TheWayoftheWeb

Content and Digital Marketing Specialists

motivation

#marketingmusicmondays

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With the constant demands of content creation and digital marketing, plus an ever-increasing list of clients and commitments, I’m constantly looking at ways to be more efficient and effective in what I’m doing. But sometimes it can be a bit of a struggle as as someone still building up to an established business, and Monday’s are the trickiest day of the week as I try and get back up to speed after two days of spending more time with my family and less online.

So to keep things going on a Monday, I’m toying with regular #marketingmusicmondays – music is pretty important to me, and there’s even a song which already encapsulates my brand marketing for everything I do.

Oh, and I picked the title for the sake of alliteration, but hopefully they might get you kickstarted on a Monday if you’re a writer, blogger, small business owner etc as well…

So what’s the first song?

It’s Pearl Jam with a song which sums up in it’s title what we should really be trying to build with any business or marketing – even if we can never probably truly achieve it. But we don’t have to actually reach a ‘State of Love and Trust’ – we just have to be on the journey to ensure that our business or marketing plan is heading in the right direction and probably achieving a lot of our goals for building communities and engagement on the way!

If you’re in the UK, did you vote today?

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Voting is a pretty personal thing, and I’m not as intrigued by how you may have voted on electoral reform as I am in whether you actually went and voted?

Quite a lot of people have already written about the two campaigns, and whether or not they’ve been effective – in my opinion, they’ve both been pretty rubbish at getting the points and information across in a clear way that I can not only understand, but actually share with other people.

Project 365 Day 125: Polling Station
Image courtesy anemoneprojectors on Flickr (CC Licence)

I’m a big believer in voting, not least for the belief that if I don’t try and make my vote/voice heard, then I don’t have the right to complain about whichever party make it into power, for example. And yet after all the money spent on campaigns, and all the debating, I found it incredibly hard to head out to the polling station. I’d been in some great meetings in London all day, finally got in around 7pm, and really just wanted to collapse on the sofa with some snacks…

It wasn’t the campaigns which got me out and voting, and my desire to make my voice heard was somewhat subdued and drowned out by my desire to watch TV for a bit.

What got me out of the house was the quick and simple question ‘Are you voting’ sent by a friend.

So did you vote? And what motivated you to head to a polling station?

The best productivity tip you’ll ever get…

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One of the best things about running my own small businesses rather than working in a large company has been the fact that I’ve been facing up to challenges and weaknesses rather than being able to find someone to delegate them to. I’m lucky enough to be able to get very good advice from a number of successful people, and there are times when paying for external assistance makes sense – for instance, when it comes to legal issues or accounting. But it’s still down to me to get that assistance sorted and make the decisions, and it’s down to me to understand enough about each subject to judge whether I’ve gone with the right people.

And that means overcoming the force of resistance.

It’s something that I talked a little about in the context of reviewing ‘Do The Work‘, but there’s also a very simple phsychological trick which is invaluable, and which I picked up from the very useful 59 Seconds by Professor Richard Wiseman. It’s a really good book that distills down a lot of the self-help advice you see being sold into very quick and simple advice based on scientific research, and aims to help you change in a matter of minutes, not months.

One of the tips on motivation and productivity references the ‘Zeigarnik Effect‘, which you’ve probably experienced, even if you didn’t realise it. Named after Bluma Zeigarnik, who first noticed the effect of unfinished activity on waiters in the 1920s, the lesson is simple. If you start something for a few minutes, it will stick in your mind, and your anxious mind will keep referencing it until it’s finished. And that is likely to be enough for even chronic procrastinators to finish the most arduous of tasks without any other tricks or tools.

It’s why ToDo lists help, or why focusing for 20 minutes with the Pomodoro Technique can work so well – because you’re forced to sit down and start the thing you’ve been putting off because it’s big and scary.

But just by getting started, you’ll be much closer to finishing it, and moving onto the next thing!

And it’s certainly working for me – whether it’s writing down the initial outline or draft of a marketing strategy, tackling the admin side of business, or even getting blog posts published!

‘Do The Work’ by Steve Pressfield

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I previously received and reviewed Seth Godin’s Poke The Box, and now the nice people at the Domino Project have sent me their second book, ‘Do The Work’ by Steven Pressfield. It’s particularly interesting as I wasn’t really familiar with Pressfield, having never got around to reading ‘The War of Art‘ or his fiction novels, so I was able to experience the print format in a fresh way.

One of my criticisms of Poke The Box was that I was already a fan of Seth Godin, so the shorter, more concise manifesto approach felt like more of a retread than a new fresh idea, and the brevity meant that it felt like some of the meat of the issue was missing. Having enjoyed Do The Work, that’s perhaps more of a problem when you’re already familiar with an author and their ideas, as although it follows a very simple level of commentary, it felt more inspiring and useful. Mixing two font sizes within each 1-2 paragraph section also encouraged me to approach it as a book to dip into every so often as a motivating voice, rather than looking at it as something lengthy which needed to be consumed from beginning to end.

‘Resistance aims to kill’

The basic concept of the book is to follow the battle that takes place against the force of resistance on a specific project. Whether that’s producing something artistic or entrepreneurial, Pressfield paints the picture of you as a knight facing down the dragon of resistance, and isn’t afraid you keep beating you around the head with the various ways resistance appears, and how it can be overcome.

It opens with the various ways resistance can appear, and then pushes you on through starting a project, the middle, and completion. I won’t go into details, as that would probably remove much of the reason for buying it – like Poke The Box, it’s more motivational than necessarily educational, although you can certainly pick up quite a few tips and techniques to actually get stuff done along the way (I will say putting a limit on how much research you do before starting an idea is a good one).

It’s very much about Getting Things Done, and as I flick through it again, I’m not sure whether it’s encouraging or shouting at me like a drill sergeant. Either way, it does feel like Pressfield is contained in the pages, to berate me for not getting on with a project, or to suggest a quick way to possibly overcome some resistance.

Considering it costs less than £6 at the moment in hardback, it’s well worth picking up, even if at first glance you might wonder about spending cash on something only running to 98 pages. But it’s not a book to be judged by length or weight – it’s a book to be judged by whether it results in getting you, or someone you know, into gear and completing a good project. And for that it’s worth the price – and I reckon everyone knows at least one other person who could benefit from the same voice pushing them to get something started, push through the resistance, and get it completed!

2 dominos down…

It’s interesting to see what happens with the Domino Project. I don’t think any figures have been released to indicate what sort of numbers it’s managing to reach, and even if it’s inspiring a handfull of people, then it’s achieving something of value for others, even if Seth and Amazon aren’t making a lot of money out of it!

It would definitely be interesting to see more books become available from a wider range of industries and subjects to hopefully read people who aren’t already established creative or marketing experts, and see what they would want to push as their manifesto, much as the TEDBooks launched as Kindle singles.

It’ll be interesting to see what comes of both publishing projects, and it’d be interesting to know how many people got on with a project after reading ‘Do The Work’. It’s certainly reminded me of 2 or 3 things I want to investigate their year…

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