“Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes.” — Maggie Kuhn
You know that thing you want?
How often do you say it out loud?
Saying something out loud — even if only to ourselves — makes it feel more real.
It shifts it from something that only exists in our brains alongside fantasies and dreams to a thing that exists in the “real” world.
It’s empowering.
Saying you want something out loud doesn’t mean you’ll get it of course, but I guarantee you won’t ever get it if you can’t even bring yourself to say it out loud first.
So speak up. You never know where it might lead.
Now, on to this week’s ideas…
1. HOW TO GET YOUR COMPANY AND CLIENTS ADDICTED TO YOUR WORK
“Job security is rooted in more than the quality of your work — it’s dependent on your ability to get people hooked on the work you do.”
No matter what kind of work you do, your success often depends on your ability to get people hooked on it.
In this post, I share six ways to make your work irreplaceable including to act like an employer instead of an employee, seek problems as much as you seek solutions, and develop unique assets.
2. LESSONS LEARNED FROM FACING 100 FEARS
“I was congratulating myself over and over again for having faced almost 40 different fears, when in reality I was facing the same fears over and over again. I wasn’t scared of needles, I was scared of pain. I wasn’t scared of doing karaoke, I was scared of being embarrassed.”
In this 15-minute TEDx video, Michelle Poler shares an amazing story about facing her fears…at scale.
She details what happened when she faced 100 days of her fears and how doing so changed how she deals with anxieties and accomplishes things.
3. SIX EASY WAYS TO SAVE MONEY
“Studies have found not only that people are more willing to pay when they use credit cards, but also that they make larger purchases, leave larger tips, are more likely to underestimate or forget how much they spent, and make spending decisions more quickly.”
Saving money doesn’t have to be as painful as we make it out to be — especially if you put your own psychology to work for you instead of against you.
Eric Barker shares six easy ways to save money, based on the Dan Ariely book Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter.
The tips include to use cash more often, ignore “on sale” signs, and don’t allow how you get money to impact how you spend it.
4. OUR RESPONSIBILITY AS AN AUDIENCE
“Every once in awhile, someone steps up and makes something better. Much better. When it happens, it’s up to us to stand up and notice it. Which means buying it and consuming it with the very same care that it was created with.”
In typical fashion, Seth Godin gives us a lot to think about in just a few words.
This recent post suggests the creation of worthwhile work is a duet and it will likely inspire you to better support the creators of the things you value.
It has echoes of my ideas about how if we don’t buy from the stores we want to exist, they no longer will.
5. WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GIVE UP SHOPPING FOR A YEAR
“Once I got the hang of giving shopping up, it wasn’t much of a trick. The trickier part was living with the startling abundance that had become glaringly obvious when I stopped trying to get more. Once I could see what I already had, and what actually mattered, I was left with a feeling that was somewhere between sickened and humbled.”
Could you give up shopping for a year? Not just buying, but browsing too?
Ann Patchett did and wrote about what it’s like to give up shopping for a yearin the New York Times.
She discovered it changed her outlook not only on what she buys, but also what she has and what she needs.
6. HOW TO QUIT BAD HABITS BY CREATING FRICTION
“The harder it is to perform a habit, the less you will want to do it. You want it to be as frictionful (yes, that’s a made up word) as possible.”
Since one of the keys to developing good habits is to make them as easy as possible to stick with, it makes sense that the opposite is true when you want to drop a bad habit.
Dan Silvestre (whose Productivity Hacks newsletter you should check out) explains how to use friction to help you quit bad habits.
He offers suggestions for how to improve your social media, eating, and shopping habits among others.
7. INNOVATION IS OVERRATED — EXECUTION IS WHAT MATTERS
“Pragmatic iteration is overlooked as the boring rehashing of old things, while exciting ‘moonshots’ and 10X leaps are fetishised. However, the opposite is often true: the most successful companies in the world focus on nailing iterative execution, not constant reinvention.”
It’s easy to get swept up in the hype about being innovative, but what’s too often overlooked is a more important factor in success — execution.
Jonathan Courtney makes the case that innovation is overrated and suggests most people and companies would be better served to “focus first on executing so-so ideas brilliantly.”
8. THREE METHODS TO GET YOUR WRITING PUBLISHED
“The big secret to climbing the blog world is to get in on the ground floor, trade up.”
Within a year of starting to blog Nicolas Cole had his work published on a number of major sites ranging from Time magazine to Business Insider.
In this post he shares the three methods he used to get his writing publishedincluding to post frequently on Quora, use social media to connect with people, and leverage small blog exposure to get big publication exposure.
9. CONTENT PROMOTION IS ABOUT MEETING YOUR READERS WHERE THEY LIVE
“Every content team vastly overestimates the percentage of their total readership that has read, applied, or even remembered any individual article.”
If you’ve got content you want more people to see, this article is can help.
Gregory Ciotti shares several approaches to content promotion and highlights several opportunities most content creators miss.
For my own take on content promotion, check out my Ultimate Guide To Growing Your Audience or how to get over your fear of self-promotion.
10. THE 2017 SMART BINGE GUIDE
“Tips on what to watch, what to stream, what to documentary, what to check out, etc.”
Dave Pell is the creator of the fantastic Next Draft newsletter and in it he occasionally shares recommendations of media worth consuming.
His 2017 Smart Binge Guide is a compilation of what he recommended last year including TV series, podcasts, books, music, and documentaries. It’s packed with stuff you’ll dig.