quote Archive - This Moment Counts

The real reason

J. P. Morgan once said that “every man has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.”

So, if your pitch is not getting you the results that you hoped for, could it be that you’re focusing too much on the good reasons?

If you care for what you do, you’ll always have enough good reasons that speak for you.

But.

Is this really how the decision maker makes the choice?

The real reason is why they choose you. The good reasons are merely there to justify the choice.

So focus on the real reason first. Understand what truly matters to them.

Once you’ve figured that out, you’ll always have enough good reasons that support it.

“I’m not creative!”

“I’m not creative!”, she said.

Maybe she wasn’t. But maybe she was and just didn’t stick with the problem long enough …

Here’s what Monty Python’s John Cleese said about his talent for creativity:

“My solution was more creative than his simply because I was prepared to stick with the problem longer.” – John Cleese

Most creative geniuses are not born with creative ideas. For one, they set themselves up to find creative solutions, for example by exposing themselves to other people’s creative ideas. Analysing them. Learning from them. Applying them. Testing ideas …

But more importantly, they don’t go with the first idea. They go beyond the first idea.

The first idea is often not the most creative idea. Sometimes, you’ll even need to go beyond the 100th idea to find a creative angle.

Are you prepared to stick with the problem long enough?

What we want to be known for

It’s a very noisy world. And we’re not gonna get a chance to get people to remember much about us. – Steve Jobs

It is indeed a very noisy world and I think Steve Jobs’ take from 1997 has only grown in importance since back in the days when he said those words to introduce the “Think different” campaign.

The world is not going to remember much about us. Which is why we need to make sure that it remembers the right things. The things that we truly stand for and that we are proud to be associated with so that it fuels our motivation and inspires our actions.

This is not to be confused with a fancy sounding marketing slogan. Fancy is great. But it’s not the point – let alone the starting point.

The starting point is that people need to be able to find an anchor in our message.

To achieve that, we don’t need fanciness but clarity: Clarity about what we want to be known for and why that would matter to our audience.

With that clarity, we’ll be in a much better position to find the best wording that turns that clarity into a fancy slogan.

First comes clarity about what we want to be known for, only then comes the genius marketing plan, the communication strategy, and the actual implementation.

It’s either good or bad

“Oh, that’s like Instagram but for poems.”

When we see or hear something, our brain automatically compares it to the things we know. We put it in context of the things we have experienced before and find a category for it.

Sometimes, though, we make the mistake of using this category as an automatic measure of quality. We shouldn’t.

Duke Ellington, the famous Jazz Big Band leader, made music in the category of “light music” – according to traditionally trained musicians (read: European classical music) who considered “light” music to be inferior to “serious” music.

Ellington vehemently disagreed with this assessment (as do I):

“You have to stop listening in categories. The music is either good or it’s bad.” – Duke Ellington

I think the same is true for almost any categorical thinking.

Let’s take presentations as an example. A presentation is either good or bad. It changes people’s minds or it doesn’t. It resonates or not.

Whether it took you 300 slides to do so or 3. Whether you told a story or presented plain, raw facts. Whether you were pacing up and down the stage or standing still.

If it resonated, it was good. It doesn’t matter if it was in the “Steve Jobs style” category or in the “my math teacher from junior high school” category.

In other words, never forget that it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

How not to please your audience

When you’re an artist, it makes little sense to try to please your audience. At least not if you take your art seriously.

If an artist were to base his work on what their audience would like to see or hear from them, they would inevitably have to limit themselves to what they have already produced. Simply because the public cannot know what it would like. They only know what they do already like. If you asked them, they’d almost certainly tell you: “More of that, please!” And that’s what you would need to do.

If you strive to please the audience, you’re shooting too low. You are being too cautious.

Which keeps you from breaking new ground. Because, well, what if they don’t like it?

The problem is that no audience in this world can guess what kind of art they haven’t seen from you.

If Miles Davis had asked what his audience liked, he would never have recorded “Bitches Brew”, Eddie van Halen would never have played his “Eruption” solo, Stravinsky would not have composed “Le Sacre du Printemps”, John Scofield wouldn’t have recorded “Time on My Hands”.

Your audience understands not nearly as much about your art as you do. They don’t know what art hasn’t been made by you, yet. And they certainly can’t imagine how it looks like beyond the boundaries of what you’ve done before.

So, what’s left is to trust your own judgement.

That’s what Bowie was referring to when he called himself “selfish” about his work. Rather than his audience, he trusted his own judgement to lead him to places where others would like to follow. Just like Miles Davis and Eddie van Halen did. They pioneered uncharted territory and then lighted the path for others to follow.

The same is true for any creative – developers, designers, and engineers, and more …

If Apple’s primary goal had been to please their customers, they would never have created the iPhone. No one would have wanted a smartphone without a keyboard, had they been asked. Not even if you had shown them one. If Apple had just wanted to please their fans, they would have developed a prettier phone, not a radically different one. Apple refused to please their customers. They were just as selfish as Bowie was.

And yet, I think that companies are actually the opposite of selfish when they take Bowie’s stance. Products exist as solutions to a problem. No customer understands the problem that you’re solving nearly as well as the makers of these products.

And so, we need to trust our own judgement when it comes to finding the best solution to that problem. We must not stop at the most pleasing solution, but continue to strive for the best solution.

That might not always be what our audiences expected. Sometimes, it might not even please them. But it’s the right thing to do. And if it’s actually great, eventually, it will not only be right but, of course, also please them.

What are you building on uncharted territory? How do you light the path for your audience?

It’s the crappy days we can learn the most from

When you’re used to being first, it hurts to end up on the 7th place. It hurts more when it’s not your fault but the fault of others.

But the reason why you end up being first most of the time is because you don’t stop at being hurt but take it as an opportunity to learn. And you don’t blame the others but take responsibility for the crap and take it as an opportunity to grow.

Lewis Hamilton, arguably one of the best Formula 1 drivers who ever lived, suffered from a bad decision by his team in the last race and ended up becoming 7th. There was nothing he could do about it.

But there was something he can take away from it. After he got over his initial frustration, his mood changed:

“I’m often grateful for crappy days like this, as it is days [like this] when you learn the most. If you’re winning all the time, you learn less.”

But there’s a twist about how the learning happens. While others focus on finding out who’s to blame, Hamilton’s Mercedes team has a different approach:

“We don’t like to kick each other when we’re down. I think… there’s no finger pointing, so no one individual that takes the blame. We win and we lose as a team. We have a very open and honest discussion and it’s not personal. It’s like: ‘hey man this should have been better, this should have been better, why didn’t we do this?’, we all take everything onboard. It’s constructive discussions, and if there’s any constructive criticism we take it onboard, then we huddle up, do the work, get on the call.”

So, what was a crappy day you were grateful for? And how did you learn from it?

Posts in Tag: quote