by Helena Escalante | Creativity, Goals, Growth, Habits, Mindset, Planning, Time, Tools
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 48 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Fall in love with mastery
— From 80/20 Sales and Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Working Less and Making More by Perry Marshall
Much is said in the world of business about the importance of having a USP: Unique Selling Proposition. It’s what makes your product or service different from the rest.
“But you also have a personal unique selling proposition that stands distinct from your current product or business,” says Perry Marshall, marketing guru, in his book 80/20 Sales and Marketing. “It’s the inherent groove based on your passion, personality, and experiences that you carry with you at all times.”
Marshall points out that “most people are vaguely aware of their natural, personal USP.” He continues, “I think one of the biggest wormholes that people get sucked into is, they get so enamored with the romantic version of what someone else does, the greener pastures, that they ignore the unromantic, plain, everyday genius that they themselves possess.”
As a marketing advisor, the thing that frustrates Marshall the most “is that it’s so much harder to get people to focus on their innate giftedness and natural USP.”
The author goes on to say that, “it’s easier to show people a bright shiny object and manipulate them into jumping on the next short-lived bandwagon than to master something that’s just beginning to flourish.”
He tells the story of him playing drums and attending a drum camp. While there, he took several clinics led by world-class drummers who, independently of each other, all made the same comment:
“The thing I hate the most about being on tour is _______________.”
How do you think they finished that sentence? Give it a shot. What do you think the answer is? Not sleeping on their beds? Living out of a suitcase in a tour bus? Not seeing their families? The ultra-long days?
Nope.
Here’s their answer:
“The thing I hate the most about being on tour is there’s no time or place to practice. I love to practice.”
To be super successful, Perry suggests practicing as much as you can. “Put yourself in a position where you get paid to practice, even if it’s only a modest amount of money.”
Practice. Practice. Practice. Preferably paid but, if not, unpaid. And then practice some more, until “whatever you love most is endowed with incredible force. Learn to love repeating even basic things over and over again, until you achieve [mastery].”
“Don’t fall in love with bright shiny objects. Fall in love with mastery.”
What should you master? That depends on your specific goals, but definitely “some aspect [related to your goals] that you naturally love and excel at—harnessing the natural forces of who you are.”
ACTION
TODAY: What is your USP? Take some time today to figure out what you’re gifted at (if you haven’t figured it out already). Ask your family, friends, and coworkers, they will gladly tell you about your gifts.
FUTURE: In a recent conversation with a friend of mine, she said, “the thing that you should charge the most for, is what comes the easiest to you.” Wise words. What is your genius and, are you mastering it to make the most out of it? If you are, congrats and keep going! If you aren’t, why not? What do you need to put in place for that to happen? Create the habit, the space, and the time for you to practice and achieve mastery.
Have a gifted friend? Please share this post: Email, Facebook, Twitter. Thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Collaboration, Goals, Habits, Mindset, Planning, Productivity, Time, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 44 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Don’t be a hero
— From REWORK: Change the way you work forever by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
“A lot of times it’s better to be a quitter than to be a hero,” say Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson.
Whaaaaat?!
The authors of Rework explain: “Let’s say you think a task can be done in two hours. But four hours into it you’re still only a quarter of the way done. The natural instinct is to think, ‘But I can’t give up now, I’ve already spent four hours on this!’ So you go into hero mode. You’re determined to make it work (and slightly embarrassed that it isn’t already working). You grab your cape and shut yourself off from the world.”
Sometimes that sheer determination and work overload can produce your desired results. “But,” the authors ask, “is it worth it?” Probably not is the answer. “The task was worth it when you thought it would cost two hours, not sixteen.”
Yet we feel terrible to leave behind, as incomplete, that investment of time and effort. While you will be the one to decide whether it’s worth it or not, you can help decrease the emotional overload by purposefully ignoring sunk costs, as you cannot get them back.
As world-traveler and side hustling guru, Chris Guillebeau, says in this post, regardless of how much time you’ve spent, “consider the next [period] of your life, not the previous investment that brought you this far.”
Look at it this way, “In those sixteen hours you could have gotten a bunch of other things done.” Plus, by going into hero mode, “you cut yourself off from feedback, which can lead you even further down the wrong path. Even heroes need a fresh pair of eyes sometimes—someone else to give them a reality check.”
The authors share how they’ve experienced and solved this problem firsthand: if anything takes them more than two weeks, they bring in someone else to take a look. That someone else might not do any work on the task, but they give their opinion. “Sometimes an obvious solution is staring you right in the face, but you can’t even see it.”
And while, most of the time, we tend to associate quitting with failure, “sometimes that’s exactly what you should do,” the authors point out. “If you already spent too much time on something that wasn’t worth it, walk away. You can’t get that time back. The worst thing you can do now is waste even more time.”
Remember, we can get or make almost everything back, except time. Don’t be a hero to defend a project that is dragging on for too long, instead, be the hero that defends your time and the best use of it.
And while you’ll find that sometimes you cannot “quit” the project altogether, because it’s out of your control, and it continues to drag on, look for ways to substitute yourself. Is there someone whose time and talent are better spent on this than yours? Can you ask for help? Can you outsource it? Think creatively and you’ll come up with the best solution.
To dispel the myth of quitting as a failure, here are some other posts about that: Selective quitting, Quit before you start, and Understanding when to quit and when to stick.
Let me know in the comments here if you’ve ever gone into hero mode and what you learned about it!
ACTION
TODAY: Take a look at your tasks at work and life. Is there a particular one that is taking longer than anticipated? Are you thinking about going into hero mode or already there? Reexamine the situation and consider how you can solve it (if it needs solving at all) so that you can be a good steward of your time.
FUTURE: Keep track of where your time goes for a week or a month, it’s a great exercise, as only that way we can truly see how much time we spend on hero mode without necessarily knowing about it. Sometimes we go into microhero mode and don’t even detect it: that extra long phone conversation, that meeting that went on for too long, etc., they all add up and we don’t even notice except when we look at the data in front of us. Time management guru, Laura Vanderkam, has a simple but effective time tracking sheet and a time makeover guide (it’s free).
Know someone who is about to go into hero mode? Save him or her some time! Please share this post with that person via email, Facebook or Twitter, thanks!
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Celebration, Collaboration, Creativity, Growth
Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 8 seconds.
Hi there!
EntreGurus is celebrating 250 posts today and I wanted to say THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, for reading it and for coming along for such a joyous ride!
It’s an honor and a privilege to share a daily idea with you, and I hope so far you have experienced many a-ha moments and will continue to experience them as we go along.
In the spirit of fun and celebration, I want to share some fun stats with you.
If I were to put all the posts together in one document the results would be:
- 380 Pages
- 4,497 Paragraphs
- 17,265 Lines
- 157,055 Words (as a comparison, a regular business book averaging 200 pages has 50,000 words.)
- 738,558 Characters without counting spaces
- 892,369 Characters with spaces (this would be the equivalent of 6,374 tweets at 140 characters each.)
Crazy awesome, isn’t it?
I made this word cloud that shows the most used words throughout all the posts:
And here’s a table with the top 50 words throughout the posts. (Thanks to databasic.io/en/wordcounter for the great online app to count the times a word appears in a document!)
| RANK # |
WORD |
FREQUENCY |
RANK # |
WORD |
FREQUENCY |
| 1 |
time |
768 |
26 |
every |
251 |
| 2 |
today |
730 |
27 |
go |
248 |
| 3 |
one |
635 |
28 |
mind |
244 |
| 4 |
people |
565 |
29 |
like |
236 |
| 5 |
make |
520 |
30 |
would |
231 |
| 6 |
idea |
486 |
31 |
better |
227 |
| 7 |
work |
485 |
32 |
important |
226 |
| 8 |
get |
442 |
33 |
person |
225 |
| 9 |
take |
383 |
34 |
new |
216 |
| 10 |
want |
382 |
35 |
ideas |
214 |
| 11 |
way |
378 |
36 |
book |
210 |
| 12 |
action |
355 |
37 |
good |
206 |
| 13 |
think |
343 |
38 |
many |
205 |
| 14 |
things |
328 |
39 |
give |
202 |
| 15 |
know |
317 |
40 |
see |
198 |
| 16 |
us |
313 |
41 |
much |
197 |
| 17 |
day |
308 |
42 |
keep |
195 |
| 18 |
life |
306 |
43 |
help |
192 |
| 19 |
need |
293 |
44 |
change |
192 |
| 20 |
future |
292 |
45 |
someone |
189 |
| 21 |
success |
283 |
46 |
others |
187 |
| 22 |
something |
263 |
47 |
great |
180 |
| 23 |
business |
261 |
48 |
done |
176 |
| 24 |
best |
260 |
49 |
find |
173 |
| 25 |
says |
251 |
50 |
say |
173 |
Please let me know in the comments here which one has been your favorite post so far and why — I’d love to write a post listing the most popular ideas from EntreGurus and feature your comment.
Thanks a lot again for reading, and I look forward to continuing to share with you the ideas from the books I read every day.
With much gratitude,
Helena
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Celebration, Goals, Growth, Habits, Leadership, Mindset, Miniseries, Opportunity, Planning, Resources, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 56 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: The Encore Effect – Part 6
— From The Encore Effect: How to Achieve Remarkable Performance in Anything You Do by Mark Sanborn
Welcome back to the last part of this miniseries. So far, we have learned what the Encore Effect is (from the book by the same name from leadership guru and author Mark Sanborn) and understood what it takes to create a remarkable performance, the one that causes your audience to want more and more.
The author has focused on several Ps along the way: passion, preparation, practice, etc., as the ingredients to create a remarkable performance. However, all the while, he’s been wondering what came first: the remarkable performance or the remarkable person?
“Distinguishing between remarkable performances and remarkable people is like asking which came first—the chicken or the egg?”
Sanborn says that remarkable performances often result in increased rewards. “These rewards may include money, but they also come as increased exposure, recognition, influence and opportunity. […] The person who strives to perform more remarkably without also focusing on becoming a more remarkable person is missing the larger point.”
So, how do we ensure that, along with our remarkable performances, there is also growth in the personal area?
Sanborn suggests “six areas of focus that, when developed and mastered, can’t help but make anyone a remarkable person.” He calls this The Pyramid of Possibility, and pictures each of the six areas—each one starting with a P—like an inverted pyramid (that is, in a V shape) “with potential as the foundation for being remarkable and personalization as the highest expression of it.”
It looks like this:
The Pyramid of Possibility
\ Personalization /
\ Persistence /
\ Principles /
\ Passion /
\ Purpose /
\ Potential /
Let’s take a quick look at each of the six Ps on the Pyramid.
Potential: “Our potential—both individually and collectively—has no known limits. Many of us know how good we are at our jobs and responsibilities, but none of us knows how good we could be. That is the magic and mystery of our potential.”
Purpose: “Potential without purpose is like a sheet of metal that has not yet been formed to make a useful object. Feed that sheet of metal into a press and its value is transformed. Every human being has unlimited potential. But we need the press of purpose to create a channel for expression and action. Purpose focuses potential.”
Passion: “Passion is the fire-in-the-belly that we bring to human endeavors. Of course, passion that is not tied to purpose is like lightning firing in the sky… But electricity that has a purpose—well, that’s a different story. That kind of energy can run a household of light up a city.” (For more on passion, read this post.)
Principles: “What are the beliefs that allow you to shape your world your performances) instead of being shaped by it? [… Remarkable people are] unswervingly committed to their core values, ethics and personal and spiritual beliefs…When what you say is reflected and amplified by how you live, you are almost certain to live a remarkable life.”
Persistence: There’s an important difference between persistence and endurance. “ Remarkable performers and people don’t simply endure—they exercise persistence. They refuse to give in to despair, and they work hard at doing what’s right. Persistence is a strategic word that suggests purposeful action…”
Personalization: England’s equivalent to the U.S.’ American Idol is The X Factor, where the X refers to that one “elusive and indefinable ‘star’ quality that separates one performer from the rest.” For the purposes of personalization, Sanborn wants you to think instead on what he calls the “U Factor”: “those qualities that make you unique among the world’s performers. The U Factor is not something that you have to acquire or search for. It’s something you already possess, and something no one else has… It’s how you use purpose, passion, principles and persistence to make your actions you.”
And with that, this miniseries on The Encore Effect comes to a close. I hope you liked it as much as I enjoyed writing it. What was your favorite part? Did you get any a-ha moments while reading it? Let me know in the comments here.
ACTION
TODAY: Think about your potential. How do you see yourself? How do you see others? The author asks us to ponder, “do you see yourself as ‘finished’ in terms of your spiritual and career advancement or as just getting started?”
FUTURE: Think about your goals. On which of them are you just enduring vs. purposely persisting to make them happen? Make a list of next steps to move that goal forward – there are 100 days left in the year for you to make it happen or to advance it significantly!
Know someone who is an encore performer? Please share this miniseries with them via email, Facebook or Twitter, thanks!
by Helena Escalante | Miniseries
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 29 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: The Encore Effect – Part 5
— From The Encore Effect: How to Achieve Remarkable Performance in Anything You Do by Mark Sanborn
Welcome back! In yesterday’s post, we looked at the difference between living our passions and living passionately. While subtle in language, there is a great difference in making it a reality.
As promised, today we will continue to examine other necessary Ps to achieve remarkable performances: Preparation and Practice.
In The Encore Effect, Mark Sanborn points out that each of us is creating our future, right now. “Whether the future is five minutes from now or five years, it is determined by our preparation—or lack of it.”
There is a lot of information on preparing for standardized tests, or for disasters, or preparedness in general for so many things… Unfortunately, Sanborn mentions, “there is a lot less information available on the extra effort that will enable you to perform remarkably and the preparation that will separate your performance from everyone else’s. Sometimes the difference between remarkable and ordinary—between ‘Thanks for coming’ and ‘When can you come back?’ is razor-thin.”
What makes the difference is preparation. Learn all you can about your audience, anticipate every question, and rehearse every problem. Always have a backup plan.
Sanborn goes on to say that “the link between preparation, practice and proficiency applies to every kind of performance. It’s found everywhere from parenting and software programming to pastoring and public relations.”
“The confidence you need can only come from doing something again and again.”
Practice. Practice. Practice.
Sanborn points out that “remarkable performers don’t practice to become perfect but to become better.” But “let’s face it,” he says, “practice sounds like something artists, athletes and actors do—not people in the everyday work world… The closest they come to it is a kind of ‘practice in process,’ based on the hope that the longer they do their job, the better they’ll get at it.”
Practice in process rarely works, says the author. He recommends being deliberate and intentional about our practice, figuring out what success will look like, and measuring every step of the way to see our improvement.
Further, Sanborn urges us to make time for the important things each day. “Few of us have time. We’re already busy… [but] practice is critical if you want to turn in a remarkable performance.”
Preparation and practice. There you have it. A couple of indispensable Ps for remarkable performances.
How do you prepare and practice? Please let me know in the comments here.
Please come back tomorrow to learn about the other Ps in remarkable performances. The miniseries is coming to an end soon, but I still have a few Ps I want to share with you.
ACTION
TODAY: Take some time to think: Where have you been winging it? That’s exactly the area of your life that needs deliberate practice.
FUTURE: Prepare to practice intentionally and deliberately in the area that you just identified. The more you prepare and the more you practice, the better results you’ll attain.
Know someone who is an encore performer? Please share this post with them via email, Facebook or Twitter, thanks!
