Wisdom from One of My Mentors
Alright, it’s day TWO of my weekend Mastermind and Info Workshop down here in California… Last couple of nights have been late, catching up with all the attendees at the bar, and so I didn’t have time to write you a full recap yet.
However… I know how important it is to be consistent. That’s what your readers want from you. So make sure you show up at the same time on the same day of the week. That proves to them that they can trust you, and that’s part of the KLT factor for your sales success.
One guy I can always count on is my virtual mentor, Seth Godin. He’s in my email 7 days a week. Every morning Seth’s wisdom shows up around 6:30am. I’ve always wondered when he writes these…
These two emails, back to back over a late October weekend, are worth reading. Enjoy. – Craig
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On Selling Like Steve Jobs
Have you thought about the fact that just about every time Steve Jobs appeared in public, he was selling us something?
And yet few rolled their eyes and said, “oh, here comes another sales pitch.”
Jobs sold us expensive, high margin hardware that we knew would eventually become obsolete, and yet people lined up to hear the pitch. How come?
I think it’s because he was saying:
“Here, I made this. It might be worth talking about.”
Inherent in this statement is the flip side, “it might not work.”
And in almost every case, he was right. That it might be worth talking about, and that it might not work.
In almost every case, skeptics pounced. People discussed his work.
Sometimes he was early, but he was usually interesting. That’s a slot that’s available to more people than ever before, regardless of industry or audience.
Average stuff for average people is getting ever more difficult to sell. If that’s all you’ve got, get something else.
And…
On Being Interesting
More interesting than you realize.
An interesting person is interesting to us because she combines two things: Truth and surprise.
The truth: Not necessarily a law of physics, not necessarily a measurable truth in nature, but merely the truth of experience. “I believe this,” or “I see that.”
And surprise. Note that surprise is always local. Surprising to me, the audience. That’s one reason that it’s said that interesting people are interested—they are empathetic enough to realize about what might be surprising to the person in the room, and they care enough to deliver on that insight.
Everyone is capable of telling the truth. And everyone has been surprising at least once.
Which means that being an interesting person is a choice. We can choose to show up, to care enough to contribute our humanity to the next interaction.
It’s a choice, but a difficult one, because being interesting feels risky. People are afraid to be interesting, not unable to be interesting.
You’re not born uninteresting. But it’s entirely possible you’ve persuaded yourself to be so frightened of the consequences that you no longer have the passion, the generosity or the guts to be interesting any longer.
Without a doubt, we need your interesting.
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Now go be interesting and sell something,
Craig Ballantyne
“If you work to minimize criticism, you have surrendered the beauty and greatness of what you’ve set out to build.” – Seth Godin