Business Tao with George Kao

A song I made with AI about sharing something before it feels polished. A woman posts one imperfect paragraph at night, and a stranger's small reply is enough for her to write again. I find that our own judgments of our work are usually harsher than our audience's, and I wrote about that on my blog.

https://www.georgekao.com/blog/contentjudgment

A song I made with AI from my blog post "Niche Mates, Not Competitors." For us self-employed people, the word "competition" can create anxiety and resistance, so I like to call the people who do work similar to mine "niche mates." They have families to feed and dreams they hope to achieve, too... and I believe there is more than enough for everyone.

The full post is on my blog.https://www.georgekao.com/blog/nichemates

A song I made with AI from my blog post "Uninspired, but willing." Like many writers and artists, I don't feel inspired until I've been working for a while, so when my calendar says "write now," I start anyway, feeling flat... and once I begin, flow finds me. Tchaikovsky regularly sat down at the piano at nine in the morning, and said the Muses had learned to be on time for that appointment.

The full post is on my blog.https://www.georgekao.com/blog/uninspired

A simple practice: ask yourself the real question, then let it go while you do something mindless -- dishes, a walk, the shower. Your subconscious keeps working on it even when you're not, and the answer shows up when it's ready. Trust the timing you can't control.

Your personal brand isn't your logo or your color palette -- it's your truest values, your natural energy, and your core message. I don't have a logo and I've never nailed down brand colors, and I still have all the clients I need. Get clear on what makes you different from everyone else copying the same playbook, and let the outer stuff take care of itself.

Only two kinds of feedback are worth your attention: people who've actually paid you, and the market's own numbers. If 500 people saw an offer and nobody bought, that's real data -- kill it or take it to a different audience. Everyone else's opinion, however well-meant, is noise.

I disagree with most marketing teachers on this one. Don't niche your whole brand — you're constantly evolving, so let your homepage and about page stay general, then make every offer, webinar, and post underneath as specific as you can bear. My speaking teacher Lee Glickstein taught me to find one friendly face in the audience and talk only to that person, and somehow the whole room feels it. Offers work the same way, and the people it isn't for won't unsubscribe, they'll just scroll past.

My website looked like crap for seventeen years, and the business still did fine. Meanwhile I've watched people work three months on an offer, get two business coaches to sign off on it, and barely sell a thing. It took me most of my career to figure out that polish was never the problem. The offer either addresses something hot in the market or it doesn't, and your market is just the buying patterns of the people you can actually reach.

You’ve probably heard the Harvard 1953 study about written goals. I went looking for it and couldn’t find it — but there is a real one, out of Dominican University, and its finding is better than the myth. People who wrote their goals down, wrote their action commitments, and reported to an accountability partner achieved 77% more than people who only thought about their goals.

I used to think about marketing as traffic and conversion, and I made good money doing it. I also burned out, and my conscience was shot — because when the sale is the priority, people become units to move through a funnel. Trust is slower. It’s also what I now build for, thinking in years and decades instead of this month’s numbers.