image by thedrun
People don’t want you to be nice.
People want you to pick the reins and lead. That’s what I’ve learned in the last couple of weeks. People sit around and twiddle their thumbs, and when someone comes along and tells them to do something, they hop to because now their life has purpose – even if its not their own purpose.
In the last week I have witnessed several incidents of men making decisions that were definitely not the right decisions, but people went along with them because they were made confidently, even forcefully. People follow those who lead with confidence.
My wife does this when we’re out with our friends. If we’re walking somewhere in a city, she walks with purpose and we all follow her. Half the time we find out later that she had no idea where we were going. She just wanted to get somewhere and we all assumed that we wanted to be the same place she was.
Here’s the thing about search marketing and social media: there is no right way to do it, so business owners waffle on which direction to lead. Then some “Social Media Expert” comes along and sells them a bill of goods and it takes them months to figure out that they’ve been duped.
The point? People want to be told what to do.
If I walk into an office and I see a CEO making bold decisions every time, and that boldness is accompanied by follow-through, I’ll pick him to win every time over the CEO who maybe knows more, makes thoughtful decisions, and has a better education. The CEO who makes bold decisions fails faster, and failing faster is important. If you’re bold, you’ll fail a bunch and find what works faster than everyone else.
I’d love it if you partnered with me. Tell me where you want your business to go. Tell me who your target market is and where to reach them. The problem is, you probably don’t know.
You need to know, though. So, here’s the deal. Hand me your cash. I’ll market your business for you.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I love this saying. Reminds me the that Micheal Jordon quote about him just taking more shots.
I HAVE seen that sign, and I think it’s pretty dumb.
America is a society that values action, this much is clear. What is confounding to me is that we’re so willing to accept massive levels of preventable failure in exchange for bold action. So much so that we often set up the false dichotomy implied in that image: its better to something today, no matter what it is, than to think about doing something tomorrow. The implication is, again, literally ANY action is better than delayed, considered action. The end result is an unbelievably low bar to get over.
Why not “Succeed Harder”?
Any way, I actually used that image in a recent lecture about the inherent dishonesty in agencies taking a clients money with the sole purpose of trying “something.” While risk and failure are part of the human experience, embracing massive failure as inevitable doesn’t help anything and has no correlation to massive success. In fact, history shows that in moments when failure is not an option, people rise to moment.
Oh, Justin. I’m starting to think that you have a personal grudge against agencies in general.
I saw Dan Weiden speak at CreateCon and I really enjoyed his comments. It takes risk to really succeed. If you don’t take the big shot, then you don’t get the big payoff. So much of life is that way.
Kobe Bryant won six games this year by taking the last shot. Would it have been better if the team had been further ahead, not necessitating the shot? Sure. But he took the shot, and people admire the fact that he didn’t freeze up.
It’s only a false dichotomy if you take it at face value. What does it mean to Fail Harder? Of course it’s good to think about what you’re doing – but sometimes just trying a few things works too – indeed, sometimes experimentation is necessary.
Well – I’ll be the first to say that I have a grudge against agencies, no secret there. So much so, I started my own.
As for experimentation, I’m all for it, its a core tenet of Fight and something we do actively with ourselves and our clients. But, I think this actually goes to my point, having spent most of 11 year career in agencies I can tell you – they don’t experiment. Experimentation implies that one is looking to discover some new insight and then use that to inform future decisions.
They get a budget, they come up with the biggest idea they can find and they hope for the best. When they win, they often win big. But most of the time they don’t succeed, and in fact, as a culture, have little grasp on how to actually measure success in the first place. The thing that drives me crazy though is that they take no responsibility for their success or failure when it comes to their clients and this is why I question the “fail harder” mantra. Whether it’s meant to or not, it has created a culture of recklessness, and in fact, has lionized it.
For the record, I agree, Dan is a great speaker, and very inspirational. “Fail Harder” is an inspirational mantra, and easy to get behind. The thing is, if we as an industry continue to treat our profession as a series of art projects, we’ll continue to face every shrinking budgets, and worse, ever shrinking relevance culturally.