posted by Ian Summers on September 19th, 2012
In today’s edition Godin recommends a One-A-Day outreach and task oriented marketing program. Reminds me of my childhood with One-A-Day Vitamins. Being in business is often overwhelming. Making lists often takes a day in itself. The list often goes to the back of the drawer. Or just as damaging you put in a place where you look at it everyday. Then you edit the list and reframe some tasks. The list never seems to go away. There is always more.
In Seth Godin’s Words:
There are at least 200 working days a year. If you commit to doing a simple marketing item just once each day, at the end of the year you’ve built a mountain. Here are some things you might try (don’t do them all, just one of these once a day would change things for you):
Send a handwritten and personal thank you note to a customer
Write a blog post about how someone is using your product or service
Research and post a short article about how something in your industry works
Introduce one colleague to another in a significant way that benefits both of them
Read the first three chapters of a business or other how-to book
Record a video that teaches your customers how to do something
Teach at least one of your employees a new skill
Go for a ten minute walk and come back with at least five written ideas on how to improve what you offer the world
Change something on your website and record how it changes interactions
Help a non-profit in a signficant way (make a fundraising call, do outreach)
Write or substiantially edit a Wikipedia article
Find out something you didn’t know about one of your employees or customers or co-workers
Enough molehills is all you need to have a mountain.
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posted by Ian Summers on August 22nd, 2012
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posted by Ian Summers on August 10th, 2012
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.Chaos - Mixed Media on Canvas – 72″ X 72″ -© Ian Summers 2011
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I have spent a lot of time defining the creative process. I thought, if there was something in common with the ways we create and there was indeed some kind of process, then it would make sense to know where we are in the flow when performing an act of creation whether it is a photograph, a painting, a poem, a novel, a piece of music, new technology, a piece of fine art or even an advertisement. Perhaps, if we knew where we were in the process, we could become ‘more’ creative. To a large extent this has been proven to be true in the process of problem solving – certainly in the corporate world. Much has been written about how important it is to introduce creativity to seemingly non-creative people where creative problems come from the outside/in.
However, when we create from the inside/out the approach changes dramatically and the energy emerges in a different place. Heartstorming methodologies use this definition: Creating is causing what you love or what matters to you to come into being. While this is a truth, and I have built a career as a coach behind this theory, I recently had a recollection while in the middle of making a painting. I looked at my painting table which seemed to be cluttered with sketches, newspaper clippings, books, tools, tubs of water, brushes, spills, rags, newspapers, and what not. It appeared chaotic.
