Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Tag: awakening

  • What’s Obvious to You?

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    When C.C. Chapman and I were writing our book Content Rules, I kept asking him, “Does this have any value?” “Isn’t this stuff that everyone already knows?” And ultimately, “Isn’t this obvious?”

    Well guess what? It wasn’t obvious. And thousands of book sales and tons of positive reviews later, I finally grok that.

    Derek Sivers, the founder of CD Baby, calls this “Obvious to You. Amazing to Others.” In a video he released the other day, based on an earlier blog post, he says, “Any creator of anything knows this feeling: You experience someone else’s innovative work. It’s beautiful, brilliant, breath-taking. You’re stunned…..

    “Afterwards, you think, ‘My ideas are so obvious. I’ll never be as inventive as that.’”

    But in his own work, Sivers discovered something surprisingly profound, he says, “Everybody’s ideas seem obvious to them.” Great musicians or artists struggle with this too. But the key is to rememeber one thing: What’s obvious to you is amazing to someone else.

    Why is it that we are terrible judges of our own creative value? It’s because we stand too close to our own selves. It’s impossible to maintain any perspective; our purview is inherently limited.

    I see this all the time when I talk to companies about the content they are producing as part of their business: They think that their blog post ideas are silly, or ridiculous, or so painfully obvious that it’s not worth talking about, because their customers already know whatever it is that they consider sharing. (Hint: No, they don’t.)

    That lack of perspective limits companies in other ways, too, when they rely on insider-y language, corporate-ese or “Frankenspeak” (as we call it in Content Rules) to get their messages across. They forget that the language they use inside their industries or companies isn’t the most effective language with which to communicate with customers. Again, they’re standing too close.

    So what about you: Are you holding back something that seems too obvious to share? How do you try to gain perspective on your own work?


    Hat tip to C.C. for the video.

    What’s Obvious to You? 1Ann Handley is the Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs and the co-author of Content Rules. People seem to like her writing. She’s a huge deal on Twitter, a point which might make her family proud, if only they knew what that meant.

  • With Great Challenge Comes Great Adaptability

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    With Great Challenge Comes Great Adaptability 2

    “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change. ”  – Stephen Hawking

    Most of my life I’ve faced one challenge or another.  Nothing special, plenty of people have faced darker roads. A host of them came from making bad choices in the midst of the challenges I faced which lead me not so elegantly to another bad situation. As a result of each challenges, I learned to adapt quickly and you can too.

    Whether you need to adapt because of the decisions you’ve made or because of the decisions someone else made or a situation that nature caused, the first lesson to learn is that change is inevitable.  There is no way to avoid change and the chaos that comes with it.  Don’t try sticking your head in the sand.  It doesn’t work.

    You want to quit your job and do something that makes you happy.  But you live in fear.  You’re tired of what you’ve been doing the past decade and want to try something new.  But you stall on taking the steps to make it happen.  A competitor came up with that innovative new idea faster than you.  But you dismiss the concerns of your smartest employees pointing out the signs until it’s too late.

    Instead of ignoring what’s happening or running around in a panic-induced purple haze with flying invisible pink monkeys, here are three ways you become more adaptable so such things don’t throw you entirely off your game.

    • Just make the f—king choice already.  There’s only so much you can debate before you can do before making a choice. Yes, give yourself time to enter the witness state, but then choose a path.
    • Don’t waste time asking “Why?”.  Does it really matter?  What happened, happened.  It’s what you do next that shapes the future.
    • Do not underestimate kind, loyal, and punch-you-in-the-face-with-the-truth friends to keep you straight. They’ll keep you from making foolhardy decisions out of snap judgement.

    Don’t make the excuse that you can’t handle what’s happening.  All of the life challenges you’ve experienced up until this moment have conditioned you to be able to handle whatever may come with more grace than you think is possible.

    Don’t make the mistake of fighting with reality.  The faster you accept whatever change has happened, the more quickly you can adapt.

    Lastly, adaptability also requires an understanding of parts at a granular level.  If you understand all the parts, you can rearrange them much faster and achieve a better outcome in the end.

    Even though developing adaptability takes much strength, courage and fearlessness, paradoxically, the more adaptable we are, the stronger, more courageous and fearless we will become.  And when we learn to adapt we gain the ability to face anything, a superhero’s strength that will allow us to fight off the real villains when they come calling.

     

    With Great Challenge Comes Great Adaptability 3Michelle (Chel) Wolverton is a productivity hacker, social marketing strategist, WordPress dev, and geeky accomplice to several individuals and businesses as the owner of Chel Consulting.  She deals with the yearly insanity of being lead organizer for Podcamp Boston, an unconference that strives to teach those new to podcasting and social media. She blogs over on chelpixie.com at random and often shares her snarkiness on Twitter as @chelpixie.

  • The power of realization or Superheros are where you find them

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    The power of realization or Superheros are where you find them 4

    When I saw human resources’ number come up on my phone display, I knew I’d gotten it, too. After the brief and awkward meeting and requisite paper signing, I headed back to my office, packed up my stuff and took one last look out the 38th floor window at a deserted Burnham Harbor. It was a good run, I thought. Great people. Visible position. Nice paycheck, good benefits. I’ll miss this view. Who will adopt my orchids? I’ll miss this office chair. Then – choking back tears – What now?

    I sought refuge at my then boyfriend’s rustic West Loop loft, assuaging my sorrows with old movies, bologna sandwiches (a symbol of my new pauperism) and a fair number of tears, while my beau, Tom, worked away in the other room.

    While Tom (not his real name), a musician, had been employed by others on and off over the years, he made his main living by hustling clients for a half dozen different concerns ranging from website development to graphic design to sound engineering, seasoned with a smattering of paying music gigs.

    Tom was not particularly organized or ambitious, but he usually managed to keep enough dough rolling in to keep the lights on and food in the refrigerator. Sometimes just barely. And sometimes the lights got turned off. Inconvenient and uncomfortable? Yes. But somehow, he lived.

    While ruminating on my situation during the movie marathon, I realized something. Not only did Tom always seem to always figure out a way make things work, by my definition at least, he also was free. As were many of my other creative, self-employed friends. They all were in control of their own destiny. Looking back, I’m pretty sure that’s not how they saw it, but at the time that’s what I perceived. And I realized I wanted that. I wanted to be free and in control. More than anything.

    I half-heartedly scanned ads looking to replace or maybe even upgrade my lost gig. A small severance provided some financial cushion, but my pride had hit the floor, hard. And the recent awareness of my deep desire to be free and in control made the idea of going back to work for someone else pretty repulsive. I was screwed.

    Classic movie number 37 playing in the background and my ego still smarting, I thought again about Tom and company. I was 100 times more organized and ambitious than almost all of them. Then this thought: “Hmmh. You know, if they can make it on their own, I bet I can, too.”

    Holy eureka-beam-of-light-streaming-through-the-clouds-angels-singing moment. I bet I can, too.

    I shifted my focus from looking for a job to spinning up skills I’d honed at the agency as a business offering. The result was my first business, Lenalinks, which provided tech writing and project management for some big corporate clients. It was lucrative work but unfortunately it also was (to me) excruciatingly boring, which is what led me back to the marketing industry. But that’s another story, titled something like, “Why an arguably sane person would close a perfectly profitable business, take a 60 percent pay cut and agree to go captive again to hone another craft.” But I digress.

    Actually, the thought – I can, too – was not as important as what came immediate after it, which was the realization. Dictionary definition: An act of becoming fully aware of something as a fact. Also known as an “Ah-ha!”

    Realizations differ from understanding. You can totally understand something intellectually, but still not really understand viscerally the truth of it – what “it” means. To me, “I can, too” meant that there was a completely new set of choices available to me. Bear in mind, nothing in my external world had changed. The realization caused my perception of what was available to me in the external world to change. Same world, yet different world. (Hello, M.C. Escher.)

    Often, one realization sets off a chain reaction that leads to a series of realizations. For instance, the realization that I wanted to be in charge of my own destiny freed my mind to reshuffle my worldview and deliver the realization that it was completely within my power to make it so.

    Realizations can seem to occur completely randomly, but there are ways to condition yourself to have them more reliably. Here are three:

    1. Make being present a priority. Awareness cannot exist in the past or future. Unless you become aware that you’re thinking about the past or future, in which case, you’re actually back in the present. (M.C. Escher reprise.) Some ways to practice being present and strengthen awareness are meditation, yoga and martial arts. The objective of all these disciplines is to get you back in your body, to bring you back to now because now is where all the power is.
    2. Be open to changing your mind. Because I was open to believing something new, or in this case, at least not opposed to the idea of having my own business, my subconscious was free to serve up the realizations I needed to move forward.
    3. Demand insight from discomfort. Being present can be uncomfortable, especially if you’re in a tight spot. It’s natural to want kill the pain. But if you always give into the impulse to drown your sorrows, you may be missing an opportunity to experience a big shift. If instead you can manage to stay present and stare down pain such as fear, embarrassment or grief, you usually will be rewarded with insight. In fact, you should demand that it be so. Said writer, lecturer and mythologist Joseph Campbell, “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”

    The point of this story is (actually, there are three): 1. Sometimes SuperHeros are unwitting, and thus, are where you find them. Don’t be snobbish about who delivers the catalyst message or models a new paradigm. 2. A single shift in your internal world can change your perception of the available choices even if nothing in your external world has changed. Be open to new thoughts. 3. Rather than waiting around for realizations, create the conditions that will allow your mind to more easily present you with them. A hidden pathway to your bold new future may be revealed.

    The power of realization or Superheros are where you find them 5Helena Bouchez is a writer, artist, connector and alchemist who makes a living as a purveyor of public relations and communications for marketing and marketing technology firms. To connect with Helena, follow her on Twitter @helenabouchez or email her at helena at helenabouchez dot com.


     

  • Making the Jump

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    Making the Jump 6I’ll admit to some bias where Chris Penn is concerned. He and I share a similar purpose in life, I think, even though we approach it from two totally different directions.

    I’ve always believed in the superhero idea, and this idea of Chris’s rings particularly true: we have superhero powers, but we don’t necessary have superhero awareness.

    Which brings me to ask this question: What makes a superhero?

    And my answer: The belief you already are one.

    We so often keep our eyes focused on what’s next, on where we want to be. On who we wish we were, or on what we wish we were doing. But the path between here and there has to built, and it has to built on something.

    That something is you.

    My friend Matt Ridings talks about change in terms of building a bridge. Between where you are and where you’re going is the path, the bridge, to get from here to there. But what a lot of us forget is that to build a bridge, you need solid ground on both sides: not only do we need to have at least a directional idea of where we want to go (the other side) and a clear idea of how to get there (the bridge itself), we also need solid ground to build on — right now.

    We forget the importance of finding our current bedrock. Of knowing — and valuing — the person that we are, right now. It’s that appeciation, that valuation, that gives us the confidence, and the courage, to step out over the chasm and onto the bridge we’ve built.

    To me, that’s what awakening your superhero is all about: it’s about understanding where your bedrock is, and what it’s made of. It’s about finding your footing where you are, so that you have a steady base from which to step.

    Without that firm footing we’re literally leaping out at the unknown, with no purpose, and no purchase to our grip.

    It’s counterintuitive, I know: since we want to change, doesn’t that mean, by definition, we dislike where we are now? Or, at least, doesn’t that mean there’s something about us, right now, that warrants change? After all, if we were happy where we are, change wouldn’t be necessary, right?

    But change, real change (as any superhero-awakening is) requires enormous strength. And ignoring — or worse, degrading or denying — some part of yourself you consider unworthy, weakens your position right off the bat.

    It’s like starting with half a you — because that is, in essence, what you’re doing. You’re trying to make a whole change with only part of you.

    And that never works.

    No, the answer lies in taking yourself, warts and all. Of being honest with yourself, about yourself. In finding how to turn your weaknesses into strengths (or at least in figuring out how the strengths you already have are well-suited to mitigating your faults), and in starting in a position of comfort — of confidence.

    So how do you do that?

    Find something you’re proud of. No, really. There’s something about you that you like. Or at least, don’t actively dislike. What is that? How can you build on it?

    Find the Force to your Dark Side. Also really. For those of us used to beating ourselves up, sometimes it’s easier to start from the negative. I’m not suggesting you stay there, but for each of us, we often have the antidote to our particular brand of poison within ourselves. So figure out what you don’t like, and then look for the thing you already have that balances it out. It’s there. Trust me.

    Find a cheerleader. Our internal tape loops get worn out after a while, and we need to hear an outside voice. Find someone who believes in you. Unflinchingly. But someone who can give you straight-up honest feedback — in a way that you’ll actually hear it.They’re the ones who can help set your course, but remind you, too, of how fun where you are right now can be.

    Find your purpose. Yes, this one dives a little deeper, but: What are you here for? What ties all that you do together? What do you really care about? We all do better when we have something to work towards. What is that for you?

    Find your beliefs and values. There’s where you want to go… and then there’s how you want to get there. So know, going in, what you hold dear. What’s most important to you? What assumptions guide your thoughts? What price are you willing to pay? And, perhaps most important what price is too high?

    You can only make a leap by pushing off the ground you’re standing on, so you better know what that is.

    It’s time to fly, superheroes.

    So go on. Grab your cape (or not). And go.

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    Making the Jump 7Tamsen Webster specializes in how to tell the right story to the right people at the right time. As the Senior Vice President for Executive Communications at Oratium, a messaging consultancy, Tamsen is responsible for helping brands and individuals tell their stories day-to-day to drive business results. Reach her at [email protected], and follow her on Twitter (@tamadear).

  • We All Have It In Us

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    It is your fault. That is the simple and blunt answer that far to many of you will never embrace as the truth.

    We want more. We crave better. We Lust after what we don’t have but someone near does. We are full of excuses and yet we fail to discover the answer.

    I’ve known my whole life that I am cut from a different cloth. I seek out the road less traveled and rise every morning eager to attack the day head on.

    I know this because a long time ago I realized that everything I ever wanted was out there for the taking. There are always obstacles, distractions and curves you never see coming. That is the comedy of life.

    But, EACH of us has it within ourselves to have all we crave. The trick is turning off the little voice of doubt, the lizard brain that says we can not do it.

    Sit down today and pick one goal. A tangible end that can only be reached or not without any gray maybe in it’s success.

    Now determine what you will do today towards that goal. What will you spend the next week doing to get closer? Finally, in the next month will you reach it or have established new items to get you closer.

    Write these down and find people that will nag, poke and push you to insure you are working towards them. Every time that voice of doubt creeps up in you reach out to one of them to squash it. Can’t reach them? Find a mirror and tell yourself.

    We DO in fact have it inside each of us. Even the greatest of people doubt themselves. The best of us train, learn and master how to push beyond, bend the rules in our favor and achieve our dreams.

    I am sick of all the doubt in the world because I know you have it in you. I know you can do whatever you desire with enough drive and hard work. Life will NEVER be easy, so stop your complaining, find your cape and soar to whatever sunset you crave.

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    We All Have It In Us 8

    C.C. Chapman is an entrepreneur, speaker and author. His first book Content Rules was released last year and he is the Founder of DigitalDads.com, where a Dad can be a Guy. He writes, speaks and consults with companies of all sizes to empower them to do better with their marketing dollars.

     

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