“Lose your product oriented lens and start seeing the world through the jobs-to-be-done lens. When you focus on your products and solutions, you begin to lose touch with the real problems and challenges people face in achieving their ultimate desired outcomes.”
What’s the thing they’re trying to get to? What’s the job they’re trying to get done?
Recognize and acknowledge that first. Then look at how you’ll get them there.
What a sad situation for Wright’s family and the company. It’s tempting to want to draw conclusions between the finances, the campaign, and Wright’s death, but we don’t actually know much about the situation. But I do think this highlights the potential disconnects between mental health & business, publicity & success, and success & happiness. The internet can seem so intimate but ultimately it’s a thin view of an individual’s or company’s reality.
via A sad update about a scissors maker that went viral
In a December 2015 article for BuzzFeed, Joseph Bernstein argued that “the dark forces of the internet became a counterculture.” He called it “Chanterculture” after the trolls who gathered at the meme-creating, often-racist 4chan message board. Others ended up calling it the “alt-right.” This culture combined a bunch of people who loved to perpetuate hoaxes with angry Gamergaters with “free-speech” advocates like Milo Yiannopoulos with honest-to-God neo-Nazis and white supremacists. And these people loved Donald Trump.
The quality threshold for content keeps dropping, making it easier than ever to stand out if you write smart content. Be the place that offers something challenging and smart. Borrow principles and trends from corollary industries and see if you can make them work for your own. Find ideas that have stood the test of time and apply them to your own strategy.
via 11 thought leaders on the future of content marketing (Airtable)
Sometimes we gotta borrow from the past as we plan for the future.
When I started to provide behind the scenes insight into what we were doing and asking questions on what people wanted to see, the engagement became real and more consistent.
Source: How I Gained 50+ Million Views After Watching Gary Vaynerchuk
Engagement is interaction. Interaction requires conversation.
Talk to the people you’re trying to reach. Listen. Respond. Change what you’re doing based on their input. It’s how we all hone our craft, whether we’re writers or performers or salespeople or retailers or engineers or whatever else.
Do something once. Do it better the next time. Do it even better the time after that. Repeat forever.
Are you thinking of making the leap as a remote worker? But you wonder what it’s be like to work remotely?
Source: A day in the life of a remote worker – Remotive
My first attempt at working remotely didn’t end well.
I had a brief stint in the role of a Happiness Engineer with Automattic back in 2013. Maybe it was the work itself, maybe it was the timing… I don’t know. But, in any case, there was a mutual agreement that it wasn’t a fit. I didn’t last beyond the probationary period.
Fast forward to 2015. I joined GoDaddy as a remote employee working from home in Toronto. The rest of my team was distributed between our Sunnyvale, CA and Tempe, AZ offices.
It’s been just shy of three years since I joined GoDaddy, and I absolutely love the setup.
It’s 12pm at home while it’s 9am on the west coast. That gives me a morning of uninterrupted time. Sometimes I use it to go heads-down on productive tasks, like writing or research. Other times I use it to run errands while the traffic is light and the stores are empty.
I still go down to our offices every few months, usually to get “face time” with colleagues and sync up on plans for the upcoming quarter. (I’m writing this from our Sunnyvale office, by the way.) But even when I’m there, I’m still doing what I’d do at home: headphones on, plugged in, working away at whatever needs doing. I just happen to be surrounded by people doing the same thing.
So, if there’s one piece of advice I have for anyone considering going remote, it’s this: your ability to perform may be determined entirely by the work you’re doing. If it’s motivating work, work that you enjoy or care about, you’ll get it done, location be damned.