Studio Non Troppo

It’s not the scarcity of money or time or knowledge. The real barrier to entry is uncertainty. If you knew that what you were trying right now would work eventually, you wouldn’t fret about spending your money or time. But unless you’re very good at practicing non-attachment or are the gambling type, that’s not how it feels.

It’s tough, not knowing if your work will create the outcome you think you want.

Photo: kwerfeldein

There’s a greeting card that asks (paraphrased), “what would you attempt if you knew you could not fail?” There’s a problem with these encouraging words, though (or with this platitude, depending on what mood you’re in):

Without uncertainty, most endeavors would become unbearably boring.

Ellen J. Langer has remarked that golf wouldn’t be much fun for long if you knew every shot would be a hole in one. Now that may sound like one of those annoying comments about lottery winners – “they were much happier before they won.” Yeah, yeah, we think. Just let ME win, and let me find out for myself whether I’ll be less happy.

But we don’t have the choice of eliminating uncertainty. Our perception that we could is illusory.

The only way through the barrier is to act even though we’re uncertain.

Here’s a lesson from a university in how not to support your employees. For those of you in the academic world, nothing here will surprise you (you may accuse me of toning down the story, even). But for anyone in business, I hope at the very least this typical story will cure you of any grass-is-greener (or grass-is-more-sensible, or grass-is smarter) feelings you might have.

Photo: Bibi

I’m on the docket to teach an advanced problem solving course this coming fall, and the best book for this particular course happens to be published by a consultancy in England called IFR. The campus bookstore is a for-profit store with a contract with the university, and the bookstore routinely tries to minimize its costs by under-ordering textbooks.

Over time, the bookstore managers have found that some significant percentage of students orders textbooks from places like Amazon, where they can frequently be had for much less than the bookstore is able to sell them. So, rather than have to return books to the distributor, the bookstore just orders fewer books than will be needed for the course. For a course with an expected enrollment of 25, the bookstore may order 15 books.

What happens when there are too few books in the bookstore?

Now what generally happens is that this causes students to go through the first several classes of the semester without a textbook. In this particular case, with the book not available through Amazon and coming from across the pond, I’d say it’s more likely to be several weeks without a textbook.

Yay England!

So I contacted the author in England, who very generously offered to ship me a stack of the books (at a 15% academic discount, even) and to take back any books I didn’t sell to the students. Even with costly shipping from the U.K., the amount per book came out to about $62.

The sources I had found in the U.S. for the book (though only an older edition is available in the U.S.) ran about $100 plus shipping. I can imagine that the campus bookstore, if it even were willing to get the books, would probably have to charge at least $100.

But then the department chair asked the administration if it would be OK for our department to front the money for the purchase of the books, and the administration said no, it would not be OK.

The reason given was that the university has a policy of not “going around” the bookstore.

Now I understand the business interests of the bookstore in wanting an exclusivity agreement, but I don’t know why such a policy is really in the interests of the university.

Or, to put it another way: shouldn’t there be a policy that the university will help students get the best resources available? Or reward faculty who figure out ways to teach more effectively while reducing costs? You can imagine how disincentivized I will be in the future to try to work out a deal like this at this university.

What to do, what to do?

I think there’s a valuable lesson here: use your policies to help you help your employees and customers. Policies should be useful tools that can be–and should be–modified when necessary for you to achieve your goals. If your policies are running you, instead of being sensibly used by you, chances are they’re doing lasting harm to your business relationships.

The project facing you is huge. Complicated. Overwhelmingly immense. How do you respond? Terror? Anger? Procrastination? A Zen laugh?

Photo: Yogi

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when you’re looking at the mountain in front of you. But exactly how you look at the tangle of tasks can make the difference between responding (i.e. acting) and merely reacting.

How do you think about tasks and time?

Consider the difference between:

1. There are many things that I need to have done
2. There are many things that I need to do right now

#1 leaves you with no chance of feeling good about yourself. You’re already behind! Depending on your personality, this may or may not demoralize and paralyze you.

#2 leaves you open to a persistent case of information overload. With so many things to do right now, you’ve unwittingly given yourself yet another thing to do: figure out which of these zillion things you should really do right now! I know I don’t function well under this kind of pressure. You might be able to, but I’d still like to recommend another approach.

Spend a little time to decide, “what do I have to do first?”

Notice I didn’t say, decide what to do first, second, and third. This is not a plan-a-thon; it’s a survival strategy. You could think of it task triage. The first benefit is that you remove the additional pressure–the information overload pressure–of not knowing which of the many tasks facing you to address first. That’s pretty nice, already. But there’s another benefit that may trump any other you could think of.

With only one thing in front of you to do next, you will be able to start.

You have many choices in how you define that first task. Don’t make it too big. “Just sit down and write the novel” is too big. “Sit down and write the first chapter of the novel” is also too big.

Watch yourself: “Buy a ream of paper” might be too small, or, rather, it may just be you procrastinating. Or…it may in fact be the first thing you need to do before you can make any other forward progress on your novel. You’ve got to be honest with yourself here.

Once you have decided what it is you have to do first, and then after you have accomplished that task, the next step is clear: you decide (again), “what do I have to do first?”

Photo: James Jordan

It used to be the “mailing list.” Now, it’s generally just called “The List.” Building and maintaining your List takes time, especially if you’re aiming for 10,000+ list members.

I find it helpful to have reminders at hand as to what I’m doing and why I’m doing it when I’m working on a long-term project, so here are four properties of a list that I hope will help you keep on track when building or maintaining your own List:

1. The List is a form of capital

Your list is a resource, but don’t think of it as a consumable. It generally takes other resources (time, at the very least) to build the list, and some ways of building a list are more expensive than others. If I offered to paint a wall-sized fresco of the Albuquerque downtown skyline (actual size) for anyone who will sign up on my list, I’d run out of time, money, and the willingness to look at the Albuquerque downtown skyline long before I had a list built.

Alternatively, if I gave away a PDF file with blueprints of my own design for a 1/20th scale model of the Duomo in Florence in exchange for a signup on my list, I’d have much less work on my hands. After I’ve put together the PDF, there’s no more effort involved in providing 20,000 digital copies than there is in providing 20.

Once you’ve built your list, it has an intrinsic value, regardless of how much effort went into building it. At that point, knowing how much time and effort was required to build the list, you will gladly put in the time needed to maintain your list capital.

2. The List is principal – don’t fritter it away

This goes along with the non-consumable nature of the list. Don’t sell out your list, and don’t squeeze the list for money. If you do, some members might still buy something from you, but they won’t like you for it, and they’ll leave. Instead, by providing value to the members of your list on an ongoing basis, you can expect to receive dividends in return. It’s a longer-term outlook. Think in terms of mutual benefit, and you’ll do well.

3. A business is made up of relationships, and that’s exactly what The List is

Selling a single product can bring some income, but getting orders for a product isn’t nearly as important as getting re-orders. If you’re getting re-orders, you have a business. And the only way to get re-orders is by building relationships. That’s the heart of the List idea.

4. The List isn’t a community in itself

Through your list, you have a relationship with each member. In general, however, the list members don’t have direct relationships with each other. Now if you work at it, you can bring some of the trappings of community to your list, by sharing selected members’ comments and questions with the rest of the list, for example.

There are different community/list mixtures available if you want to experiment. A blog with comments enabled will still have you at the center of the discussion, but participants can relate to one another directly through the comments. A discussion forum that you moderate would be still more community-focused. Besides the limits on your time, there’s nothing to keep you from building a list, running a blog, and moderating a discussion forum if you want to.

What questions or concerns do you have about building a list? Are they “why” questions, “how” questions, “when” questions? Or maybe “whether” questions? Please post your comments by clicking on the “Comment” button or in the comment window below this post. If you’re reading this post through an RSS or email feed, please stop by the studionontroppo.com site and share your thoughts. I look forward to your comments and questions!

Photo: jeremyfoo

I’ve written before about the virtues of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system. I still think there’s nothing like it for taming information overload and actually “getting things done.”

But it’s not easy for most mortals to keep the GTD machine purring along, day in and day out. There are times when I find myself adding more and more to my inbox without taking the time to process all the new material coming in. Soon, I have dozens of parallel projects that aren’t behaving.

They all seem to shout, “take care of me now!”

It can take me awhile to see that my GTD system needs a tune-up. Over the past couple of weeks for example, the tasks and projects kept piling up, and I thought I had everything organized well enough to manage them. But then I noticed how I was feeling: frustrated, overwhelmed, and under too much pressure.

I realized I hadn’t done my GTD “weekly review” for about three weeks.

The weekly review is where all the inbox items get processed. It’s a housecleaning of the mansion of projects. Not a full-blown spring cleaning, but the kind of cleaning where you at least go into all the rooms to make sure you know where you’re living.

When life is especially fluid, when projects are being born or morphing structurally every day, it can be moving too quickly to take good notes. But these are the times when it’s especially critical to regroup by doing your GTD weekly review.

I’m going to do mine today.

Photo: greefus groinks

If there’s one thing that’s easy to do these days, it would be to sell exclusive information on how to make money online. There are a few requirements:

1. a good sales letter

OK, so maybe there’s only this one requirement. [Cue the laugh track]

Now, chances are you are not currently selling exclusive information on how to make money online.  Instead, you may be interested in setting up a business to make money online.  If this describes you, and if you’re considering purchasing a book or program to help you set up such a business, caveat emptor!

But let me elaborate.

You generally don’t have to worry that you might be swindled, that your credit card will be charged and you won’t receive anything in return. This really isn’t a common problem, especially if you’ve done your homework and looked at what people have to say about the products and companies you’re considering.

No, what you need to beware of is this: the product you purchase will probably have a lot of accurate, hard-won, insightful information, but you will feel overwhelmed by the prospect of actually implementing it.

You know intellectually that if it were really that easy to be making an income online, everybody would be doing it, so it can’t be that easy.  But a well-written sales letter can suspend your reservations, making you want to believe its claims.  In addition, if you go ahead and purchase the product, you may be convincing yourself in a mysterious, semi-conscious way that it will be easy for you to implement the program and that your success will be immediate.

But it won’t work out that way.

Instead, when faced with the twin realizations that 1) the product you paid for contains valid information, and 2) you don’t have immediate (read “instant”) success, you may decide it’s not possible for you to make money online, leading you to give up.  You’ll find yourself rationalizing that this project is just too hard.

That’s the emptor I’m talking about: you thought this was going to be easy (you’re not thick, after all!), but now you believe it’s too hard, and you are disheartened.  This feeling is really what you have to beware of.

What to do?

Consider this important, but often overlooked psychological truth: other people’s achievements can seem impossible to replicate when you are not privy to the individual steps they took to get there.

Social psychologist Ellen J. Langer describes this effect in her book Mindfulness:

Our judgments about the intelligence of others can be distorted by an emphasis on outcome. In an informal inquiry, my students and I asked people to evaluate the intelligence of scientists who had achieved an “impressive” intellectual outcome (such as discovering a new planet or inventing a new drug). When the achievement was described as a series of steps (and virtually all achievements can be broken down in this way), they judged the scientist as less smart than when the discovery or invention was simply named. People can imagine themselves taking steps, while great heights seem entirely forbidding. (p. 76)

The task before you was claimed to be easy but then felt impossible. By looking at it afresh as a process requiring a series of steps, and by using failure well, you can regain the confidence you need to get to work.

Photo: L.Brumm Photography

We all know that advice is overrated (except our advice to others, which is unheeded). It’s just hard to acquire wisdom through advice-giving.

We also all know the “other person’s shoes” idea, how experiencing something from another point of view can bring insight.

I’m not going to give advice in this post; I’ll just tell a (short) story.

My day job for years has been as an educator. Educators are fond of talking about how a good teacher is always learning. I’ve heard myself say this many times, I believe it, and I thought I was practicing it, too. It’s funny, though, that it was only recently that I signed up to take a course, the first college-level course I’ve enrolled in since 1997.

It’s an art studio course, and wow is it hard work!

Only now do I remember what it feels like to be a student.

The instructor explains something, and I think I understand, but I can’t put it in to practice.

Or: I’m thinking about what she just said, and I realize I’ve just missed the next four things she said.

Or: My classmates easily pick up some techniques I find nearly impossible, and I find other techniques straightforward and see my classmates struggle.

Or: I know I’m there to learn and not for a grade, but I feel the pressure of the imminent grade.

Or: I go through frustration, despair, impatience, perseverance, more despair, and then relief over the course of a single homework assignment.

The class is an extended interaction, more than a survey form or a role-play or an experiment that I set up, control, and evaluate.

Now we’re cooking with gas!

Photo: .Baz

Thanks to a blogger who has done this before and documented his methods, I was able to move the Studio Non Troppo blog to its new host without any major problems. The only apparent casualty has been the plugin I use to upload photos to the blog, which will take some time to troubleshoot, but it looks like all other systems are go. Edit: I just had to change one setting in the ‘Miscellaneous’ panel – the plugin is working fine now.

Of the methods I’ve seen for transferring a WordPress blog to a new web host, this one was the easiest. The WP-DBManager plugin (written by Lester Chan) did all the heavy lifting. If you’re going to attempt this, make sure you have updated your WordPress installation and the WP-DBManager plugin to the latest versions.

I’ll write more soon about web hosts and the challenges involved in finding a good one. For now, though, I’ll sign off, reminding you to make your site backups. “Have you saved yet?”