ask them to sit down to talk and they would go on and on for hours.

Then comes the hard part. Moving on to creating a strategic plan for content creation. This is where a lot of people hit a brick wall. They ask questions like… What do I talk about? How can I do a post a day or three times a week? How do I come up with new things to talk about? Why would people follow me?

Maybe the answer here is to come up with one idea. One idea that is worth solving or worth thinking about. One idea that can be approached from different angles. One idea that when you got up tomorrow can be explored time and time again. All with passion and with the same vigor as the first time you thought you really got it.

Is It That Simple?

I believe it could be. The key here is to come up with one idea that is worthy of this effort. One idea or drive that can be approached from different prospective.

Just a thought, what do you think? Is having one idea the key? Is it possible to keep focused on one idea and still be interesting for years and years?

Can you come up with one idea? (picture by Mike Fleming)

Picture:

• Want To Inspire People To Join Your Mission? Start With Why. – With Simon Sinek
• How To Produce Like A Linchpin By Understanding Your Lizard Brain – with Seth Godin
• How Answering “So What?” Will Increase Your Site’s Engagement – With Mark Magnacca
• Setback. Setback. Setback. Then (Finally) Success! – with Herman Heunis

I believe that in just about every interview that Andrew does you will find at least one gem of insight to help you in what you do.

While we hear about the power of social media as marketing tools, especially for those trying to bootstrap their businesses, but just how effective is it? New research from Utpal Dholakia and Emily Durham of Rice University takes a look at this question. The study is featured in the March issue of the Harvard Business Review.

The study, based on surveys of more than 1,700 respondents over a three-month period, found that compared with typical Dessert Gallery customers, the company’s Facebook fans. Great study with numbers here >>

Information Overload

Gary Flake talks about the high level overview and will help change your frame of reference.

Marketing to Millenials

One of the most evident changes is social networking, which is embraced by 75 percent of the Millennials, compared with 50 percent of the Generation X members (ages 30 to 45) and just 30 percent of Baby Boomers (aged 46 to 64). Marketing to Millenials >

Social Media Metrics

One of the best posts I’ve seen in a while for social media metrics. Before you do enter social media sit down and come up with the metrics that are important to you and your organization.

While companies are starting to adopt Social Media for online marketing campaigns, and even letting employees participate, the question of ROI (Return on Investment) arises, along with doubts about what metrics to measure. Good overview of tracking metrics here.

Spotlight Effect - do people really care about you as much as you do.

This might shock some you– and this is tough to tell you but you are not the center of the universe. At least not in the eyes of others. While this has been proven time and time again we still internally fall into this trap. People tend to assume their features and behaviors are more salient to others than what they generally are. This is termed the Spotlight effect, the tendency to believe that other people are paying closer attention to one’s appearance and behavior than they really are.

You drop a glass, you mess up in a presentation, or you just think you don’t look right in that video you released on Facebook. While you notice these things and this may change the you outcome for your day oftentimes the ones around us are oblivious to these things.

Let’s Talk a Little Science

Thomas Gilovich, PhD, Victoria Husted Medvec, PhD, and Kenneth Savitsky, PhD, the psychologists who coined the term spotlight effect, also devised numerous ways to measure it. In one experiment, they had college students enter a room with other students while wearing an “embarrassing”  Barry Manilow T-shirt. When the mortified (I didn’t know Barry Manilow was such a scary guy) students were asked to guess how many people in the room would remember the face on their T-shirt, they gave a number about twice as high as the number of students who actually remembered the shirt.

Other studies support what this one suggested: The spotlight effect makes most of us assume we’re getting about twice as much attention as we actually are. When Lincoln said, “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here,” he was wrong—but only because he was president of the United States. If you are currently president, rest assured that millions will note and long remember if, say, you barf on the prime minister of Japan. However, if you are not president, you’re probably pointlessly blinded by the glare of imaginary social judgments.

Taking Advantage

Taking advantage of this effect is can be powerful. Instead of focusing on what to you seems the issue focus on what you accomplished. This spotlight is typically just inside your mind and in your own world. While constructive criticism is good also remember that if you are confident about your subject and about what you do that this will exceed any outward appearance.

In the book Bag the Eelephant by Steve Kaplan he tells about giving a presentation to a candy company he was looking to land as a client. The clients came in the conference room with coffee and bagels and sat down to view his plan. The first thing he was going to share was their design for the new logo The Big Pass. He flipped off the lights, turned on the projector and in big red letters… The Big Ass.

Late hours had shown through. Not only was this on the slide but it was also embedded in the template, which meant that it was on the lower corner of every slide. With a quick joke and moving past it Steve was able to land the account. The client later told him that part of the reason was the were impressed we weren’t distracted by the screw up.

http://blog.mixergy.com/entrepreneur-interviews/

If you don’t have time to listen to them all here are the ones that you should start off with:

Timothy Sykes

Timothy Sykes says he took about $12,000 in bar mitzvah money and turned it into about $2 million. That’s obviously impressive, but the list of people who’ve made fortunes is long and growing daily. What I’m more impressed and curious about is how he’s building his personal brand online, developing a cult following around it and profiting from it all.

http://blog.mixergy.com/cultivating-your-personal-brand-timothy-sykes/

Rosalind Resnick

Why listen: Rosalind bootstrapped a company that she eventually took public. You’ll learn the trial and error that went into finding that golden idea.

http://blog.mixergy.com/is-goal-setting-outdated-the-rosalind-resnick-interview/

Peter Pham

If you want to know the value of having a good network, take a look at what it’s done for Peter Pham’s new company, BillShrink:

• Networking helped him find a co-founder who is a former venture capitalist.
• Networking helped him land a top creative director without having to pay a recruiting fee.
• Networking helped him get an adviser who successfully sold a startup in the industry Peter wants to dominate.
• Networking helped him get his business funded.

http://blog.mixergy.com/networking-connector/

Are you making assumptions? Photo by AlphaTangoBravo / Adam Baker

Are you doing stuff today based on assumptions?

We make many decisions based on our own assumptions. If your like most people your daily actions are driven by these assumptions.

Now more than ever it is important to continually question what you assume.

“We simply assume that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be. And our attitudes and behaviors grow out of these assumptions.” – Stephen Covey

Are You Testing Yourself?

Assumptions are not bad but they do need to be kept in check. Many of the breakthroughs in science and business came from testing what everybody assumed.

It was assumed that there were only 109 Elements in the Period Table… since 1994, six new elements have been discovered.

Here is a list of some business assumptions that you should check often:

• Everyone will love my product/service as much as I do.
• A good product/service will sell itself. …or… If I build it, they will come and buy it.
• In this business, I must purchase (build, own, have rent, show, etc.) _______________.
• My competitors have ______________; therefore I must also.
• My customers expect me to have ___________________.

Operating daily on false realities without the benefit of reality testing is a recipe for failure.

Social Media Assumptions

You can’t go anywhere online without seeing someone mention that you should be engaging social media. I’ve noticed something though. It seems for every glowing success story in social media I can point to 7 or 8 examples what I would consider failures.

Everybody is assuming that social media will make a difference in their business. They are assuming that if they get in twitter, facebook, and youtube that this will drive sales. Is this really true?

That is one of the problems with social media. People and companies dive in assuming that their prospects or customers want to connect with them in social space. Many times they find that’s not what people want.

How to Test Assumptions

Look to see what has worked. Do a thought exercise and take what you are doing to the conclusion. Do you have numbers or proof that these assumptions are true?

Here is an example. Everyday you get up and you login to Facebook and Twitter. You check your messages and you maybe send a few messages back to some people. Now you assume this is great time spent but if I asked you right now how many leads or prospects  you received from these efforts could you tell me? Many people could not.  I’m not talking about a guess, I would want an exact number.

The key assumption here is that if you continue down some path you are expecting some result. Although right now you probably have enough data and experience to make an assessment. Often times people wait too long to make an assessment on thier assumptions.

Assumptions cloud our judgment and allow us to stay in that comfortable spot. It’s time you start to challenge these daily. Tear them apart and take what you are doing today to the conclusion. Did it end how you assumed?

Bonus Assumption…

It’s important that I not make mistakes.

Wrong! It’s important that you not continue to make the same mistakes — that you identify your mistakes early and “correct” them (i.e., try a different approach) before they become costly mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. In fact, you want to make mistakes. You learn more from your mistakes — than from your successes. By not making mistakes, you’re have no way to gain “opportunity loss” — which can be just as detrimental to your business as any cash flow or core financial problem.

I attended a sales symposium last week by an organization called Allied executives. It was a great symposium and I came away with many gotcha’s about how to better run a sales organization from people in the trenches.

One of the best insights I learned is what I’m about to share with you now.

This insight comes from the perspective of being a sales manager or a CEO running a sales team. I believe this tip is equally transferable to an entrepreneur, small business owner, or an independent professional.

At some point in the sales process a sales person is going to place a proposal in front of a perspective client. The sales manager should hold the sales person accountable by getting the answer to the following statement.

The Salesperson must be able to exactly describe to management what will happen if we put this proposal on the table.

After you read this let that sink in a little bit and think about it…

Now from a sales manager’s perspective this is a critical concern in managing a sales organization or an independent salesperson.

What a sales manager wants to hear is what is going to happen, not what they feel will happen, but what will happen. That’s the goal.

Now there’s a lot that goes with this, but dig deeper in the question and you realize that in order to answer it there are tons of lead up questions you would have to know:

• Have you properly assessed the needs of the client?
• Does the proposal solve the pain or a need for the client?
• Is the proposal in the ballpark of what the client is expecting for level of service or fee?
• Is the prospect or client expecting a proposal?
• Will this prospector client signed the proposal?

The possible questions could go on and on. What the sales manager expects from the salesperson is to make sure they have properly addressed and solved the prospects needs.

The Power of Knowing

This is a powerful concept to transfer over to any aspect of your business.

I believe if you take this concept and apply it to something such as a networking meeting or even a cold call you should be able to answer that question.

Look at it as if you were a real estate agent and had a possible listing appointment to list someones home for sale.

As an agent you should ask yourself if you know the outcome of this appointment? Do you have enough information about this person’s situation, property, or interest level in listing with you?

I can hear it now, based on my conversations with real estate agents I know the common response I get is… How do I know that information without actually going to the appointment?

There are ways of getting this information before you even schedule an appointment. The key is you should implement these as part of your sales process with a focus to answering the above question with near certainty before you spend your time further on any prospect or lead.

Or take one of our clients here at You Brand who sells telecommunications solutions to small businesses. He does a check before he even sends out a proposal. He makes sure that beyond a doubt he knows the outcome of submitting the proposal.

For him this means knowing at what stage his perspective client is in the buying process.

Are they just shopping rates? Are they seriously considering changing telecommunications infrastructure? Have they committed to giving an answer immediately?

He has a list of questions that must be answered in a positive manner before he will even submit a proposal. This simple step has kept him focused on the true customers and prospects worth his effort.

What’s the point of all this?

First, doing this will save you time by eliminating the time spent on prospects or clients that don’t have the intention to do business with you.

Second, by focusing on a certain outcome you focus your efforts on thinking about the sales process and whether or not you, your product, or your service solves the needs of your perspective client.

I wouldn’t end it there, I would take this concept and transfer it to meetings, phone calls, sending an email, or even networking events.

If you run a small business or are an independent professional holding yourself accountable by asking this question has the potential to drastically change your business.

Can you think of some good lead up questions you need to answer before you can answer this big question? If so please share below in the comments.

Building Personal Brand Within the Social Media Landscape.

Note: This presentation contains adult language.