You break the mental patterns that are detrimental & you leverage existing patterns that might be beneficial to your marketing objective.
And how do you do that?
Patterns are formed through their habits.
Understand their habits.
Habits come from who they believe they are. Their identity.
Understand their identity.
Now reverse engineer. Understand who they believe they are. If the idea about who they believe they are is conflicting with what you are offering, no amount of selling will help.
That’s why brands like Apple & Nike pour millions of dollars to shape what their customers should feel like when they buy their product. Or rather what kind of customers should buy their product.
This is easy to do for passionate creators & entrepreneurs who obsessively care about their customers.
How to break patterns or leverage them?
Ask yourself,
1. Who do they believe they are? What is their internal self talk? (1. I’m only a manager hired to do what I’m asked. Or 2. I’m building up reputation for myself in this industry.)
2. What are tendencies of such people? (1. Complacent, satisfied with the way things are. Or 2. Ambitious, growth mindset)
3. What are their habits? (1. Does what is asked from him. Focuses on efforts rather than results. Or 2. Thinks, how can I do my job better? What other skills should I develop? Focuses on results rather than efforts.)
4. What are the patterns/outcomes they create as a result of those habits? (1. Keeps job hopping. Or 2. Keeps getting new opportunities. Networks with people. Creates content.)
Then talk about your offer from their perspective.
Those who create, multiply & generate wealth. Those who consume, help creators get rich.
The good thing is, you have a complete control over which side you want to be on.
If you are scrolling through your feed, STOP right now. Create something.
Write a LinkedIn post. Click a picture, post it on Instagram & write a caption. Or write a blog. Let it be only 140 characters or a 1000 words. Shoot a selfie video. Don’t do it for the likes or views.
Do it for your own sake. For the clarity. For the satisfaction of creating something.
The reward of creating will eventually come to you in form of hard cash. I promise that to you. But the journey of reaching there will be even more rewarding.
The best time to begin was yesterday, the second best time is right now.
When I ask people for feedback, they weirdly go in a ‘problem finding’ mode. I generally have zero respect for people’s opinions. The purest form of feedback for me is people’s reaction to my work. Not their opinion. They can love it, hate it or be bored by it. That’s good feedback.
When you ask for feedback, people feel obliged to give you one. Even if they have no idea what they are talking about.
Creators generally ask for feedback so they can improve their work, but quite often it either ends up confusing or discouraging the creator. Creativity is a vulnerable place to be.
Here is a better way to ask. What I rather started doing is ask for ideas & suggestions. Worked like magic.
It forced people to think deeper and not just blabber opinions reactively. Plus you will start understanding who has some good quality suggestions and who doesn’t. Good way to filter out people whose opinions don’t matter.
Just wanted to share since I get asked a lot by creator friends to give feedback about their work. There’s always a better way.
When I was in my 10th, I spent all my pocket money on internet cafes. And my weekly pocket money would not be more than 15–20 rupees. That means not more than 1 hour of internet access every week.
I wanted to learn animation and a lot of other stuff. That left me with only 4 hours in a month to learn something I was passionate about. We got a new computer at home but no internet connection. And that was a good thing.
Every week I went to the internet cafe for one hour with notes of questions I had in mind and I asked Google. I learned the basics of animation that way within 10 hours spread across 2 months of internet cafe visits.
This trained my brain to learn at rapid speeds. Because the constraint of time for me was very real.
When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.
Though I haven’t read the book yet, this phrase stuck in my head. We have unlimited access to information all the time, everywhere. No constraints.
My mentor once told me,
“If you don’t work with constraints, you can’t be an entrepreneur? That’s what entrepreneurship is all about. All buggers with a lot of money would have built startups. They can’t.”
And that’s the point.
For me, the day access to information became cheap and easy I got lost in it and my ability to be intuitive was clouded, until recently, when my illusion was shattered by the reality. My creativity went down, I couldn’t make quick decisions and my faith in myself started to get weak, which is rare for me. This pushed me to introspect deeply. And all that I needed to do is bring back my constraints and focus on things that matter.
Being a filmmaker in the early part of my career, I reflected on the meaning of being creative in practice and one thing that has always worked for me is creating & imposing constraints. You can’t be creative without having constraints to work around.
Every great disruption and invention happened around constraints. Einstein had self-imposed one constraint around which he built his entire Theory of Relativity. That constraint was the speed of light. He was able to throw out all other presumptions out of the window because he could hold on to one solid constraint.
In fact, our DNA is one of the greatest examples of constraint at work. The child of a human will never be a bird. Constraints are at the core of great systems. Systems that work well all the time.
All great creations have a constraint at their core. The reason we can recognize great artists is because of their consistent styles. They stuck with certain constraints at the core of what they did, so they can have their freedom with everything else.
Today, the most real of all constraints is ‘time’.
If at all, for some weird reason you don’t feel pressed for time, use the ‘Pomodoro technique’. Google it if you don’t know about it.
And make the most of your time here on earth.
So even when information has become cheap, if we are aware, we can invest our attention wisely.
That’s the difference between ‘knowing’ everything versus truly ‘understanding’ everything. Or at least trying to understand it.
