B00CHVIVMY EBOK (20 page)

12. Sacrifice is an accelerant. Create a list of things you are willing to sacrifice in the pursuit of awesome. Later, when you’re mad that you didn’t get to go somewhere or do something because you were focused on the long-term win, review this list and remember why.

13. Create a full box of ammo for why you won’t give up before you get to awesome. Some days, “working so my kids have a brighter future” will be enough. Other days, “friends who hold me accountable” will be enough. In the moments when it gets hard to keep going, you’ll be glad you have 101 reasons to not quit.

14. Identify a little bit of Central Park in your life (page 157).

15. Write down three of your expectations for the road ahead. For example, “I expect to have a new job in the next six months at a company in Austin, Texas.” Detail them as specifically as possible to make sure you’re not harboring any “secret” expectations (pages 158–61).

The Land of Harvesting

1. No one gives up when they can see the finish line. If your harvest feels far away, create a series of small finish lines so that each day or week can have a bit of harvest hidden in it. Example: Writing a book takes forever, so I made chapter finish lines and sometimes even daily word count finish lines to keep me going.

2. Ask your mirror friend or fellow travelers if they feel like you’ve taken any exits or climbed any entitlement ladders along the road to awesome (pages 170–73).

3. Don’t be a jerk. Repeat as necessary.

4. That last one was easy, right? Probably took you ten seconds. To take it even further, ask someone who loves you enough to tell you something you may not like to hear, “Am I being a jerk these days?”

5. Make a list of the “action payments” you’re paying toward your dream. If the list is small, don’t complain when the harvest is too. If that’s not okay with you, make more payments (pages 174–75).

6. Build a brag table (pages 184–85).

7. If the harvest doesn’t feel as big as you wish it were, give yourself the “10,000 hours test,” using Ericsson’s principle of how long expertise takes. Add up all the hours you’ve worked on your dream. If it’s less than 10,000, don’t worry about the size of your harvest. You’ve got some more mastering to do. If it’s greater than 10,000 and the harvest is still small, be patient. Weeds grow quickly; the best crops take longer.

8. Make a list of the things that got you to Harvesting that you no longer need to do and those that you must continue. Example: To grow my blog community, I initially used to comment on dozens of blogs. As it grew and I had my own traffic, I had to stop commenting on other blogs so much and instead focus on writing my blog more.

9. Check to make sure “self-sabotage” has not reared its ugly head. Are there any situations right now where you’re drilling holes in your own ship? If the answer is yes, call it what it is—“fear of success”—and punch it in the face.

10. Review your diamond and rock list to make sure any unwanted changes have not happened to your priorities along the way.

The Land of Guiding

1. Make sure the stuff you acquired in the land of Harvesting (money, accolades, fame, success, etc.) are merely consequences of being awesome, not your reason to be. Great things mutate into great exits if we’re not careful.

2. When is the last time you failed? Have you been carrying it around too long? Or are you coasting based on a
success
you experienced? If so, avoid both exits back to average by launching another small experiment for your dream (pages 209–10).

3. Using the “student of you” technique, write down three of the best ways you could guide someone else. Example: I’m great at one-on-one interactions; I’m best at speaking to groups of ten or less, etc.

4. Write a list of three people you could guide in your life right now.

5. List three successes you could share with someone.

6. List three failures you could share with someone.

7. Pick one day a week that you will set aside time to deliberately guide someone else. Example: Every Friday morning you go out to breakfast with someone who needs some advice or encouragement. It won’t happen unless you’re intentional.

8. Create a list of people you’re okay with disappointing as you spend time being deliberate with how you guide (pages 212–14).

9. Identify a new part of your life to take back down the road to awesome. Review the “later list” from the land of Editing, if you created one.

10. Review the journal you’ve been keeping. Or blog or whatever form of record worked best for how you tracked progress. If you’re going to march down the road again, it helps to know where the dragons and potholes are so you can avoid them on the second trip.

11. Start again.

Appendix A: 10 Ways to Accelerate Awesome With Social Media
 

Appendix A

10 Ways to Accelerate Awesome With Social Media

I wish I could put a sign in my yard
that says, “I know about Google.” That way, whoever keeps delivering forty-two-pound yellow pages to my house could skip our driveway. Every time we get one it goes right to the recycling bin because by the time it’s printed, it’s out of date. Books about social media usually suffer from the same problem. The whole industry is moving so quickly right now that by the time the ink dries on your sentence telling people to “build a presence on MySpace,” Facebook has murdered it. (One notable exception to this problem is Michael Hyatt’s book
Platform
.)

So rather than tips about specific technologies that will be out-of-date tomorrow, here are the ten principles I used to build my tribe and accelerate my awesome. These are the principles that dominated the first decade of social media and will continue to play a critical role in the next 100 years.

1. Understand why you’re using social media in the first place.

In the great book
Start with Why
, Simon Sinek encourages readers to ask why before they start any new endeavor. That logic certainly holds true with social media. Most businesses and individuals jump online, sign up for thirty-two different platforms, and never stop to ask that question. “Why am I using social media?” Is it a fun way to keep up with relatives? Are you trying to connect with potential customers? Are you trying to service existing customers? Are you trying to build a platform that will make your next job interview even easier? The answers to that question are endless, but the one that matters most for you is yours. What’s your goal with social media? Mine is to help jumpstart people who feel stuck. “Jumpstart” means I’m great at the initial creative moment that helps someone get unstuck but not great at the twenty-year follow-up plan. So I tend to stick to online tools that offer short bursts of information. Like Twitter. On the flip side, I failed at a blog concept I came up with called “#FinishYear” because writing about the same exact subject for an entire year isn’t what I’m great at. Get your social media goal roughly shaped, and then you can really start to apply the rest of the principles.

2. Pick your places.

The most overwhelming part of social media is that by the time you finish reading this sentence some new technology will be popular. You’ll put this book down, and your hipster friend will say, “You’re not on double upside-down orange 2.9? You still use Facebook? Ugh, no one uses that.” We all have “profile exhaustion,” the sense of tiredness we feel when someone sends us an invitation to yet another social media platform we should have a presence on. Let’s put that concern to bed right now—you don’t have to be everywhere at once online. You just have to pick your places. Depending on your goals, pick one to three places you want to be involved. If you’re a business, go where your customers already are. If you’re an individual, go where your passion is. Don’t buy the “all or nothing” myth of social media. Pick your places carefully. (My places are Twitter, my blog jonacuff.com, and Pinterest. I do next to nothing right now on Facebook.)

3. Play to your strengths.

Make social media play to your strengths, not the other way around. For instance, I am a horrible photographer. I will never make it onto the popular page of Instagram with the quality of my photography. I’m a writer. That’s my strength. So rather than waste time trying to become an amazing photographer, I do something completely different. I write simple, spreadable thoughts on Post-it notes. Then I take a photo of that note and post it on Instagram. Those photos get more “likes” than any other photos I do. Why? Because I’m a writer who found a way to “write” on a photo-based platform. Don’t think you have to develop some completely different talent to dominate social media. Make the platform obey the strength you already have.

4. Focus on your content strategy before your promotion strategy.

Imagine you owned a store. You were having a grand opening. You spent hours and hours promoting your big day. You spent thousands of dollars inviting people to the ribbon cutting, doing everything you could to drive traffic to your location. The day arrived, the parking lot was slammed full of people, it was a wild success . . . and then you opened the doors. And all the shelves were empty. In the excitement of promoting your store, you forgot to stock it. You’ve got an immaculate layout. The design is unbelievable . . . but it doesn’t matter. People were expecting products. And as soon as they took a look behind the curtain, so to speak, and realized the store was empty, they left and never came back.

That’s what content is in the world of social media. Content = products.

Even if you never want to sell a single thing via social media, if you want to build a community, you have to have a foundation to build it on. And that foundation is the content.

If you start with the promotion, the building will be well known and well ignored. If you start with the design, the building will be beautiful and empty. If you start with the community, the building will be temporarily crowded but eventually abandoned.

Content is king. Content is currency.

Content is critical. In the old-school, “Who? What? When? Where? Why?” model of journalism, content is the “What?” What blogs will you write? What videos will you share? What will you create?

5. Be honest.

One of the challenges with social media is that it’s hard to stand out. I Googled the phrase “mom blog,” and there were 341 million results. Every month, millions of people join Facebook and Twitter. YouTube has 92 billion page views per month. How do you possibly stand out in the middle of that clutter?

The answer most commonly given is “talent.”

You have to have the most talent or the best talent or the greatest talent. And thirty years ago, maybe that was true. But in the last twenty years, honesty has become as important as talent. Why?

Well, thanks to the Internet and globalization, we now have more access to more talent than we’ve ever had in the history of mankind. Think about it. Do you know where that band you found online was playing their music twenty years ago? In their garage—you didn’t know they existed. Twenty years ago, that director who makes funny clips for Youtube or Funny or Die, you know where he was showing his movies? In his living room. You didn’t have access to his work. Do you know where your favorite blog writer was writing her thoughts twenty years ago? In her diary. On her nightstand. She was still writing amazing stuff, but you couldn’t read it.

In the last twenty years, we’ve all gained more access to more talent than we can possibly fathom. (Granted, there’s a lot of nonsense too.) But what’s happened is that the talent pool is really full right now. It’s crowded. There’s not a whole lot of room to splash around in that one. The honesty pool?

That’s a completely different story. You can do the backstroke in that one. You’ve got all the room in the world. No one would say that in the last twenty years we’ve become more honest as a culture. (Shows like TMZ have exposed more dirty laundry, but being caught is not the same thing as being honest.)

So if you want to stand out online, if you really want to make a splash with social media, be honest.

This isn’t new information. The best marketers in the world already know this and are racing to honesty as fast as they can. Take Nike, for instance.

In the ’90s, companies like Nike and Gatorade used to tell you to “be like Mike.” The advertising was over-the-top, practically promising that if you bought the Air Jordan, you’d probably be able to dunk the next day. And we believed it. We believed it to such a strong degree that kids started shooting each other for the sneakers.

Do you know what the headline for a recent Nike campaign was? “This shoe works if you do.”

Wait, what? Where’s the bravado? Where’s the promise? Where’s the hype? That’s a 180-degree change from the ads they used to run. But they know that this generation has the sharpest marketing radar ever. They want honesty. That’s what’s going to stand out, and Nike knows that.

Be honest online. That was the biggest reason my first blog grew. I talked honestly about some of the ridiculous things we did in the name of faith, and people hadn’t seen much of that online before.

Social media is either a megaphone or a mask. It will amplify what you’re all about or hide what you’re all about. Be honest and amplify.

6. Don’t think of social media as a silver bullet.

When the readers of my blog built those two kindergartens in Vietnam, the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
wrote an article about the first kindergarten. The headline was “Blogger raises $30,000 in 18 hours.” Technically, that headline was true, but it should have read, “Blogger raises $30,000 in 18 months.”

That’s how long it really took to raise the money. For eighteen months, I consistently wrote Stuff Christians Like. I poured a million words of the best ideas I could think of into the conversation with readers. Day after day, post after post, with consistency, I jumped into the discussion happening on Stuff Christians Like.

I didn’t show up one day out of the blue and say, “Hi, my name is Jon. You’ve never heard of me. Give me money for a kindergarten,” but sometimes we think that’s how social media works. We watch certain ideas go viral and think our business, cause, or blog should go viral too. We want social media to be a silver bullet. Here’s the truth:

Social media isn’t a silver bullet. It’s a million free bullets.

If you try something for a month and give up, you won’t change the world. If you write a blog for ninety days and quit, you won’t change the world. If you fool around with Twitter for a week and then stop, you won’t change the world.

It takes time. It takes grind. And it takes a commitment to consistency.

7. Don’t reinvent the wheel.

When we discussed our plans to build a microsite for this book, do you know what the first question we asked was? “How did Michael Hyatt design his microsite?” Why did we ask that? Because he’s a genius, and you should never reinvent the wheel in social media. We knew that he and other authors had very deliberately crafted their microsites. We could study theirs, add our own unique aspects, and skip weeks of needless guessing. If you’ve got the answer to the first question—why you’re using social media—and you understand what your content is, start researching. Find other social media giants in your sphere who are already doing brilliant work, and then build on it.

8. Once you know what you’re all about, make sure others do too.

A few months ago I had dinner with a friend of mine. He’s a social media consultant. He gets paid thousands and thousands of dollars to help companies with their social media strategies. During the middle of the meal, he leaned forward and confessed something quietly, “I know I’m supposed to be using Google Plus, but I just don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing.”

And as silly as that may sound, I feel the same way.

I’m pretty sure it’s awesome. I mean, it’s Google, after all! Who doesn’t love Google? But whenever I check in or log in or whatever verb you use when interacting with Plus, I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do.

I’m positive there must be some stream of conversation going on somewhere within the platform. There must be some reason it’s awesome, but I can’t find it. So, after a few minutes of poking around, I return to the platforms I do know how to use, Twitter and Pinterest.

And it turns out, so do a lot of other people.
The Wall Street Journal
reported, “visitors using personal computers spent an average of about three minutes a month on Google Plus between September and January, versus six to seven hours on Facebook each month over the same period, according to comScore, which didn’t have data on mobile usage.”
1

Will Google Plus bounce back? Maybe. That team is brilliant, but if they bounce back by the time this book comes out, it will be because they fixed one thing: clarity.

Clarity is the way you carve out some space in the cluttered social media world. It’s how you tell readers and followers and fans and customers, “This is what I’m all about.” It’s your idea stripped down to its bare essentials, so that the most distracted generation in the history of mankind can instantly understand where you fit in the social media landscape.

This one takes time. No blog ends up a year later being exactly the way you planned it. No social media campaign does exactly what you expected it would. The only way you develop your voice is by using your voice. And often you have to use that voice for six months to a year until you’ve got clarity.

What does this look like for an individual like you?

Allow me to share the first thirty words you see at the top of the blog Pocket-Sized Stories: “When you teach kindergarten, the things that you bring home in your pockets every day tell that day’s story. Every day, I’ll empty my pockets and tell my story.”
2

That is perfect. Who is writing this blog? A kindergarten teacher.

What is it about? The things he has in his pockets at the end of the day.

Why is that interesting? Because those things tell a story.

In less than thirty words, the author of the blog gives an incredibly compelling reason to read his blog.

Is that important today?

Yes. And it will be even more important tomorrow because, every day, 100,000 new blogs are started. Clarity is a great way to differentiate yourself from the masses. Although it’s harder to explain your blog when it has multiple topics (leadership, parenting, writing, etc.), it still needs to be done.

Can you summarize your approach to social media in thirty words or less?

9. Recognize the ridiculous power of context.

Context changes everything, and I learned that in a maternity ward in Boston almost nine years ago.