Justin Whitaker
Jeremy Clarkson is absolutely right. Stopping is the killer. So whatever you’re doing, don’t stop.
Does it stand the test of time?
Ponder this for a moment: the vast majority spend the vast majority of our lives sweating, suffering, and slogging mightily over stuff that’s forgotten by next quarter, let alone next year or next century.
Call me crazy, but I’d suggest: mattering means building stuff that’s awesome enough to last.
Maybe not forever, like Giza’s Pyramids — but surely more than a couple of months, before it’s absent-mindedly tossed into the dustbin of history along with the rest of the flotsam and jetsam of the age of disposable plastic junk.
”If you follow me on Twitter, or anywhere, and you’ll know that I’m a fan of Umair Haque.
He’s sort of taken up the role of the philosopher economist for the never ending recession age, in the grand tradition of John Locke, John Stuart Mills, and Adam Smith.
The quote above comes from “Create a Meaningful Life Through Meaningful Work”, and it really gets to the heart of the matter in our productivity driven work culture.
How many of us are doing work that doesn’t even meet this simple test?
I’d wager that even people that are cubicle escapees spend much of their time failing this test as well.
It’s long been okay at most workplaces to deliver what I call “minimally viable output”, a project, document, spreadsheet, or presentation, what have you, that’s just enough to pass our manager’s or client’s requirements.
What else can we really do? We have another deadline to meet!
And it’s because of this incessant drive to do more, with less time, that whole industries have arisen to help us maximize both our inputs (as time, attention, etc.), and outputs (as productivity).
If we slowed things down a little, we might see that none of that MVO really matters in the grand scheme of things. We’d realize that we’ve bought into this idea of work as impermanent, disposable, dead on arrival.
Maybe we should be shooting for something a bit more, require more of ourselves, than what passes for work these days?
I don’t know what my “Work”, the big world changing, vital work that Stephen Pressfield or Seth Godin talk about, is, but I know that I’d much rather have work that stands the test of time than satisfies a deadline.
Wouldn’t you?
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Are We Thinking Big Enough?
mappa_blog (Photo credit: francescopozzi)
One of the things about following blogging expert’s advice is that it narrow’s your focus.
If you listen to them, you need to post every day, have a commenting strategy, a promotionnal strategy, and a blog business plan.
Which is all good advice, but because we are all busy people with limited time and attention, we quickly get bogged down in the tactics and lose sight of the big picture.
Big picture thinking, no matter what the market or nice, requires time, and attention. Time to consume related content, time to keep abreast of trends, time to digest and analyse them.
So, we settle for doing the minimum viable blog, shooting from the hip on whatever event the Internet is upset about that day, and calling it a day.
No wonder so few blogs make money, and so few blogs survive.
We aren’t thinking big enough.
Opinions are easy.
Reporting the Tech, Social, or Business events of the day? Also easy.
Anyone can pass news along.
Everyone has an opinion.
What’s rare is analysis. What’s rare is investigating the trends, connecting the dots, and filling in the big picture.
In The NOW Revolution
Analysis helps lift the fog obscuring the big picture.
Umair Haque has an interesting take on this.
A while ago, he discussed the difference between “Thick” and “Thin” value.
“Thin value” is anything that is disposable, easily consumed, and generally is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. In the blogging world, think TechCrunch, Mashable, Social Today. Whatever content they push is dead in an hour. It might inform, but it doesn’t enrich anyone’s life.
“Thick value” is anything that provides real and lasting value, enriches the reader’s life, help society or culture move forward, or generally makes some dent in the world. Think Copyblogger, Julien Smith, Seth Godin
You have a choice when you write about what sort of value you provide to your readers. You can either push content that has thin value, or you can push content with thick value. It’s really up to you.
My take is that in order to be a successful blogger, you need to think bigger. You need to take the time to analyze. You need to dispel the uncertainty in your reader’s future. You need publish content that has thick value, and not settle for thin.
You need to think bigger.
- The Brilliant Content Strategy Everyone Gets Wrong (problogger.net)
- Why the Size Really Matters (zemanta.com)
- Solving the problem isn’t the problem (sethgodin.typepad.com)
