Effort Archive - Page 5 of 6 - This Moment Counts

When the manager isn’t nice

Someone goes to a restaurant. He really enjoys the food. The next day he takes the trouble to call the manager to tell him about how he thoroughly enjoyed the food. But what happens?

The manager hardly takes time to appreciate the effort. He seems to be in a rush. The customer is so baffled by this that he decides to never want to eat there again, because:

“When the manager isn’t nice then what does that say about the business you are running and the people in it?”

What does it say about your business – and yourself – how you interact with customers who take the trouble to reach out …

(PS: The video is the first in a series of videos in which actors read restaurant reviews by users of the website Yelp. It’s worth watching.)

Envy

But this company has a much larger marketing department.

But this CEO is much more extroverted.

But our competition is backed by venture captial.

But this girl has richt parents.

And so on and so forth …

It’s easy to find reasons why things are so much easier for the others. And why it’s super hard to compete with them.

But it is what it is.

Instead of complaining about the things that we don’t have, it’s much better to focus on the things that we do have. The irony is that it might just be what our competition envies us for.

… because I’ve got three meetings, a proposal that needs to be sent out, my email inbox has 127 unanswered emails and there are a bunch of other pitches that we need to prepare besides this one. We really need to get this done quickly.

Which is totally understandable.

And yet …

All of this is a choice!

The choice between crafting this one proposal meticulously well, fully committed to the outcome and between rushing a whole bunch of things half-heartedly.

Some work is better than others simply because the makers were focussed on that work much better. Rather than doing 5 things in an ok manner, they fully commit to making this one thing shine.

What exactly is it that you don’t have time for?

Reading their news

What are your customers reading?
How do they speak with each other?
What are they saying about your product?
Or about other products?
What words do they use to describe their problems?
What bothers them?
What excites them?

These are all questions that have become much easier to answer than before. Thanks to social media we can much more easily immerse ourselves in the world of our customers. Doing so is a great step to learning their language and understanding their problems.

Relevance starts with empathy. Empathy starts with open eyes.

No, you don’t owe me for the years

Our customers couldn’t – and shouldn’t – care less for how long it took us to make something. It’s our decision to spend the time and it’s our decision to make the offer. If we decide to offer our service or product to a customer, all our customer needs to know is whether our offer does what we promise it does.

They owe us for the result, not for the effort. If someone comes along who provides them with the same result but less effort or less experience, there’s no reason why a customer should pick us – let alone pay more because it took us 10 years to get to the point where we can make that job in 30 minutes.

Rather than focus our story on the experience we have, it’s much better to focus our story on the experience we give. Make that the best they have ever had … and our customers will stop worrying about why we charge what we charge.

The art of saying what you mean

One of the most frustrating experiences about writing a computer program is when the computer just doesn’t do what you want it to do. This is why one of the earliest lessons you learn as a computer scientist is that there really is no use in getting angry at the computer about this.

The computer does what you tell it to do. Exactly that. Nothing more. Nothing less.

It doesn’t do what you meant. It does what you said. When something doesn’t work the way you meant it to work, it means that what you said was not what you meant.

The computer is always right.

There’s really only one way of getting a computer to do what you meant: Write the code so that it says what you mean.

This is also a great rule to apply when talking to humans. Granted, you might not want to speak to humans just the way you write a program. Your audience might consider you crazy. But, you can invest just as much care in making sure that what you say is what you mean.

(Although when talking to humans, things get even more complex because communication is not about what we say but about what our audience hears.)

Juggling with thoughts

Almost anyone can juggle two balls. Many can do three. Four is rather difficult. More is impossible for most.

Juggling thoughts by keeping several things in mind at the same time is quite similar … Two? That’s easy. Three? Still easy. Four is more difficult, and then it quickly gets really difficult. The more complex the things you have to keep in mind, the more difficult it is to keep multiple things in your mind.

Of course, that’s also true for your audience. If we juggle too many balls in a speech, it will be difficult for our audience to keep track. Sooner or later they will drop a ball … and while they’re still busy picking it up again, the next thought balls are already falling to the floor.

Unfortunately, most topics – especially those worthy of being the subject of a presentation – are rather complex. Usually, three balls just won’t get the job done.

Fortunately, though, thoughts have a property that physical balls don’t have. Thoughts can combine to form larger thoughts. Thoughts can trigger other thoughts.

Apples, pears, and bananas become fruit. Fruits, vegetables and grains become vegetarian food. Vegetarian diet has effects that you first illustrate through a story and then abstract to derive a specific dietary recommendation.

Yet, at any given time, we kept a maximum of four thoughts in the air so that everyone could follow along effortlessly.

Complex in nature, yet simple in narrative.

With a clear story and a great structure, we can get extremely complex things into the minds of the audience. We just have to make sure to build the complexity step-by-step.

Natural born talents

“This is so hard but the eloquence with which you’re using words tells me that you must be a natural born talent.”

Only that she wasn’t. In fact, she struggled with finding the right words all her life. Which is why she worked like mad on improving her skills. She looked for better ways to express herself. She read piles of books on the topic. She went to workshops. Hired a coach to help her refine the skill. Analysed articles, movies, books, ads. And she never settled with the first idea.

So, when she publishes something, it’s the result of hard work. Not only the days that it took her to write that specific piece. But also the result of a lifetime of learning.

And that’s true for most “natural born talents”. It’s easy to envy the skill but a lot harder to envy the will and the effort that went into the skill. It’s a lot more useful to call them “natural born improvers”.

Complexity sells better

Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better. – Edsger Dijkstra

Because when it’s more complex it must be more elaborate. More powerful. Better thought through.

Only that it isn’t … because the only reason that it is so very complex is precisely because the team was too lazy to take it one step further. To invest the hard work to make it simpler. To educate themselves about different perspectives. To appreciate the connections that this education makes us see among the dots.

Complexity is deceptive. It suggests sophistication and hides the fact that the opposite is true. Moreover, if it’s hard to understand, then it must be proof for how clever we are. But it’s not. It’s much rather proof for that we stopped thinking at that level of complexity. That we shied away from cracking the complexity.

If we’re able to make the complex simple and then, if we go even further so that we can explain it in simple terms … that’s sophistication.

Just a minute more

Just a minute more can make all the difference when we reply to a mail or posting.

It can make the difference between a harsh answer and a polite one.

It can make the difference between a wording that’s super-misleading and one that’s super-clear.

It can make the difference between an answer that’s selfish and one that’s generous.

All it sometimes takes is to read our reply just once before we hit reply. Or to take a deep breath before we start typing. Or to fact check our claim.

Just a minute more can make a huge difference.
(Now imagine what a difference five minutes – or even an hour – can make.)

Posts in Tag: Effort