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Knocking on doors
How people find out about you matters a lot. Your current physician probably didn’t cold call you. You find good products and services through recommendations, media, and searches. Anyone who is cold calling you is implicitly telling you, “Not enough people trust me to do business with me yet.” That’s why cold calling is difficult.…
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Seek truth
If you’re an expert, your job isn’t to convince people to buy or do something. Your job is to see patterns, acquire information, and provide it to people in a concise and clear way. Seek truth through facts, expert opinions, surveys, anecdotes, and data. This doesn’t have to be complicated or cost even a single…
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Build the team
If you’re an entrepreneur, one of the highest leverage activities you can do is find good people to work with, build a good relationship, and keep working with them. You don’t need to be hiring full-time to start doing this. People can be available in all capacities, for all sorts of roles. (In fact, many…
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On developing a taste for problems
“What if You Had a Universal Remote… That Controlled Your Universe?” The premise of Adam Sandler’s film, Click, is simple: the protagonist is granted a remote control that allows him to change the speed of his life (e.g., he can fast forward, slow motion, even rewind, etc.). Here’s the trailer for it: Spoiler alert: the…
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Monkey barring
Once you’ve found a ladder, and chosen a game, you need to stick with it. For some of us, that’s a tall order. If we’re not progressing, we don’t want to play. One solution here is to monkey bar. We’ve got two hands, and we don’t always need both on the same rung for a…
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Find a ladder
Structure is great for giving people things to focus on and to channel their creative energy through. Structure is bad for constraining people and sucking away their motivation. It’s easy to either become too rigid with your structure, or to embody a swirl of chaotic energy. You need to know when to do what. One…
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“What if grinding is bad?”
A coach asked me this question in my late 20s. It was mind-blowing. At the time, I’d already read Trying Not to Try, and I was still soaking things in and slowly shifting my worldview. This question really accelerated the process. Some questions that counter-grinding question provoked: Wasn’t everything supposed to be a grind? If…
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Make a habit of sharing other people’s work
One of the scariest things about promoting your own work is the fundamental reality that nobody else cares. It’s not a personal attack on the worth of you or your work; it’s just that people are living their own lives. They experience their own thoughts, curiosities, and challenges. You may know this in theory, but…
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How Adidas Yeezy’s placement strategy works
In tenth grade, I learned about the 4 P’s of Marketing in business class: product, placement, price, and promotion. I’ve long considered product and promotion the most important pieces; in recent years, I’ve come to appreciate the power of price. Today, I want to write about placement and why it’s fascinating: There’s a tension that…
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Marketing as the sector of the future
Excerpted from Average is Over by Tyler Cowen: “Despite all the talk about STEM fields, I see marketing as the seminal sector for our future economy…. “It sounds a little silly, but making high earners feel better in just about every part of their lives will be a major source of job growth in the…