April was a busy month for me. I set myself two seriously ambitious goals:

• Exercise almost every day (by starting two different exercise programs)
• Earn $10,000 from the website

Did I achieve either of those goals?

Nope.

With the exercise I was so out-of-shape that I sprained my butt and didn’t know it.

With the money, my small resource idea grew into a mammoth website fear management resource that demanded way more than a month’s work, making it impossible to complete (and therefore earn any money from it) within April. I spent all my time writing, didn’t market at all, and sold only about $400 of consulting and resources from existing links.

Am I happy with the results?

Heck yes!

I knew that those goals were huge and very hard to accomplish, that’s why they were inspiring.

For both I didn’t reach the goal I wanted to, but I did achieve what I really wanted: I started to think of myself as someone who does those things. Even if I haven’t put on my shoes this week, (and due to injury and early-morning interviews, I haven’t) I still think of myself as Someone Who Exercises. And though the resource won’t be ready for a few more weeks, I still think of myself as Someone Who Launches.

And of course I did manage to jog for five hours and earn $400 without marketing, and that ain’t nothing.

The plan for May

Whoo boy, I got a LOT goin down.

Wendy Maynard and chatting (with flailing arms) about a new challenge for our readers that could totally kick ass.
I have another half-dozen glorious interviews lined up (exciting!!!)
Squoodles of guest posts
I need to do the last bit of writing for the resource: 10,000 words and counting
I really need to find a name for the resource (The other Wendy – I am surrounded by wonderful Wendys – came up with a name that made me snot-laugh, but I haven’t decided for sure)
And of course I need to launch it.

Well, my birthday’s on the 28^th, why not do it then?

Yes!

Right!

It’s a little insane, but what the heck…

The website-fear-management resource will go live on my birthday, May 28.

Want to learn more? Find out about the fantastic people I’ve been interviewing?

Sign up here!

I think it’s delightful that creating this resource about fear management has involved so many practical lessons for myself. I’ve added a number of new sections of fears I’ve uncovered, or rediscovered, during this process.

An example? Why of course.

I decided that it would be great to have a few interviews with people who have created successful websites, to ask them what fears they experienced and how they overcame them. So I mentioned the idea in one of the forums I visit, including the line “I know XXX (the forum owner) would be perfect but I’m sure he’s too busy…” Five minutes later I have a comment from him saying “I’m up for it, will be busy but I would love to make time for it.”

Oh. Really? Awesome!

Encouraged, and slightly giddy, I emailed some other Important and Very Busy people. Within 12 hours I had 8 yeses. My first reaction? Panic. Then joy and gratitude and pride. Then panic again. The Voice starts:

Ohmigod can I record interviews through the webcam it’s gotten very flaky maybe it’s the USB connection but can I afford to buy a headset they’re usually too heavy and give me headaches but if I had one I could start recording my posts with Dragon Naturally Speaking which is good because my wrist is starting to hurt and I hear it won’t work with Vista SP2 well I’ll be getting up at 4:30am to get these done probably but who cares oh dear I’ve only written one section so far and the biggest stuff isn’t done and I’m seeing Sus and Troy this weekend I said the first draft would be done by then and I haven’t set up the affiliate program and this will make a great post and do I prepare questions beforehand or just wing it holy crap this is really happening not very many people have signed up for the advanced list but hopefully that will grow right? right? because I really want to quit the Day Job but this will have to sell quite a few copies to let me do that and I want to give away two of the special coaching spots to people who can’t afford it that’ll be good publicity too have a competition maybe I still have to make a good landing page before that guest post and what if my internet fails when I have to record the interview should I use Pamela or something else I think there’s some advice on how to record interviews in Dave’s stuff right I’ll check that and should I email anyone else…

The Voice is all my fears that this is really happening now, I have to finish this resource and then I have to publish it, and that’s when stuff gets scary because that’s the point where I can succeed, or I can fail.

The fear of failure

Obviously, I have a lot riding on this product.

• If no-one buys it I won’t be able to quit the Day Job.
• If it sucks then I’ll be very embarrassed.
• If I screw up the launch I could lose respect and supporters.
• If I pike out and never produce it I’ll feel bad about myself.
• And so on.

The fear of success

I’ve never been a full-time entrepreneur before. What if I make enough to quit the Day Job and find I hate it? What if I go bankrupt because I can’t manage my cash flow (and other “What if I fail at being a success?” thoughts.) What if I never sell anything else, ever again?

Notice the difference between the fears. With failure, I know what failure feels like. I hate it, and I don’t want it, but all of these are consequences I know; I’ve experienced them in the past. The success fears, however, are “what if” fears… they’re fears of uncertainty.

The uncertainty

Uncertainty is much more painful than fear. I can plan for failure, and I can plan for success (ohplease). But if I don’t know what’s going to happen, if I can’t control what’s going to happen, that’s the scariest part. Fear is a normal reaction to risk. Uncertainty is a reaction to risk we feel we can’t control. So it combines danger (I could lose money, or respect, or time) with helplessness (and there’s nothing I can do to stop it). That is a gigantic mind-fuck.

So what did I do?

I let myself panic for a little while, making mental notes of useful points raised by The Voice. (I’ll be checking out headsets later today.)

Then I spent awhile in what I call the Fear Cage Match, playing one fear (“I’ll never achieve anything and I’ll be in this job for the rest of my life!”) off against the others.

Then gently reminding myself of a few truths:

• The people I’m interviewing have been where I am and are very understanding. Technical difficulties might happen, but we’ll find a way to get around them.
• Even if this resource only helps one person manage their fear and build an awesome website, it’ll be worth the time and effort.
• I had zero expectations around the Website in a Weekend course, and it consistently sells with no effort on my part.
• All of these wonderful people are willing to spend half an hour to be interviewed. My product and I must be doing stuff right.
• Even if this doesn’t sell enough to let me quit the Day Job, it will help. And next time, for sure!
• If I do everything I can and it still fails, I will still be proud of myself. And so will other people.
• Imagine if it does work! How awesome it would be.

Then I did some pushups.

And then I sat down and started writing. About fear, success and uncertainty.

Do you find uncertainty to be scarier than fear? Tell me in the comments!

P.S. Why, you might ask, am I not naming some of the spectacular and awesome names I have lined up for interviews? Because, liebchen, they are terribly busy and I don’t want to disappoint if it turns out they can’t make it. But as soon as I have completed an interview, I’ll tell all the people on the advance notice and discount list about it. So if you want to know, you should sign up!

I’m in favour of awesomeness. (No, really?)

I’ve been pushing myself hard these last few months: getting up at 4:30am to chat, writing and studying every spare moment, abandoning a number of my favourite hobbies, working 14-hour days… you know, stuff I thought I couldn’t do, stuff that was Too Hard for the likes of me.

But it’s not too hard. Do you know why?

Because of you.

Because helping you get unstuck enough to start a website is the best feeling in the world.
Because encouraging you to show your delightful personality to the world makes me proud.
Because every time you tell me that you’re afraid but you’re going to do it anyway, I feel I’ve won a great victory.
Because every time you post something, you’re making the world a tiny bit more awesome.
And as I said, I’m in favour of awesomeness.

The fear and awesomeness tango

I’m also in favour of fear.

Umm.. what?

Fear is our protective parent. It stops us from poking tigers or punching police officers or investing your savings in a “sure-thing” online marketing system. Fear is a damn useful tool…

*caveat alert*

if you can manage it.

If we can manage our fear, then we can have safety and risk, stability and growth, usefulness and delight… and of course a gigantic bucket of awesomeness.

But if we don’t manage our fear, it leads us to perfectionism, procrastination, and many other painful, obstructive behaviours that stop us from rocking it out like the brilliant fascinating rock stars we are.

I know this from experience.

The fears I had to manage to get this far

I can’t learn about websites!
I can’t do design!
I can’t build a business while working a full-time job!
I can’t sell my expertise!
I can’t say that!
I’m going to fail.
I’m going to go broke.
Oh God, what if I succeed?
No-one will listen to me!
I don’t want to offend anyone!
… and a dozen more.

Most of these are reasonable fears: I am putting myself at risk by starting and growing a website. I had to learn how to listen to the sensible parts of my fear (“Do not spend $2,000 you do not have on a training course, you will not be able to pay for it.”) while placating the nonsensical parts (“No-one will actually shun you on the street if you write a bad post.”) This took me three years. Three years in which I talked about starting a website, I planned and daydreamed and what-if’d about starting a website, but I never, ever did anything about it.

Register a domain name? What if I pick the wrong one!
Apply some (any) of the knowledge from the blogs and courses and e-books I ceaselessly read? Oh, but I’m not ready yet!

Luckily, I improved.

After a lot of work I’m now pretty skilled at managing my fear. I still get it wrong sometimes, but I have a website, I post every day, tell people about what I do, sell my advice and skills, and have an achievable plan to quit the Day Job.

More and more as I listen to your comments and talk to you in various media (including the survey, and thank you to everyone who replied to it), I can see I’m not alone in having this balance to manage. And many of you are in a similar place to where I was three years ago: too scared to start a website, or too scared to grow it the way it should be grown.

Do you want some help?

I’m writing a resource to help people who aren’t managing their fear as well as they want to.

It’ll include:
The signs that you’re not managing your fear
Some excellent general strategies to manage your fear better
Some specific website-related fears and how to manage them

And I’m also going to run a special group for people who want one-on-one, customised help.

Are you interested?

It’s live, baby! Learn more about Awesome Fear-Wrangling here.

Any questions? Come tell me in the comments!

We made the plan to create an awesome resource. Then we checked the plan for adequate levels of ass-kickery. Now it’s time to create and promote it.

Create your awesome resource!

Before you start creating the content you need two things:

1. A clear vision of what you want to accomplish (check!)

2. Buckets of passion

Danger, Will Robinson!

When you’ve been involved in anything long enough to be an expert it all feels very familiar. Comfortable. Ordinary.

Ordinary is the enemy of passion! You have to find a way to turn all the dials up to 11 before you start creating.

Get psyched: Music. Loud. Dancing to it. Music that matches the emotion you want people to feel as they interact with your resource! (When I wrote the Awesome Manifesto I listened to reflective, mellow music. For this article I’m listening to really loud gypsy punk. I turn up the volume every time I feel my energy lag.)

Get furious: Spend 5 minutes with a patient family member or pet, ranting about the issue you plan to write about. Stop after you do exasperated gestures but before the forehead veins turn up, and get creating.

Get inspired: Think about all the people this resource will help. How much better their life will be if you get this right, if you get them to act.

The process

Is entirely up to you. You might like to mind-map, meditate, or just dive in and start creating. As long as you can stay resolutely on topic and keep your passion levels up you should use whatever suits you.

Editing and prettifying your awesome resource

1. Ruthlessly cut everything that doesn’t support your message. (You can put your name on at the end, but that’s it.)

2. Don’t feel you need to use all the clever tricks. Clever tricks allow you to hide behind the flash, instead of making the message stronger.

3. Don’t exceed your technical skills. Plain and raw is better than awkwardly polished.

4. If your resource goes for longer than three pages or three minutes, it might need a narrative structure (like the classic dramatic arc) to tie everything together and keep it on track.

5. If you produced the content over a number of sessions, make sure the tone and energy stays consistent. (Something I have not done in this series of posts!) For video and audio, you might have to redo a bit to get it all to match.

6. Don’t fall into the perfectionism trap.

7. Make sure the opening is engaging enough to get your audience to keep going.

Tell everyone about your awesome resource!

Which should be easy enough, since you’ve made a killingly awesome resource. You should be bubbling over with excitement and dying to tell people, which is the simplest, least skeevy and most effective way of marketing it. Just make sure you ask people to share it and tell them how.

Also, if you’re anything like me, test the links, make sure it all works, then get the heck away from your computer for a little bit. I tend to drive myself crazy with checking pageviews and comments if I don’t monitor myself.

Feeling inspired yet? Ready to make an awesome resource? Tell me in the comments!

Last time we started the process of creating an awesome resource by planning the result, the message, the audience, the medium and the content. Did we get the planning right first time?

Time to ask the tough questions

Handcuff your planned awesome resource to a chair, shine a bright light in its eyes and ask the following questions:

Is your awesome resource brief?

Since you could be using any number of formats this is hard to define, but you want it be as brief as it possible while still being effective.

I screwed this up with the awesome vs perfect video, which at 8 minutes is far too long to make one point. My planned remake will be 3 minutes max.

Does your planned resource stick to one message?

Remember the post I did last week about sticking to one idea per article? Get really tough about this: you can say one thing, or you can say nothing. You want to take one single, easily articulated concept and focus every decision on how to communicate that message. If you start making extra points you muddy the message; your readers won’t remember the core concept, and they won’t act.

Is your awesome resource shareable?

You want this idea to spread. Make sure it’s easy for people to tell their friends about it! If it’s a resource you want people to email it needs to be under 10MB, and if you really want the word to get out don’t require an email address before they can access it.

Can the message of your awesome resource be summed up in 80 characters?

If you want the idea to spread through social media, it needs to be brief enough to be easily communicated. We’re not talking about dumbing it down or making a bad sound bite. It’s about having a compact core message, an ideavirus that’s strong enough to be explainable in a few words.

Will your awesome resource righteously piss someone off?

It should. If you’re doing anything that really matters it will always make someone furiously angry. If you can’t think of anyone, is this really a valuable message?

Does your awesome resource convince the audience to act?

I mean, put down the earphones right now and get moving. I’ve started defining “truly awesome resource” as “the one I have to pause mid-way through so I can go and do the action they’re talking about”.

Is your resource going to do that, or will it get your audience to say, “Huh. Interesting.” then close the browser window and wander off to eat a banana? This is why you need a clearly defined audience: you have to know what really motivates them, and what will get them moving.

Is your awesome resource remarkable?

Would someone use your resource and then call a friend to say, “You’ll never guess what I read/watched/heard!” To spread and engage your message needs to be presented in a way that’s worth talking about:

new
funny
fresh and interesting
surprising
evocative

Does your awesome resource match your brand?

If you’re quirky, your message and your delivery needs to be quirky. You do have the option to deliberately violate your branding, which has been done effectively by some corporate brands. They dropped their usual super-professional tone and delivered something low-key, informal and remarkable.

Is your awesome resource emotional?

Is it so full of passion that it jumps off the screen? Do you want to write it in all-caps? We don’t need any more Good Ideas, there are plenty around. We need MAGNIFICENT ideas, INSPIRING ideas, messages that change the world and get us to achieve extraordinary things and make meaningful change and rock the world!

This doesn’t mean the idea has to be implicitly sexy. Cleaning out your sink trap isn’t a sexy idea, but if you honestly believe it will improve lives, then you’ll be emotional. And that will resonate with your audience.

Feeling a bit discouraged?

Yep, it’s really difficult to create an awesome resource. But if you do it (or if you create a pretty-damn-cool resource) you will have done something truly rare, truly worthwhile, and epically kick-ass. It’s worth the effort and strain.

If you don’t think your current idea has the chops, go back to the drawing board. Take a look at some of these wonderful resources on the way and see if they inspire you. It’s not a broad list; I’m just choosing stuff out of my browser in the last month. There is much, much, much more out there… whatever you want to say, there’s a compelling way to say it.

Ben from Ben & Jerry demonstrates the United States’ nuclear arsenal using BB pellets.

Charlie Gilkey (He of “Do Epic Shit”) produces free productivity planners each month to help people take action.

The Girl Effect and their simple and moving video about what happens when you invest in girls.

Dave Navarro made some resources on how to play a bigger game.

The Eight Principles of Fun.

A case study on Nine Inch Nails and how they have revolutionised music marketing.

Is your idea awesome enough to get produced? If so, tell me in the comments and tune in tomorrow as we talk logistics!

Do you have an awesome resource? Something on your website that is so unique, remarkable, useful, meaningful or beautiful that people can’t stop talking about it?

Screw the professional talk about a “valuable resource”. Do you have a resource on your website that’s spectacular. Fantastic. Magnificent. AWESOME?

No?

Let’s make one!

This will take a number of five-minute missions. You can spread it out over a week or get them all done in a couple of very busy and overwhelming days if that’s your style.

Plan your awesome resource

Mission 1: Plan the result

What one action do you want people to take as a result of interacting with this resource? Like:

• Prepare a disaster plan with their family
• Stop being perfectionists
• Call their representative to oppose a rezoning request
• Train their dog to stay
• Decide to start an awesome website
• Clean out the sink trap in the kitchen

Mission 2: Decide on the message

What message do you want people to understand that will lead to the action in the first step?

• A good disaster plan protects your family
• Perfectionism is fear in disguise
• The proposed factory will keep all of us awake
• You and your dog will be happier once you establish your dominance
• The tech doesn’t matter, content matters
• Blockages in the sink trap leads to expensive plumbing problems

Mission 3: Target your audience

Who do you want to act? Your category can be pretty broad, but it can’t be everyone (unless you’re running a campaign about why breathing is a nifty idea).

• Proactive parents
• Perfectionists
• Local residents
• Dog owners with misbehaving dogs
• People who are blocked on starting a website
• People who pour oil down their sink

Mission 4: Choose the medium

(Or the large?)

(Sorry.)

How will you deliver this message?

PDF
video
audio
web page
printable poster
screencast
online quiz
flash game
treasure hunt
live streaming
email
tweet
online presentation
Facebook fan page
a combination of the above?

Mission 5: Design the content

What content will you produce to make that point?

I’m once again indebted to Made to Stick. In the book they talk about a research team that discovered 89% of award-winning ads followed the same basic templates. You can read the whole article, but here’s the summary:

Extreme Consequences: Take an unintended consequence and make it much more dramatic.
Pictorial Analogy: Show extreme consequences visually.
Extreme Situations: Use an unusual situation or one aspect of the point and make it bigger.
Competition: Show your concept winning, possibly an unusual competition
Interactive Experiments: Let people interact with the idea directly
Dimensionality Alteration: Use a time-leap to show longer implications of a decision

You can use multiple templates: most winners use Extreme Consequences and Pictorial Analogy.

Sound intimidating? It isn’t! Example time…

Let’s take the “The proposed factory will keep all of us awake” message and design some content using each of these templates:

Extreme Consequences: An article with a huge image: a row of children asleep at their desks. Title “I can’t go to school today, Mum. I’m so tired.”
Pictorial Analogy: Informational brochure that shows a row of houses, with a factory that’s 10 times taller.
Extreme Situations: Video showing a normal family trying to have a conversation over a stunning amount of noise. (“What was that?” “Whaaaat?”)
Competition: A mock news article: Suburb wins “Worst Place to Live” Competition
Interactive Experiments: A website page, press a button and listen to various levels of noise and the decibel rating for each, from children playing up to trucks unloading, to the factory itself.
Dimensionality Alteration: “Interview” a distraught couple outside a house with ten “For Sale” signs about how they can’t sell their house; no-one wants to live next to “all that racket”.

Some of my resources have used this and been very successful (the manifesto, which is up to nearly 500 views), and some haven’t used it and were less so (the awesome vs perfect video, for example. Version 2 will use a few of these templates!).

Mission 6: Design the promotion

How will you tell people about this content? Choose all that apply (because the more the merrier!):

Twitter
Facebook
Email
Posters
Fridge magnets
Word-of-mouth
Google ads
Email signature
Comments
Book tour
Flyers
Forums
Blog post
Guest post
Yellow Pages
Cross-promotion
Interviews

Whoo boy, I think that’s enough to get started on! Next time we’ll check our plan and get sure that our resource is going to be awesome, then get it done.

What’s your awesome resource going to be? Tell me in the comments!

It’s a new month. Time to set some goals! I’ll go first.

What’s a small accomplishment I could achieve this April? In regards to my finances and my health I could:

• Earn $100 this month
• Exercise three times

How much effect would those goals have? A tiny bit, but nothing noticeable. It’s easy. Boring.

Let’s go bigger!

What’s a noticeable accomplishment I could achieve this April? I could:

• Earn $1000 this month
• Start the hundred pushups program

How much effect would those goals have? Some. It would be a medium-sized step in the right direction. A little challenging. Still boring.

Bigger!

What if I decided to go MEGA? What’s a stunning accomplishment I could achieve this April? I could:

• Earn $10,000 this month
• Start the hundred pushups program AND the Couch to 5K running program

Hoooooooly shit. That’s intimidating. I would have to exercise almost every single day, and not just go for a stroll and decide it counts. I’d have to jog. That would hurt. A lot.

And I would have to make some truly mind-boggling cash. I’d need to develop and sell some premium products. I would have to really up my game.

Could I do it?

Yes.

If.

If I decide.
If I plan my time and spend it well.
If I refuse to accept excuses.
If I refuse to back down.
If I get a bit of luck.
If I put my fear in a headlock.
If I truly commit to being awesome, every waking hour.
If I can stop my heart racing right now.

Hell, I’m going for it. It’s time to Do Epic Shit.

Your five-minute mission, should you choose to accept it…

(This one is definitely a volunteer mission.)

Choose one – or if you’re a wee bit insane, two – goals to accomplish this month. Hard goals. Scary goals. Ones you can only accomplish if you go hardcore, if you do more than you’ve ever done before.

And tell me about it. We can cheer each other on as we jog (argh!) the path to Awesome.

Yesterday’s video post about why you should give up perfection and start aiming for awesome got some great comments and emails. Thanks!

What I learned from shooting the video

I’d been planning to make the video for two months.

• I wrote a mind-map of the points I wanted to make.
• I bought a new video camera with my Christmas money.
• I played around with the camera.
• I bought a nifty tripod.
• I took Elizabeth Potts-Weinstein’s 4 Weeks to Video course.
• I signed up for Andrew Lightheart’s free Presentation Superpowers course.
• I changed the mind-map.

None of this mattered diddly-squat.

What mattered was that on Sunday I picked up the camera and started making the damn video. Then editing it. Then uploading it. Then telling people about it.

It was terrifying.

When I write one of my posts I’m confident that I’ll get some positive feedback. I had no such certainty with the video, and I was nervous.

Yesterday my web server and comments system both had the hiccups and everything went awry and so instead of the half-dozen comments and tweets I usually get in the first hour or so of posting I got zero. None.

I had a minor anxiety attack and had to go lay down for half an hour so I didn’t frantically hit refreshrefreshrefresh on Twitter, email, forums etc to see if someone had responded yet. I was even reloading the YouTube account page to see how many views the video had, which is truly sad and I’m resisting the urge to go do it again.

Was it worth it?

No.

I spent my entire Sunday shooting, editing and watching the damn thing upload (it took 12 hours) until I was so brain-friend I watched Johnny Mnemonic and thought Keanu’s acting was okay.

I spent Monday excitedly thinking about how this was going to be the Next Big Thing and wondering if I should up my server’s resources in case I had a thousand people watching it.

Tuesday was a nightmare of everything going wrong and hand-clenching why-is-no-one-reponding pacing and the realisation: being shouted at is better than being ignored. (At least shouters care, even if they don’t approve.) And when there were commenters again, they were pleasant and supportive and offered good advice but it was not enough to slow my racing anxious heart. I had a sick headache and I got no work done because I could think about nothing other than how it was being received.

The supreme irony

I was acquiring more resources instead of shooting. I spent more than two months planning and planning and never executing. I was incredibly anxious about whether it would be liked.

It sounds a bit like I was trying to make it perfect, doesn’t it?

Hilarious!

What I should have done

If I’d shot the video on the first day I’d thought of it, I would have moved faster than my expectations. It wouldn’t have been as good (I had less presenting and technical skill and a much dodgier camera), but I’d be happy with the number of views, comments and tweets no matter how small it was. And I would have made another video the next day. And the day after. By now I would have two months of regular footage and I know I’d be better at it than I am now.

By taking the time I let perfectionism sneak in and whisper in my ear. And perfectionism can sound so reasonable! I did need a better camera. I did need to learn more about editing and lighting and presentation.

But that’s still bullshit. That’s still fear talking. Every time I think I have it beat, that sneaky little bastard finds a new way in.

What I’ll do now

I’ll be reshooting that video in the near future with improvements from the feedback: the new version will have louder sound and be much shorter. (The two-shirts schtick will stay since everyone seems to like it. I’m glad!)

Most important, I’ll keep being vigilant about stopping perfectionism from sneaking in to my awesome. And my best chance of doing that is to act before he gets a chance to whisper in my ear.

Your five-minute mission, which you should damn well accept…

1. Pick one thing that you’ve been too uncomfortable to do because too much seems to be riding on it: calling a prospect, writing a post, confronting someone, building something…

2. Go and do it Right Now.

3. Come and tell me what you did in the comments.

I love awesome. I hate perfect.

Perfect is a creepy abusive boyfriend: he stalks my friends, messes with their creative processes, makes them doubt themselves, trashes their favourite projects and leaves them powerless and afraid. I want to drag perfect out into the parking lot, pick up a aluminium baseball bat, and teach perfect a lesson it’ll never forget. Perfect will spit out teeth and cry for mercy before I’m done.

Awesome is your favourite perky grandma: she approves of you, encourages you to try new stuff, tells you forget the rules, sing loud and unashamed. She comes to your experimental art showings, tells you when your pieces aren’t good enough, and pushes you into making better ones. I bask in awesome’s sunshiny regard.

I have Strong Feelings on this. So I made a video about why you should stop trying to be perfect and start trying to be awesome.

Your five-minute mission, should you choose to accept it…

1. Choose: are you going to strive for perfect, or for awesome? (If you decide “perfect”, then I wish you well but maybe you should stop reading these posts.)

2. If you choose “awesome” – and why wouldn’t you? – then commit to never, ever aiming for perfect. Make sure your goals, your products, your voice match up with that decision.

3. Go forth and Be Awesome.

Which have you chosen? Does “perfect” have any redeeming characteristics? Tell me in the comments!

As part of the website heresy month, I wanted to talk about a heresy that’s related to the workplace, and to how you help your customers. It’s the principle that you should never make the job you do obsolete. I suspect (and hope) I’m not alone in thinking that making yourself obsolete – working yourself out of a job – is in fact the awesomest thing you can do.

I’ve done work at companies where they’ve had That Guy, ossified into his corner cubicle like one of the crew on The Flying Dutchman, secure in the knowledge that he’ll continue to do the same job for the next twenty years, just the same as he’s been doing that same job for the last twenty years. The Catholics called that Purgatory. If you can avoid it, no one wants to solve the same problem, work at the same task, over and over again for eternity.

If you were a personal trainer, having clients who’d already started to go through a program like Hundred Pushups after an initial consult, and had started to get jazzed by seeing results would have to be a win. Then you could take their blossoming dedication to routine and basic fitness and start molding them into Roman Gladiators.

There’s only one of you, so there’s only so much you can do with your time. Working out ways to deal with these entry-level, starting problems lets you deal with the more interesting problems that you’d move on to after that, as a starting point. It lets you and your customers get to The Next Level.

You? You’re not worried about being obsolete because you’re nimble on your feet, and able to reinvent yourself. Making your old job obsolete is only an issue if you can’t see what the next level is for what you’re doing currently. Hell, the next step might even be doing something different that still helps clients in the same industry. Built To Last is a great book that touches on this area. It talks about examples of companies that have been around for over a hundred years, and how they’ve managed that. And the interesting thing is that some of them have moved into very different industries, or reinventing themselves to adapt to changing markets. IBM is a great example – they started out making glorified calculators.

From experience across IT consulting and commercial voice work, the principle holds true. There’s a core set of values and abilities that can be applied for success across a number of fields.

Don’t do it because you want to stay ahead of the curve, or because Someone Else Will Do It If We Don’t. Do it because it increases the overall Awesomness Quotient.

Your five-minute mission, should you choose to accept it…

Look at the current services you offer to customers, and see if there’s something that can be automated, or made unnecessary by educating your clients. (plumber with too many great clients and too little time? what about putting together a basic leaflet on how to change tap washers?)

The second step is thinking about what you could do for clients with the time you’ve just saved. What’s the Next Level?

Do you have a job you could remove yourself from? Tell us in the comments!

Postscript

Some of you might not be aware of who I am, but I’m the sharply-dressed guy on the left of the banner. Due to a number of factors (mostly work) I haven’t been around as much as you all deserve, so I’m doing the right thing by you all and the site and moving to more of an assisting role. There’s no ugly drama behind this – Catherine and I remain fast friends, and I’m quietly hoping that this shift actually sees me around more in the months to come, not less.