It isn't enough to think outside the box. Thinking is passive. Get used to acting outside the box.
Tim FerrissRead
The reason I was successful in launching my first book with bloggers is this: I assumed that I should spend as much time on a blogger with a million-person readership as I would pitching an editor of a publication with a million person subscription-base.
Interpretation
Success comes from treating all opportunities equally, regardless of their platform or audience size.
Tim Ferriss emphasizes the importance of dedicating equal effort to all channels of promotion, treating influential bloggers with large followings as seriously as traditional editors. This approach highlights the value of diverse platforms in achieving success, suggesting that both can have a significant impact on reaching a larger audience.
In practice
In a seminar on book marketing, I shared a quote by Tim Ferriss to emphasize the importance of diverse outreach strategies.
It isn't enough to think outside the box. Thinking is passive. Get used to acting outside the box.
The way we measure productivity is flawed. People checking their BlackBerry over dinner is not the measure of productivity.
It's just astonishing to me, but not surprising in some respects, how dependent we are on the somewhat meaningless and certainly ephemeral feedback that we get from strangers on the Internet. I think that's a dangerous dependence to develop.
I always point people to the article '1,000 True Fans' by Kevin Kelly. If you choose your thousand ideal customers or readers properly and find the single author blog that targets that audience, you never have to do any more marketing. You're done. That is a lesson that very few product developers and marketers have learned, and it's unfortunate.
By using money as the scapegoat and work as our all-consuming routine, we are able to conveniently disallow ourselves to do otherwise: 'John, I'd love to talk about the gaping void I feel in my life, the hopelessness that hits me like a punch in the eye every time I start my computer in the morning, but I have so much work to do! I've got at least three hours of unimportant email to reply to before calling prospects who said 'no' yesterday. Gotta run!
Being busy is a form of laziness - lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.
The best part of basketball, for those people on the inside, is the bus going to the airport after you've won a game on an opponent's floor. It's been a very tough battle. And preferably, in the playoffs. And that feeling that you have, together as a group, having gone to an opponent's floor and won a very good victory, is as about as high as you can get.
Fame itself... doesn't really afford you anything more than a good seat in a restaurant.
If you're running a business for the long term, the last thing you should be doing is borrowing money to buy back stock.
I've learned over the years that when it comes to success, consistency is key. Consistent hard work that we may not like doing today, but for a payoff we'll love tomorrow. Earn it. Enjoy it.
My dreams do not end with playing Major League Baseball.
Victory is the beautiful, bright-colored flower. Transport is the stem without which it could never have blossomed.
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