At the seminar I did in July for college students, we talked a lot about impresarios. (You can read one student's take on it here).
Weave together resources and opportunities and put on a show. That's what impresarios have always done. You rent the opera hall, find the singers and sell tickets. You see an opportunity, connect people who can benefit from it and make something happen.
I challenged the group, 20 strangers who had just met, to orchestrate an ebook of brainstorms and opportunities for their fellow students (and to finish it in just 80 minutes). Here's a copy of their short ebook.
The magic of the impresario opportunity is that it can start on the tiniest of scales. You can organize a lunch outing at work. You can start a bowling league. Over time, you can work up to a Kickstarter or a small association of fellow industry professionals. It's not strategically difficult to imagine fifty ways you can use the resources you have right now to start something.
But actually becoming an impresario is far more difficult than it looks. Not because the systems aren't in place, not because it's not straightforward, but because it is fraught with risk. The risk that you'll be called out for going against the grain and the risk that it might not work. We've spent so much time worrying about how hard things are that sometimes we overlook how easy today's tools make it to actually create something.
PS I'll be talking about this and more advanced tactics with an entrepreneurial focus at my upcoming seminar on the 20th. There are just a few seats left. It's not for everyone, but if you're in the midst of starting a significant venture, I think it will be worth your time.
If I started with “I have a confession to make…”, that would be cliché, so I have TWO confessions to make:
Confession #1:
This post has nothing to do with SEO. It’s about creative work. I guess it applies to content marketing. Ok, maybe it’s a little bit about SEO. If you’d rather eat a sandwich, I understand.
Confession #2:
I am a serial, high-functioning under-achiever. In other words, at the risk of sounding like an ass, my half-assed efforts usually return 7/8-assed results. I learned too early to game those ass-fractions – during final exams in college, for example, I’d calculate exactly what I needed to get an A in the class. If it was only going to take a 67% on the exam, I’d study for 30 minutes and then play Wing Commander for six hours.
1/2 Ass + 1/2 Ass = 1 Ass (Me)
Fast-forward to my 40s, and I still sometimes slip into habitual half-assery. As a marketer, I’m especially guilty of one bad habit – I save my best material for the future. When I have a really “great” idea, I add it to a list to write later, presumably because only content marketing will save us from the coming Zombie Apocalypse. Instead of wasting my best ideas, I pull something from the B list and try to get it to 88% assedness.
Why We Cheat Ourselves
So, why would I choose a method where I’m purposely ignoring my best ideas and ultimately doing sub-optimum work? I’ve asked myself this question a lot, and now that, on my good days, I’m finally breaking the habit, I think I’ve found a couple of answers:
(1) Perfectionism
When it comes to any creative block, you can bet the P-word is going to come into play. Obviously, my “best” ideas need to result in my best work, so enter the self-doubt. I could fight through it and put in twice the effort, or I could just procrastinate (the other P-word). Unfortunately, fear of imperfection doesn’t just rob you of your best ideas – it robs you of your passion in the here and now. If I’m always taking the idea I’m most excited about today and putting it on a list for later, I’ve already lost half the power of that idea. When I go to revisit it down the road, the spark is already gone.
I think that moment of passion is a lot of what makes any piece of content worth creating. I won’t claim that this post is the best thing I’ll ever write (please feel free not to wholeheartedly agree with me in the comments), but for whatever reason this particular fire was burning today. If I left it for next month, I’d be scratching out this sentence with the leftover coals.
I’m also not saying that you should never plan your writing or content ideas in advance, or that it’s bad to make a list. It’s always nice to have a back-up plan. Just don’t keep pushing today’s best ideas to the bottom of the list. Your “B” ideas can go on Plan B. Hit the A-list today.
(2) Future Glory
I suppose this is the outgoing half-sister of perfectionism – I’m waiting until my skills are good enough to be worthy of my best ideas. Only then, will the world recognize me in all my glory and unanimously declare me Supreme Commander of Taco Night (it’s a job – shut up).
Here’s the problem – only your most ambitious ideas push you hard enough to learn. If you keep churning out half-assed work, you’ll never close the gap between your capabilities and the idealized ideas in your head. If you’ve never seen radio producer/personality Ira Glass’s take on the “gap”, then do yourself a favor and watch it now…
This quote (in part 3) sums the series up, but doesn’t begin to do it justice:
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.
I’ll go one step further – it’s not enough just to do a lot of work. You have to take a shot at your best ideas; at doing your most important work even when you don’t feel ready. That’s how you grow and, eventually, become worthy of those ideas.
(3) Fear of Brain-drain
Finally, there’s the fear that I think all writers (fiction, non-fiction, ad copy, part-time, whatever) have – that we’ll just run out of ideas. If I use up my best ideas today, all I’ll be left with is junk, so I’d better save them up. The irony is that, the more I write, the more good ideas I generate. If I write more often, I find it easier to come up with things to write about. I can’t convince you of that until you’ve seen it for yourself – all I can tell you is this: trust yourself. Your creativity is a renewable resource, if you give it a chance.
How We Cheat Our Clients
I hate to say it, but this tendency to push our best ideas back to the future can also turn into a form of professional selfishness. My best ideas should benefit me, right? Why should my clients get them? I’ll make the same argument I did in (3) – you won’t run out of ideas, at least not in the long-term. If one of your favorites is a good fit for a client, let them have it. It’ll make you both look good, and you’ll grow as a professional. If you’re stuck on being selfish, then let me tell you from experience – showcasing your best work for a client will also make you a lot more money down the road. You cheat them, you just cheat yourself again.
How Do We Stop Cheating?
There was a great bit of history going around this week – a letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald to a family friend and aspiring writer. It was very honest criticism, but also a path to creative success. He cuts right to the chase with this advice:
I'm afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.
So, pay the price, and put your whole ass into it. The only way to do your best work is to write what demands to be written, even if you aren’t ready. You can’t wait until you’ve got the skills, because no one will give you the chance to get there unless you make them care today – and to make them care, you have to care. So, stop shuffling your best work to the bottom of the to-do list – get out there and wreck it.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
The Inbound Jobs story with Five Tips on Getting Buy-in from Thought Leaders.
In April, Ben and I attended LinkLove in Boston. It was a great experience for a number of reasons, and the best part was connecting with other awesome SEO’s. As a designer/developer team, we asked these thought leaders what we could create for them that would make their lives better. Tom Critchlow planted a seed with us that would eventually become the job board now found on Inbound.org.
Tom helped us see that there was an urgent need for inbound marketing agencies to find, recruit, and keep great talent. He connected us with Rand who was very interested in having a job board on inbound.org–his side project with Dharmesh Shah.
We were thrilled at the opportunity of working with Rand and Dharmesh and started planning out the site. Unfortunately at that time, the inbound.org team was too busy to put in the time and energy needed to move the project forward (we think it had something to do with the 18 million).
So we pushed the project aside, realizing that the job board would only be successful with their community. As with most great ideas, the job board wouldn’t leave our minds (Tom must have planted the idea in a dream within a dream), so we scheduled some time to build it despite the fact that Rand and Dharmesh said they couldn’t support it. We figured at the very least Tom could use it for his presentation on hiring and training inbound marketers at Mozcon.
After we built the job board, we contacted Rand again to see if our up front investment of time and energy would be enough to get Inbound.org’s backing. This time we got buy-in, and we partnered with the Inbound.org team to get the site ready for Mozcon. Rand introduced the job board during the Mozcon kickoff and gave us a generous mention. As you can imagine, it was a huge deal for us, mostly because of the connection.
So what can be learned from all of this? I’ll try to explain why this worked from a content strategist’s perspective. As SEOs, we are always talking about creating great content and getting buy-in from thought leaders. In theory this seems doable, but how do we actually go about it?
Here are 5 tips on getting buy-in from thought leaders, based on our experience building the job board:
Make Real Connections by Showing Up. LinkLove is a niche conference, and on paper it was a stretch for a bootstrapped company, but we went for the networking. We went to meet people in the industry and find ways we could add value. Meeting Tom was pure luck, but we wouldn’t have even had the opportunity without showing up. Figure out where thought leaders hangout online and in real life and connect with them in a thoughtful and intentional way.
Find How You Can Help. Most people approach thought leaders looking for what they can get out of the relationship, but it’s better to think about how you might be able to help them. Uncover opportunities by asking what would make their lives easier or better. Maybe you aren’t a designer or a developer but there are many other ways to provide value. Think about how you can help them with your knowledge, skills and relationships.
Invest Up Front. There are different philosophies here, but our mentality is to invest up front. You don’t need to create the entire piece of content, but create something good enough to show your idea and prove that you can deliver. In our experience, the more you can provide up front, the more feedback you will get. There’s no question that this is a risky strategy, and we don’t recommend it for every piece of content, but buy-in is much more likely if you have something solid to start with.
Think/Go Big. Thought leaders are extremely busy people and they are bombarded with others trying to get their buy-in and support. When you reach out to them, only go after your best ideas since you have a limited amount of time and small window of opportunity.
Create Content You Believe In. We believed that the inbound job board was necessary for the community. This made it a lot easier for us to invest up front. Push ideas that you believe in, and create content that you can rally behind. Don’t build content for the links, do it for the value the content will provide and the relationships you will form.
Conclusion
These are some of the things we learned about getting buy-in through creating the job board for Rand and Dharmesh. We’d love to hear how you are getting buy-in from thought leaders in the comments below.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
Tomorrow we will welcome more than 150 Parent Teacher Association leaders from 41 states, DC, and US military bases overseas to the White House for a day-long briefing. But this Friday isn't just for those joining us at the White House: we'll also be engaging with millions of moms and dads who can’t make it to Washington.
We're hoping you'll tune-in live and join the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #WHPTA. Watch the conversation live at WhiteHouse.gov/Champions for PTA Day tomorrow, starting at 12 p.m. EDT.
President Barack Obama talks on the phone with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India aboard Air Force One during a flight to Colorado, Aug. 8, 2012. The President called Prime Minister Singh to express condolences for victims of the attack at the gurdwara in Wisconsin, which took the lives of Indian nationals as well as Americans, and to convey the solidarity of the American people. Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, is seated at right. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
In Case You Missed It
Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog:
New Report Highlights the Impact of the President’s Agenda on the Hispanic Community A new report, “An America Built to Last: President Obama’s Agenda and the Hispanic Community,” takes a close look at how President Obama’s policies have made a difference for Hispanics and all Americans as we work to move our country forward out of the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Empowering Young People to Build a Kinder, Braver World We must all stay focused on ending bullying because no young person, or their loved ones, should have to endure the pain, agony, and loss to our families, schools, and communities that can come with bullying.
A Smarter Approach to Regulation This White House White Board lays out the facts and shows that we can protect health and safety while promoting economic goals.
Today's Schedule
All times are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).
12:45 PM: The President delivers remarks at a campaign event
2:50 PM: The President departs Pueblo, Colorado en route Colorado Springs, Colorado
3:20 PM: The President arrives Colorado Springs, Colorado
4:25 PM: The President delivers remarks at a campaign event
6:25 PM: The President departs Colorado Springs, Colorado en route Joint Base Andrews
Left to its own devices, the mob will augment, accessorize, spam, degrade and noisify whatever they have access to, until it loses beauty and function and becomes something else.
The tragedy of the design commons.
A farmer's market with no entry requirements turns into a bazaar and then into a souvenir stand and finally into a flea market.
A bulletin board with no moderator or hierarchy becomes a random mess of affiliate posts and noise, where only a smart search engine is helpful.
An Apple product designed with user feedback would have thousands of extra features, multiple input methods and weigh 18 pounds.
(The best exception to this rule are some--not all--places where people live, including parts of Manhattan and Kibera, Kenya. But even in the best instances, as soon as commercial interests are served, it starts to fail).
It seems democratic and non-elitist to set it and forget it and let the users take over. But the tools we use (Wikipedia) and the brands we covet (Nike or Ducati) resolutely refuse to become democracies.
"We're getting a lot of calls from high earners who are asking whether they should get out of France," said Mr. Grandil, a partner at Altexis, which specializes in tax matters for corporations and the wealthy. "Even young, dynamic people pulling in 200,000 euros are wondering whether to remain in a country where making money is not considered a good thing."
Because there are relatively few people in France whose income would incur such a tax — perhaps no more than 30,000 in a country of 65 million — the gains might contribute but a small fraction of the 33 billion euros in new revenue the government wants to raise next year to help balance the budget.
There is no question Mr. Hollande is under fiscal pressure. He has pledged to reduce France's budget deficit, currently 4.5 percent of the nation's gross domestic product, to 3 percent by next year, to meet euro zone rules.
The matter of how best to hit that target, though, is as much a political question as a fiscal one. Mr. Hollande was elected in May on a wave of resentment against "les riches" — company executives, bankers, sports stars and celebrities whose paychecks tend to be seen as scandalous in a country where the growing divide between rich and poor touches a cultural nerve whose roots predate Robespierre.
Half the nation's households earn less than 19,000 euros a year; only about 10 percent of households earn more than 60,000 euros annually, according to the French statistics agency, Insee.
There is currently no plan to change the tax rates for most people, which is 14 percent for the poorest and 30 percent for the next rung. For higher earners — people with incomes above 70,830 euros a year — the tax rate will soon rise to 44 percent, up from 41, in a change that was already set before Mr. Hollande's election.
Taxes are high in France for a reason: they pay for one of Europe's most generous social welfare systems and a large government. As Mr. Hollande has described it, the tax plan is about "justice," and "sending out a signal, a message of social cohesion."
France has a 33 percent corporate tax rate — the euro zone's second-highest, after Malta's 35 percent. That contrasts with the 12.5 percent rate in Ireland, which has deliberately kept a lid on corporate taxes as a lure to businesses.
"It is a ridiculous proposal, but it's great for us," said Jean Dekerchove, the manager of Immobilièr Le Lion, a high-end real estate agency based in Brussels. Calls to his office have picked up in recent months, he said, as wealthy French citizens look to invest or simply move across the border amid worries about the latest tax.
"It's a huge loss for France because people and businesses come to Belgium and bring their wealth with them," Mr. Dekerchove said. "But we're thrilled because they create jobs, they buy houses and spend money — and it's our economy that profits."
Essential Math
The New York Times estimates that fewer than 30,000 make more than 1 million euros.
However, Sophie Pedder, writing for The Economist came up with a much lower number in an NPR interview.
"Probably no more than about 3,000 French households will be affected by this. But that's an absolutely tiny fraction of the whole. So, once you start looking at numbers like that, you realize how this is very much a symbolic gesture," said Pedder.
That's a big difference. But whatever the number is, the government will collect far less than it thinks.
The current top tax rate is 41%. It's a big jump to 75%. And the more someone makes over €1,000,000 a year, the bigger the incentive to move.
Tax Rate Comparison
According to Pedder the UK lowered its top tax rate to 45% from 50%. Sweden has a top rate of 57%, and Belgium at 55% so "France sticks out really like a sore thumb on this one."
I strongly suggest this move by France will backfire. When it does, Hollande will probably seek to raise taxes on the next rung lower to make up for it.
Government Spending Over Half of French GDP
In Quick Facts on France, Heritage says "Government spending has increased to a level equivalent to 55 percent of total domestic output. The deficit remains more than 6 percent of GDP, pushing public debt up to more than 80 percent of GDP."
In a recent panel discussion in Spain, Paul Krugman said he would start to worry when government spending is over 50% of GDP.
France is there now, and the US headed there unless we rein in the deficit, which Krugman does not want to do.
For those who who view matters on a practical basis, France has been in recession the entire year. For those who need to see two quarters of negative growth first, France slides back in recession.
France is headed back into recession for the second time in just over three years, the country's central bank warned on Wednesday.
The Bank of France predicted a 0.1 percent contraction in gross domestic product (GDP) for the third quarter of this year, an outcome which, if confirmed, would follow a similar fall in output for the three months to June.
Economists define a recession as two consecutive quarters of negative growth.
The economy was flat in the first three months of 2012 but the deteriorating outlook has forced the Socialist government to cut its growth forecast for the full year from 0.4 to 0.3 percent, and for 2013 from 1.7 to 1.2 percent.
Definition of Recession
Bear in mind that a recession, at least is the US, does not require two consecutive quarters of negative GDP. Rather, the NBER, the official arbiter of recessions, looks at a whole gamut of factors.
The NBER does not define a recession in terms of two consecutive quarters of decline in real GDP. Rather, a recession is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales.
Recessions frequently start (as did the last one), without even a single quarter of negative GDP.
Two quarters of negative GDP is a sufficient but not necessary condition so the statement in the article "Economists define a recession as two consecutive quarters of negative growth" is simply wrong.
Europe in Recession
Recall that back in January IMF head Christine Lagarde said she thought it was possible for the eurozone to avoid a recession.
Even those waiting for two quarters of negative growth cannot hide the obvious: Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal, and France are all in recession. Germany is headed there.
Postări
