There’s only one piece of advice I feel comfortable giving everyone: only follow advice that resonates with you.

Everyone has advice. They’ve learned things from their experience that they want to share to help others. That pretty much guarantees that if you seek enough advice, you’ll hear diametrically opposing views, often leaving you with more data and less direction.

Most advice is good advice, in the right context. So only take advice that seems right to you, that seems like a natural extension of advice you would give yourself. The other advice might be great. Maybe later, you’ll wish you’d followed it sooner.

Don’t second guess yourself.

If advice doesn’t resonate with you now, you’re likely to follow it badly.

You’re on a journey. Small shortcuts are useful. Giant leaps off your current path and onto some other path aren’t shortcuts so much as teleportation, leaving you disoriented, unequipped with the experience of getting there through ways you understand.

What’s one piece of advice you would give everybody?

I want to build a ship.

I need your help.

Were I to follow Antoine’s sage advice, how would I teach you to long for where that ship will take us? How would I get you onboard? How would I imbue in you the passion and the drive to love every part of the process and the journey?

That has a lot to do with the ship I want to build.

What lofty goal requires mustered driven masses? Specifically , I want to promote a world that I’m proud to have helped create. I want to beam with joy when I am on that sea. I really think it’s that simple, but of course there is an endless immensity behind that desire.

So, how do I teach you to long for the endless immensity of the sea? I must show you the sea. I must drive you to the shore and let you breathe in the briny air. I must share with you my sea stories.

In other words, I must strive to be a role model. I must strive to cultivate in you the belief that the world can be great. I must demonstrate what I think it will take. That will resonate with some of you, and some of you will be enough.

Great. Now you know my goal. Let me share a sea story with you. I promise to be much less heavy-handed most of the rest of the time.

The past couple years have been transitional for me. I have known that I am in transition, on a journey, and I am still not sure where it leads. I’m trying to figure it out as I go. Knowing such things may not be as important as doing such things. I hope that both of us, you and I will benefit from this experience.

Earlier in the year, I stumbled on the insight that I have been an overachiever. That is to say, I have been a person whose internally driven sense of self worth has been externally located. I had been one of those people who strived to be the best at everything in order to prove to myself that I was good at anything. I always needed to out-perform my last success. My yardstick for measuring my worth had no inches on it. This is a recipe for burnout, crash-and-burnout.

That realization was the first step. I knew I needed to have an internal absolute benchmark for my worth. After decades of operating under a different premise, I had no idea how to get there.

The successes of my career had given me a fragile confidence. Unfortunately, I had misplaced my identity and felt like I was my job, the sum of years of projects and programs, products and business plans.

Being unemployed this last year forced me to rethink that strategy. If I am my job and I have no job, what am I? Well, clearly, I’d better go get a job, so I can be a person again. That wasn’t working, so I started consulting. I was adding value and solving problems, but it was tenuous. It wasn’t steady enough to feel like an identity. Consulting was something I did. I wasn’t a Consultant.

I embarked on a new roller coaster, designed by the same people who brought you that ride we all love, Crash-and-Burnout. I was looking for new employment with the same faulty premise. If they didn’t hire me after I did my best, was I worth hiring?

I had been on this path long enough, I had to stop and take stock. Frustrated to the point of desperation, I found myself pondering the metaphysical. It seemed like Life was some entity that had put me in a holding pattern, not to continue my journey until I had learned some lesson. Okay, fine. What do you want me to learn already?

I told my wife this story. She told me, you just need to learn that you are not your job. You need to stop being so invested in these outcomes, as though your self-worth depended on them. It doesn’t. (I’m paraphrasing, of course. She doesn’t talk like that, and I’m jealous that she seems to always know crap before I do, like the plots of most movies.)

I always try to be a good listener, and I often fail at listening to the people I trust most. I guess they’ve always been too close to support my erroneous need for external validation. Nonetheless, I am trying to stop all that. I am trying to listen and learn, and I hope that sharing this with you will help codify this lesson.

I am not my job. I am not what you think of me. I am a man blessed with a wonderful family. I am a loyal friend. I am person committed to doing the right thing the right way.

I am here to build a ship.

But that’s me. What about you?

When you stop to ask yourself who you are, do you bother to differentiate between your roles and your self? Do you see value in stripping it all away to see what’s left?

Lastly, wanna help me build a boat?

I expected less discussion of tools and more discussion of what it takes to excel at listening. I think we each need to remind ourselves regularly what it takes to be an effective listener, independent of technology. Hopefully, this post will accomplish that task.

By the way, Baeza’s post wasn’t devoid of good listening advice at all. He included great advice from Glenn Dobson, which I’ll summarize, ‘Be genuine, responsive, appropriate, and respectful.’

What I want to explore is what lies at the heart of Glenn’s advice, “Care.”

It’s an overly simple concept that eludes many of us. We get so caught up in the results we want from communication that we forget to appropriately value our audience.

We want them to buy something. Or we want them to tell us what to build. Or we want them to stop complaining.  We come to see them as problems to solve. We see them as objects, variables in an optimization formula.

We forget why they would want to buy our something. What problem of theirs is it solving? We forget that we’re building the next thing to meet their needs instead of building it to sell them something. We forget that we’re responding to their complaints because we care about their experiences, not because we want to shut them up.

It’s wrong to engage an audience with any motivation other than caring, and doing so will provide wrong results.

If you approach communication with empathy, you will be a good listener. If you care about your audience enough to want to understand them, you will need to actively listen to them. And, when you’re listening, be genuine, responsive, appropriate, and respectful.

It will make a difference.

Thank you.

I agree that most success is learned through trial and error and that most plans are guesses. Fine.

Having said that, most small businesses need periodic rigorous scrutiny that they never take the time to give.

Small business owners are going with their gut. It was good enough for all of their past success, so it’s good enough now, right?

Wrong. People develop blind spots. They develop fear of asking questions that might draw attention to weaknesses.

I suppose that a serial business starter will never need to face his weaknesses if he always turns sustaining the business over to someone else after an initial success. However, almost everybody else should be reinvesting and reinventing their business every few years.

I haven’t met a small business owner who couldn’t benefit from doing a deep dive on what they know and don’t know about their business. Once you’ve done that work, it only makes sense to apply what you learned and build a plan. Yes, a plan, if only a working list of priorities.

If you know the most important thing to do and you build an action plan for doing it, you’ll usually find that you don’t have time to do lower priority things. Over time, iterating on what actions matter most to your business will make your business much more successful than operating without a plan.

You make the valid point that most plans are built on internally sourced data. That doesn’t make them bad. Most people know everything they need to know to dramatically improve their business and build a great plan. But knowing something in a disorganized way and knowing something in a very organized way produces wildly different results.

Lastly, I actually want to defend the inane formal business plan that nobody will ever read. The utility of going through all the ridiculous work involved in building an MBA’s business plan is in thinking through a problem from a wide variety of angles, in an attempt to avoid dangerous blind spots and big faulty assumptions.

Sure, if you’re a business genius, you don’t need a plan. MBA’s and business plans are guiderails for the rest of us.

Don’t you think the world would be a better place if people were a little more thoughtful about what they were doing?

Wacky business priorities in action:
My wife runs a gift shop with customers across the world, so she has to ship items frequently, especially during the holidays. The United States Postal Service chose the busiest time of year to radically change their online tracking system. When my wife, a pretty savvy software user, needed to chat with customer support to troubleshoot a buggy experience, the representative told her the problem was her browser choice; she needed to switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox to use the functionality she needed. Put another way, USPS opted to support the 1-in-4 user scenario and not the 3-in-4 user scenario, again, during the busiest shipping month of the year. As though that weren’t bad enough, the representative with whom she was chatting was dismissive and disdainful of her for being one of the 75% of online users that isn’t using Firefox.

This was a less than ideal customer experience. What could have driven USPS to make these decisions? What business priority won out over providing reliable mission-critical services?

Wonderful business priorities in action:
My laptop is old by laptop standards. In my experience, after 5 years, it’s time to get a new laptop. This belief seemed validated over the past few months as my laptop began shutting down in apparently random circumstances. When it started shutting down more frequently, it seemed related to video playback. After troubleshooting and consultation, I assumed the CPU fan was dying. I hoped I could replace it, but I prepared myself for the possibility that I would need to buy a new PC.

While I was calling around town to find out how likely and expensive a repair might be, I spoke with Aleem, a repair guy at HardDrives Northwest, a local small business with a great reputation for integrity, quality, and service. He listened to my story and concluded that I probably just needed to blow some dust out with pressurized air. It hadn’t occurred to me; I’ve had several laptops and never needed to clean the insides. I was prepared to spend thousands on a new PC, or hundreds on a repair. Instead, I got some simple free advice. Now my laptop is good as new.

Without a doubt, great customer service is a priority to HDNW. How many repair shops would have defaulted to saying they needed to open the laptop up, incurring at least $100 in labor costs? How do companies foster the kind of caring service I received today, the kind of service that earns my loyalty?

One artifact of my online presence across which she stumbled was a tool I built that helps one determine what one’s core values are.

I don’t know if you know me, but I’m the kind of person who, when faced with the question of whether the glass is half full or half empty, looks at the meniscus to see if one half dominates, which is to say, I have my analytical moments.

So when I was having a conversation a few years ago about values, about how a person will find natural passion, energy, and creativity for his work if it aligns with his core values, I approached the discussion quantitatively. There was a list of 63 values. The question was posed, what are your top values? Most folks in my mentoring ring just picked their top 5 values subjectively and were satisfied to move on to the question of whether their actions were aligned with those values. Not me. I don’t trust subjectivity without validation.

When in doubt, build a spreadsheet.

For the sake of convenience, I added a 64th value to the list. Then I went through iterative pairwise comparison, randomly pairing different values and forcing myself to choose the value that was most important to me. The easiest way to do this was usually to assume that whichever value I didn’t choose would cease to exist in the universe. Which value could I most live without? After a couple dozen iterations, top and bottom values began to emerge as consistent winners and losers.

Satisfied that I had a workable idea of my top values, I returned to the mentoring ring, surprised to find that I was the only person in the group who took this approach. I really did think there’d be a least a couple of us. Well, while nobody else made a spreadsheet, several people were fascinated that I had, and a couple were interested in using the tool on their own.

Since then, many of my mentees have found it useful as a career coaching and personal branding tool, and I recommend it to you. If you use it, remember that there is a cycle between qualitative and quantitative thinking. Before you start ranking values, subjectively pick your top and bottom 5 from the list below. Then, go through a couple iteration sessions with the tool, and see how closely you knew yourself.

After you have an objective point of view, rinse and repeat. Subjectively ask yourself if you agree and what you think that should mean in your life, your choices, and your actions.

Thinking back on the woman that found me online, I wonder if she perceived my values or her own as she decided she liked what she saw.

Do you give any thought to your values and how they relate to your actions? Or, is it just me?

What do you value most?

Justice
Security
Strength
Time
Independence
Advancement
Productivity
Solitude
Equality
Communication
Accuracy
Family
Teamwork
Structure
Relationship
Humility
Growth
Honesty
Innovation
Mastery
Clarity
Autonomy
Diversity
Humor
Creativity
Belonging
Risk
Wisdom
Commitment
Beauty
Service
Challenge
Prestige
Winning
Spirituality
Health
Knowledge
Adventure
Vitality
Helping Others
Uniqueness
Duty
Respect
Freedom
Integrity
Leisure
Effectiveness
Wealth
Religion
Balance
Excellence
Competition
Excitement
Cooperation
Self-Realization
Critical
Equity
Love
Fun
Achievement
Curiosity
Power
Tranquility
Quality

(Please feel free to edit the list of values in the Personal Values Tool to better suit your needs.)

This got us into a conversation about success metrics.

If you plan to recommend a solution to a business executive, it really helps to have concrete and demonstrable objectives. Are you going to increase revenue share, market share, mindshare, or something else?

“What’s mindshare?”

Good question. The idea of share assumes that there are finite resources in a given market.

There’s a limited amount of money that a market or customer will spend on products like your product. The percent of the customer’s budget that you get versus your competition is your revenue share.

There’s a limited number of customers in your total addressable market, the people or entities capable of and likely to buy your product. What percent of customers are using your product to meet the needs that could be met with your competitors’ products? That’s your market share.

The idea of mindshare suggests that there’s a limit to how many brands or products a customer will bother to consider or is even capable of keeping in mind. When a brand is top of mind, they often get credit for ‘thought leadership’. Brand loyalty and customer satisfaction are measureable facets of mindshare.

It’s also important to understand the qualitative measures associated with share. If your brand is top of mind for negative reasons, it won’t do much for your business’ bottom line.

It would be ideal if you had some idea of how the business is tracking against existing metrics, and by how much you would need to change your numbers before you achieved success with a proposed solution.

I hope that helps.

How are you defining share? What metrics are you using to make decisions?

In my attempt to better arm him for wild success, my constant goal in any mentoring relationship, I gave him the following advice, which may be of use to you, no matter where you’re at in your own career.

You’ve only been there a month. In the first month at most companies, you wouldn’t be expected to know more than how to find the bathroom. Having said that, you should over prepare and dazzle the VP with the amount of thought you’ve put into running the business.

This is the same thinking that we talked about when you were preparing for the interview.

What’s the biggest problem facing the company?

He thought the biggest problem facing the company was that there was no brand awareness of the company among end-users of their product since they almost exclusively sold through indirect channels. Since his job is to market the company and its products through word of mouth marketing vehicles, it’s understandable that he perceived a lack of consumer awareness to be the company’s biggest problem.

It says great things for you that you’re a junior marketer who’s only been there a month and you can already speak intelligently about the problems facing the company.

What are the top three reasons that’s the biggest problem?

If customers give our carriers credit for our product’s customer experience, all word of mouth marketing will be for our carriers instead of us. Also, what customers know about our brand can be tainted by the negative reputations of our carriers. We get none of the positive brand associations and lots of the negative.

Okay, what’s another reason it’s the biggest problem? Try to come up with a few. Round out your thinking.

What are the three best solutions you propose to address the problem?

You need to come prepared to answer the important questions. What? Why? So what? How? When? Where? Who?

What should the strategy be? How should it be tactically executed? How does this fit into the operations of the business? What would success look like? How will you measure it?

You won’t be able to figure all of this out before your meeting tomorrow, but going through the exercise of trying to wrap your head around these business questions will make you much more prepared for whatever the meeting brings.

During your thinking, you’re likely to generate more questions than answers. That’s great. Decide which questions seem most important. If you get a chance to ask good questions, you will do more than demonstrate your dedication to the success of the business. You’re also likely to add value by making the VP think about things that she may not have considered.

In any case, I know you’ll shine like a star in tomorrow’s meeting. You’ll blow their expectations for what someone should know by the first month out of the water.

Good luck!

How many months into your current role are you? Take a step back. What advice would you give yourself?

The techniques weren’t new, but they were new to me. Since then, I have learned a great deal more about creative problem solving, and I’ve tried to share these lessons with my friends and colleagues.

While I’m happy to share what I know about useful methods, I’ve come to realize that the beliefs with which I approach problem solving matter much more to achieving meaningful outcomes.

Here are 3 of those beliefs.

Belief #1: Every problem can be solved. That’s a sweeping generalization, so let me qualify it. By “solved”, I mean addressed. Every problem can be looked upon as an opportunity to be assessed, prioritized, and appropriately acted upon. Actively holding this belief empowers one to overcome the biggest barrier to problem solving, the inertia of being in problem-mode rather than solution-mode.

Belief #2: You already know everything you need to know. Over and over again, I have found this to be true. If you have a problem, you not only know everything you need to know about it, you probably also know everything you can know about it. Again, these are sweeping generalizations that I’ll qualify. First, people always know more than they realize. Sometimes it takes a facilitator to draw the important facts to the surface, but people always know enough to act on a given problem, even if the most appropriate first action is to conduct research to learn more. Second, there is a limit to how much a person can know or need know before taking action on a problem. Believing that you know enough is critical to overcoming another big barrier to problem solving, the marketing cliché known as analysis paralysis.

Belief #3: Many problems don’t need to be solved. When you look at a problem set from several angles, you usually see a few things you hadn’t before. Some problems are irrelevant. Many problems go away once you solve a root problem. Other problems are actually valuable assets and opportunities once reframed in a broader context. When you know what problems don’t need to be solved, you can focus more clearly on the right course of action.

There are thousands of creative problem solving techniques from which to choose, but our beliefs guide us to solutions.

What are your beliefs?

She was referring to everything, every thing we say and do.

I started it.

I marveled at and commented on the pen she handed to me to sign my credit card receipt. It was a Sharpie Retractable Ultra Fine Permanent Marker. It’s negligibly different in function or quality from a Paper Mate or Uni-ball ultra fine point pen , but they’ve designed it to look like a standard Sharpie permanent marker that just happens to have an ultra fine tip. The shape of the pen was cashing in on the brand promises of quality and familiarity that I’ve come to associate with that industrial gray pen shape whose bulk and taper evokes images of a passenger plane’s fuselage. I’m instantly happy that I have a dependable brand like Sharpie in my hand, even though I’m currently in love with Uni-ball’s Gel Impact pens.

When she commented that it was great marketing, my first impulse was to agree.

I guess I’m a marketer, I thought; I realized that I had blindly assumed that the pen’s design was based on marketing intelligence and decisions. But it occurred to me that a developer, a maker would have said that it was great product development.

I reasoned, to myself this time, that every discipline looks at the world through arrogant lenses that make everything all about that discipline. A PR professional might take credit for pushing the Sharpie brand name and messages so well that I have built my brand perceptions and loyalties.

In reality, it’s actually true that each discipline plays a pivotal role in the creation and maintenance of a product and its brand attributes, and it’s important to remember.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to say your discipline should be humble. Oh, no, wait. That is what I’m trying to say. It’s not all about you. Jeez, I guess that also means it’s not all about me.

Hmm. I may have to reconsider this argument.

What was the last thing you took away from a conversation with a barista?