Tag: creation

Be Your Own Credential

We talk a lot at Praxis about building a better signal than generic degrees and institutional imprimaturs.  Whether or not you have a degree, you need to learn to 1) create value and, 2) signal your ability to create value to the world.  Degrees are a very weak way to achieve either.  You need something more.

I got an email today from a guy who decided to put that advice into practice.  Check out what Daniel Myers had to say:

Hey Isaac,

You know how Praxis always talks about creating value? About taking the entrepreneurial route in your work? Well, I decided to do just that, by writing a 44-page report on business and entrepreneurship for a venture capitalist firm here in TN. I had read an article this past Fall on the Praxis website about value creation for a company instead of just shooting a CV/Resume out to everyone and expecting it to do all the work. This report has been well received by the public and has truly allowed me to create a name for myself, rather than just being another undergrad with “some resume”.

All this said, I want to thank all of you at Praxis for what you do. I am continually inspired by all of you at Praxis and hope you all continue to be successful in all your endeavors. Again, thank you for your inspiration!

Best, Daniel

P.S. I’m reading Derek’s book on “How to Get Any Job You Want“. It aligns perfectly with what I did and will continue to do in my career.

Here’s a link to Daniel’s report on startups in TN.

I don’t know how long it took for Daniel to put together such an in-depth report.  But compared to what?  How does time spent creating a valuable resource like that compare to time spent sitting in a classroom, blasting out generic resumes, or waiting and hoping for a cool opportunity?

Daniel gained not only a great signal of his value creating potential, but a lot of knowledge, skill, confidence, and even some free PR along the way.  In short, by creating value now instead of waiting to be invited to with a formal job offer, Daniel became more of who he wants to be, instead of waiting for someone to tell him what to do.

Go start building now.  What are you waiting for?  And of course, if you need some help, a great apprenticeship with an entrepreneur, and an intense year-long experience in value creation, discover Praxis.

The Futility of Reform

Don’t run for class president.  Don’t go to HOA meetings.  Don’t join a committee.  Don’t get involved in political campaigns.

All of these activities are about reform.  Get into the institution, play by its rules, and try to make it behave differently than it wants to.

Forget this approach.  It sucks.  Here are four reasons why.

It makes you less happy

Have you ever been to a town hall meeting?  Life’s too short to endure such horrors.  The worst life to live is a boring one.  The machinations of every political institution are stale and boring and full of self-serious processes, procedures, and practitioners.  Your every moment is too valuable to suffer through it.  It’s inhumane.  If Roberts Rules of Order are relevant to any effort you’re involved in, get out and go build something new.

You can’t change the game by playing

Political institutions do one thing best: restrict individual fun and freedom.  It’s natural to want to reduce the role of these rule-happy entities.  But you can’t win playing by their rules.  You can’t vote your way to a system where votes no longer curtail progress.

Trying to reduce the role of the state by engaging in politics is like trying to put a casino out of business by playing blackjack there.  “Oh, I have it figured out.  I’ll beat the house!”  No.  You won’t.  They want you to think that.  They want you to keep playing.  Abiding by house rules is no way to protest or change them.  Especially when the house gets a little richer every time you do.

If you don’t want the casino to keep luring people in don’t go in yourself.  Build something better that people want to go to instead.

Progress always comes from without

Political institutions are reactive.  They wait until the world forces them and then they change.  If humanity is a car these institutions are the brakes, able to stop progress but never create it.  If you want to get to a new destination you need the accelerator.

Accelerators are new ideas and products and services that forge ahead, paying no mind to the consensus-seeking bureaucrats nested in the status quo.  Accelerators don’t care about argument, nor protest.  They care about creation.  They build the world they want to live in instead of hoping to prevent its decay.

There is no permanence

The great thing about innovation is that it only needs to happen once.  That painful, gruelling, child-birth like experience of the creative act or eureka moment is born out of imagination, hard work, and courage.  If the result is of any value to the world it lasts forever and serves as the stepping stone to still greater innovations.

The wheel was invented once.  No one has to re-invent it.  It’s world-improving powers are permanent and irreversible.

Any apparent victory within a political structure is fleeting by definition and design.  You align all the powers and elites and interests just so after years of butt-numbing meetings and pompous proclamations from people you’d never want to have a beer with but now you must woo and coddle.  You have your mandate or constituency or whatever other serious sounding label you slap on the gaggle of interests vying for a win within the house rules.  You get your way.  Hooray!

Until the next month or year or election cycle when the new interests group outmaneuvers you and the tables turn in an instant.  Everything you created in your coalition vanishes, along with all the money you convinced people to throw at it.  The same tiny sliver of ground must be re-won, each time as if from scratch.  Only then do you realize that broader social forces created by the outsiders accelerating humanity are the master, not the servant, to these stale political institutions that apply their rusty brakes against all odds.

Go out and build something

Build something instead.  Exit.  Go your own way.  Forget the suits and speeches and posturing and canvassing and internal climbing and deal-making.  Go build your wildest dream.  Imagine and create things that excite you.  Move to a place that doesn’t suck.  Create a job that’s not boring.  Live a life you want to live.

Don’t wait for the world to change or beg for permission to let it evolve.  Go change your own world.  The rest will follow.

One of the Benefits of Writing: Better Reading

Let’s say you come across an interesting and perhaps controversial idea in an article.  If you share the quote on Facebook you’re likely to get a lot of comments about what it omits, or the other side of the idea, or the potential errors and pitfalls.  Even inspirational or thought-provoking little witticisms that do not pretend to convey the whole truth get scrutinized and poked at because of what they leave out.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with pointing out error or missing pieces or potential for misunderstanding, but it does severely limit your ability to take in new ideas.  Good ideas often begin as bad ones, but if you immediately look for what possible problems any idea could have, you’ll stunt the process.

If it’s easy for you to contradict or find flaw in every pithy quote, I submit that you might not be writing enough.  When you aren’t putting your own thoughts into the world often, it’s very easy to play critic and see problems with everyone else’s.  But once you start writing regularly you’ll discover just how hard it is to convey a thought while covering all of your bases.  You’ll find the very tough trade-off between making sure you’re not misunderstood and not going on and on forever or being so full of exceptions that you never communicate the rule.  Of course every sentence is not the whole truth of the matter.  Of course there are exceptions.  But if you want to write and think well, you can’t spend all your time listing them.

After writing a lot you’ll stop looking for perfection in the writing of others.  You’ll get better at the practice of charitable interpretation, where you assume the author is intelligent and has thought of your objection but chose to write what they did anyway.  See if you can discover why.  They must have assumed what they wrote was worth the risk of misunderstanding.  Why?  Writing opens your mind and creates a kind of empathy with other writers.  You know they face the same limitations you do, and you can more easily see the core value in their communication over and above any flaws or omissions.

The more you create, the harder it will be to simply sit on the sidelines and be a critic.

On Feedback and Data Gathering

Expressing an opinion is free.  Everyone will tell you they think your idea is good.  That’s not the same as giving up something to read it or listen to it or purchase it.  Focus groups, surveys, polls, and research can’t tell you as much as putting a product or idea out into the world.  In a marketplace where people have to trade-off other opportunities to take advantage of what you’ve made, you’ll learn more about its value than any test-case or lab experiment.

It doesn’t mean you can’t gather some facts or be informed.  But it’s more important to have a sound theory, and a clear bet on what gap you’re filling or value you’re creating than it is to have a lot of cost-less expressions from disinterested parties of whether or not they imagine it will be valuable.

Do it if it’s valuable to you and if you believe in your unique vision.  Do it if the process of answering the question, “Is this a good idea?” is exciting in and of itself.  Do it if you’re willing to fail to get the answer.

Why It’s So Hard to Create

Yesterday in a blog post I wrote “LCD” when I meant LSD.  A commenter on Facebook was kind enough to point out the error.  It was a little funny and a little embarrassing, and an illustration of one of the reasons it’s so hard to create stuff.

Typos and errors here and there are no big deal.  But if you’re regularly churning out copy, they start to accumulate.  Not only will people tell you when they dislike your content, they’ll (helpfully) point out mistakes.  Nobody emails you to say, “Hey, there were no typo’s in this paragraph”, or, “Great work getting the commas right.”  It’d be weird if they did.  Still, when you’re on the production side you can begin to feel like all you produce is error.  Why take the risk at all?  If you don’t create anything no one can tell you what’s wrong with your creation.  There is no opportunity to be embarrassed by factual or grammatical error.  There is no chance you’ll offend or be misunderstood, or what is sometimes worse, ignored.

The fact that it’s not perfect exudes a relentless pressure toward not completing or releasing your creations to the world.  Even if you think it’s pretty good, sometimes it has no effect.  Sometimes it gets no traction, doesn’t persuade or enlighten.  Sometimes it has an effect opposite intention.

I’ve responded to this pressure by not creating at times.  The world goes on and nobody seems put out.  Except me.  Humans are creative beings.  We’re not fulfilled if we’re only repeating and consuming.  Production and exchange of goods, services, and ideas are necessary for a full life.

I have to regularly remind myself why I create.  I do it for me.  With or without perfection, with or without an audience, the process and result are necessary for my own well-being.

Marketing Creates Value

Near the end of the classic movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” George Bailey saw reality in a whole new light. He glimpsed a world in which he was never born and realized just how important he was to those around him. This experience instantly and dramatically changed George’s outlook on life. In a matter of minutes, he transitioned from attempted suicide to pure joy at the fact of his own existence. No material facts changed. George Bailey was still stuck in Bedford Falls. He was still hard of hearing. He was still in deep legal and financial trouble. The angelic Clarence did nothing to improve the external condition of Mr. Bailey’s life, but he saved it nonetheless. He saved it with marketing.

Marketing is often criticized as being deceptive, slimy or at least economically wasteful. How could anyone justify a $2 million dollar Super Bowl ad about a bottle of Coke? Skepticism of marketing springs from an overly narrow and simplistic view of value. In the real world, the line between the real and perceived characteristics of an economic good is all but nonexistent. Our knowledge of and beliefs about goods are just as much a part of their value as anything that can be weighed or measured.

Economists have long understood that value (in the economic sense) is subjective. There is no universal formula to determine how much a good or service or experience is worth, because each person has different tastes, preferences and needs, and each will value things differently with changing circumstances. This means that how we feel about a good and what the good is made of are equally important in determining its value to us—i.e. how much satisfaction it brings. If making a better mousetrap can make lives better, so too can making people feel more confident in their mousetrap. This is not trickery; it’s value creation. Confidence in my mouse trap might help me sleep better at night and enhance my quality of life in a very real way.

We’ve all seen news stories about blind taste tests. They are meant to reveal consumer stupidity and branding smoke and mirrors. I recall reading about customers given a cheap beer and told it was a more expensive brand. They reported that it tasted much better than what they were told was the cheap beer, but was in reality the more costly. When they were told the opposite, the results reversed.

The report was framed as some kind of “gotcha” moment, as if a great hoax had been revealed. Why should these results be surprising? If you’ve ever picked up a glass of milk, thinking it was water, and taken a swig, you’ll understand. Even if you like milk you are likely to spit it out. Your beliefs about what you are consuming prepare your brain and your taste buds for a certain experience. The knowledge you have about what you ingest literally changes the experience of consumption. Try smoking a good cigar while stressed or in a hurry and see if it tastes even remotely similar to the same cigar when you have an hour to kill with nothing on the mind.

They say marketing is all about the sizzle, not so much about the steak. Why shouldn’t it be? Steak without sizzle is little more than raw meat; carrion fit for vultures and wild dogs. Steak beautifully plated and garnished creates more value for the person consuming it. Sight, sound, smell and taste are all part of the experience, and the brain is the crucial interface. Even if you have a purely utilitarian approach to eating and care only for the sustenance, you can’t ignore the mind. What you believe about your food actually affects how much it satisfies you.

My father suffered a closed head injury many years ago which affected, among other things, the communication channel between his brain and his digestive system. His brain always tells him he is hungry, no matter how much he eats. It is a near full-time job to convince him that he is full and doesn’t need any more food—that’s some serious marketing. In fact a great many people without head injuries resort to all kinds of tricks and techniques to convince themselves of the same thing in order to stay trim.

I recall talking to a friend who had no taste for coffee. I convinced her to try a sip only after closing her eyes and letting me describe step-by-step the growth, cultivation, harvesting and roasting process. She admitted that, while she still didn’t love it, she began to enjoy the taste a good bit more and understood why I love it so much. I know of people who can no longer stand the taste of meat because they observed the operations of a meat-packing factory. The meat did not change, yet its taste changed with their knowledge and feelings about it. The value of the product radically shifted with a change in perception.

If marketing makes us love a product more, and therefore makes us happier, it has indeed created value. Love for a new car comes not only because it is red, weighs 2,500 pounds and has four doors—all things that can be measured objectively—but also because it is safe, one-of-a kind, and edgy, all subjective to the person experiencing it. The purely informational role of an advertisement is no more valuable than its ability to make us proud of what we purchase. But how valuable is it?

We can get a rough idea of the minimum value created by marketing in dollars and cents. This does not, of course, measure the subjective value to each consumer, but it reveals how much value consumers placed on the marketing in money terms. If a marketing campaign costs $10 million and it results in an additional $11 million of revenue, we know that it has created more than $1 million in value, as judged by those who willingly spent money on the product. If the campaign made the product more valuable to more people and induced them to buy more or buy at a higher price, that is a reflection of the fact that the consumers felt the product and associated satisfaction created by marketing was worth more than the money they gave up to get it. Real value was created. If it was not, people would not have willingly parted with their money in exchange for the good. Better marketing can often be a cheaper and more effective way of improving a good and making people happier than altering the product itself.

Goods and the knowledge and feelings that come with them cannot be separated. New tile floors and soft lighting may be just as important as variety and good service at a clothing store. An inspiring ad campaign may bring just as much happiness as new features on a smartphone. This is no scandal, but a fact of the human experience of reality.

Rather than denigrate it as some kind of fraud or waste, we should applaud good marketing. Not only does it enhance the value of the products we buy, it enhances our quality of life even when we don’t buy the products being marketed. TV ads are often funny and entertaining. Billboards and magazine ads are sometimes works of art. Good marketing is a free gift to all, and it makes all our lives better. A world without marketing would be dull and far less fulfilling.

Altering our perceptions of reality is one of the best ways of improving our quality of life. It’s powerful stuff. Clarence saved George Bailey’s life with a recasting of the facts, and set him out with a full heart ready to take on the world. The creative efforts of marketers everywhere have the same power to make our lives richer and better.

Originally posted here.