Advice: Bowing to a higher authority

Everyone in life (and indeed everyone in business) has skills and experience unique to them – skills and experience gained from education, from years of working on the job, or gained from unique insights and moments of inspiration.

I know for sure that my experience, while broad (and hopefully fairly deep!) is partly due to my insatiable need to learn. If I’m not actively working on a client’s project, I’m ‘working’ on my knowledge – talking to other like-minded souls, or surfing the internet, reading or watching those who inspire me.

I’d suggest that as an individual, we don’t need to be able to amass 100% of the skills we need all by ourselves – in fact, we simply can’t – and that apart from the odd moments of epiphany, we gain our skills and experience by absorbing information from other rich sources – our own stable of mentors.

So – who are my own ‘rich sources’ of pure gold? Who are my mentors? Let me introduce you to a couple…

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Seth Godin (http://sethgodin.typepad.com)

Seth Godin is the master marketer of the internet. And if that title isn’t enough, I’d also add that he’s the master of *common-sense* marketing. Full stop.

Sure, ‘marketing’ can be both an amazing mix of art, science and manipulation – a force used for good as well as evil – but Seth manages to come up with daily insights of such clarity and common-sense as to be virtually indisputable. It’s hard to argue against the obvious. In that regard, he’s the Jerry Seinfeld of the internet/marketing worlds.

Take these gem, from just the last week:

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The hierarchy of success by Seth Godin

I think it looks like this:

1. 1. Attitude
   2. Approach
   3. Goals
   4. Strategy
   5. Tactics
   6. Execution

We spend all our time on execution. Use this word instead of that one. This web host. That color. This material or that frequency of mailing.

Big news: No one ever succeeded because of execution tactics learned from a Dummies book.

Tactics tell you what to execute. They’re important, but dwarfed by strategy. Strategy determines which tactics might work.

But what’s the point of a strategy if your goals aren’t clear, or contradict?

Which leads the first two, the two we almost never hear about.

Approach determines how you look at the project (or your career). But as far as I’m concerned, the most important of all, the top of the hierarchy is attitude.

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Dang, he’s a smart guy. The author of and the many best-sellers in the fields of internet/marketing, such as: Permission Marketing, Small is the New Big, Purple Cow, and most recently, Tribes.

From his web site, http://sethgodin.typepad.com/, you can get daily nuggets, and you can also follow links to download *free* ebooks – free in exchange for permission to email you, of course. But what awesome emails!

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43 Signals

(http://37signals.com with their free ebook at http://gettingreal.37signals.com)

These guys/this company is the author/originator of the Basecamp.com family of web sites – web sites aimed at filling the gap between full blown ‘project management tools’ for huge projects, and ‘mountainous piles of paper’ for the rest of us.

They single-handed created the niche of small-group management tools; they inadvertently developed a massively popular web development tool called Ruby on Rails; and they are proponents of their own theory of building businesses (especially internet-based businesses) called ‘Getting Real’.

Their ebook is free to read online at http://gettingreal.37signals.com or you can pay a tiny fee to download it and/or print it out as a PDF.

‘Getting Real’ details the most common-sense approach to keeping your business lean, in profit, and focussed on single goals at a time – as opposed to the alternative of ‘building it and they will come’. They outline the initial starting phases of finding and defining a problem that your business will address, right through to pricing models, publicising your business, and on into growth phases of your business.

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If you haven’t figured it out already, the common thread between these two of my mentors is their unarguable common-sense. What they point out so clearly is just so plain *obvious*, that it elevates them to ‘super-guru status’ in my opinion.

So – who are your gurus? Who are your mentors? Care to share a couple? Leave your thoughts in the comments, and we’ll see if we can ‘share the love’.

AB out