NFTF

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A friend of mine asked me the other day if I was finishing the year strong. It got me thinking about my tendencies in business and life.

Maybe I’m alone in this, but finishing isn’t the hard part. And neither is starting. It’s the middle where I tend to lose focus and energy...

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One of the things about this time of year I love is the advent of new beginnings and endings that bring positive change. Almost everyone I talk to is starting something new and sunsetting something else.

At Calm Capital we’ve had more than a few entrepreneurs reach out to us in the last few weeks, hoping to sell their current business so they can start a new one. And I’ve talked with several in-house creative folks who are leaving their jobs and venturing out on their own to provide design and/or copy services to soon-to-be clients.

Recently I ran across an old Field Notes notebook that held the original handwritten notes I made for starting my first agency, in December 2008. It’s funny to see how my mindset was back then compared to today so many years later.

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It’s already started. Black Friday sales abound. Today, I counted 16 emails in my inbox with some offer related to the biggest shopping day of the year.

This is all fine and dandy of course. I’m an opportunistic marketer who likes to take advantage of peak cultural consumer dynamics. However, I do my best not to read too deeply into the type of customers acquired during this season. Doing so could set one up for long-term setbacks to their marketing efforts.

Here are my notes from last week.

• Who are your best customers?
• Are they ones who wait to buy your products and services when they’re on sale?
• Are they the ones who feel FOMO (fear of missing out) so they jump in before the offer ends?
• I’m not so sure. I like a definition I read from April Dunford: Your ideal customers buy quickly and pay full price.
• Not all customers are the same, weigh them accordingly. If you could only have ONE type of customer, who would you want? Optimize for that.
• Segment customers who buy during “big sale” times from the customers who buy at full price.
• Segment customers who buy quickly.
• Don’t set marketing strategies and tactics based on what works during “Black Friday”, “Cyber Monday”, “End of the Quarter”, “Year end closeouts”, etc.
• This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take advantage of these times.
• Take short-term gains in key performance indicators (KPIs) with a grain of salt.

Again, I’m not saying don’t take advantage of times when potential customers have a heightened desire to make changes and try something new. Be careful not to let the tail wag the dog, and fall into the fear of missing out yourselves. The only thing worse then having no customers is having ones you don’t want.

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In a recent interview, I heard Jocko Willink diving into a few stories that influenced his best-selling book, Extreme Ownership. If you haven’t read it, the overall premise is — in any organization or on any team, all responsibility for success and failure resides in the leader.

The story he shared was about how an attitude of personal responsibility adopted by a group of POWs in a Vietnamese prison camp created an environment for survival.

While simple, it’s really hard to do. I tried it for a few days and let’s just say I have plenty of room for improvement. Here it is.

If any external factor impacts your attitude, it’s your issue.

If your spouse’s snoring or your kids’ constant silliness bothers you, it’s on you.

If your co-worker’s communication style gets under your skin, it’s your problem.

If your client or customer gives you terrible feedback or the result of your marketing leaves you frustrated, guess what?

And this attitude isn’t off base, is it? After all, we can only control our attitudes and actions.

What a different business, relationship, and world we’d have if we took 100% of the responsibility and stopped playing the victim. Sure, sometimes we may be a victim of something but it doesn’t mean we have to play one.

Here are my notes from last week.

• I don’t remember where or when I jotted this down, but it’s been a good framework for me to follow when developing areas of personal responsibility
• K.A.S.H
• Knowledge: not only depth of logic but strength of conviction
• Attitude: take every thought captive, taste every word that leaves your mouth
• Skills: stay curious, learn by doing
• Habits: first develop the habit, then improve it

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In addition to the “design + build + run” mission component of my boys’ robotics team, there is also an innovation project assignment. Its requirements include developing a “desirability, feasibility, viability” style presentation and creating a prototype for their innovation.

At last week’s meeting, the team of four boys and a girl passed the crucial point in all innovation projects where you have to stop thrashing and start subtracting.

All teams of any size doing any type of work cross this threshold — when the creativity mindset takes second seat to the focus mindset.

Here are my notes from last week.

Notes on Work

• There are dozens of ways to dissect the anatomy of work. To simplify things, let’s look at the two mindsets for doing any type of work from mowing the lawn to sending people to mars.
• The two mindsets are Creativity and Focus
• The Creativity mindset is
• surrendering to discovery and curiosity
• exploring any and all ideas and possibilities
• looking for buried treasure on an island without a map
• The Focus mindset is
• the elimination of options
• the devotion to discipline
• the execution of a well-groomed plan

Look back at any good work that “gets done” and these two mindsets were present. If you miss the creativity phase, your work falls flat. If you miss the focus phase, your work falls down. Hold the tension of both, and good work can become great.

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We still have pretty young kids by most standards. However, as they’ve matured, my wife and I have introduced what we call “family pillars”. These are the foundational markers for what our family name, their name, stands for.

Similarly, each of Calm Capital’s companies have “pillars” or values woven through the fabric of everything they do.

One of those is integrity.

Here are my notes from last week…

• Integrity is when the outside matches the inside — and when your behavior matches your beliefs.
• At least in part, the word integrity, comes from the Latin word integritatem (nominative integritas) meaning soundness and wholeness.
• Additionally, these roots are also where the word integration comes from, meaning bringing together the parts of whole.
• So, having integrity means you’re the same in all areas of your life — who you are at work, at home, with others, and when you’re by yourself.
• In design and engineering, the term integrity is used to describe the quality of work as its executed per the specs and standards of the work. When something breaks, they’ll say it “lacked integrity” — which is to say there was a price or circumstance where the bits or atoms became compromised.
• For us, the point at which we compromise our values is when our integrity fails. And integrity is easier to keep than it is to regain.

One of the reasons my parents introduced me to golf when I was young was because integrity is built into the game. In other sports, referees are used to make sure players’ behaviors align with the “beliefs” of the game. Unlike any other sport I’m aware of, in golf, players call penalties on themselves.

There are numerous examples. One of the most famous is when Bobby Jones, an all-time great, lost a tournament because he called a penalty on himself when he was in the woods all alone.

Much like golf, our lives are rarely lived with a referee looking over our shoulders governing our attitudes and actions.

And at the end of the day, who you are, is who you are when no one is looking.

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I’ve written a good bit about listening over the years. Partly, because I believe it’s a learned superpower.

Few developed skills are as impactful as listening. Becoming good at it makes you a better spouse, parent, child, business person, leader, … the list goes on.

So when Song Exploder host, Hrishikesh Hirway, released his TED Talk on the idea of listening to others in a different way, I jumped in with reasonable expectations to learn something. I wasn’t disappointed.

Here are my notes from last week…

First thing. If you’ve never listened to the Song Exploder podcast or watched the show on Netflix, it’s a show where musicians break down their songs, bit by bit, and tell the story of how they’re made. It’s incredibly well-done.

Alright, with that in mind, let’s dive in.

• Songs feel a lot like houses. As a listener, you can listen to the finished product, but similar to admiring a house from the outside, you don’t know what the rooms look like or what it means to the creator of the house.
• When musicians break down their songs on his show, they’re giving the listener a guided tour inside that house and uncovering the layers and stories within.
• Once we know the stories and have seen the rooms, we don’t look at the house (or listen to the song), even from the outside, the same. This goes for anything - writers, clients, friends, etc. The context gives us a new appreciation.
• When we’re in a conversation with someone else, there could be tons of rooms to discover, which develops new learning and builds a bridge between you and them.
• Three keys for better listening

1. Be open to new ideas - Most of the time, we listen to music or others passively, often failing to discover anything more than what’s on the surface.
2. Stop multi-tasking - It’s like listening to one song while trying to sing another.
3. Let them know you’re engaged without taking the focus away from them - Use nonverbal cues like a nod — sometimes intentionally engaged silence makes space for new discoveries

At one point in the talk, Hrishikesh mentioned the act of “getting immersed”.

It makes me think of language immersion schools and how effective they are at teaching those who want to learn a foreign language.

What would happen if we “got immersed” when listening?

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