Follow Through-but really
My father…A million things could be said about this man but one of his most intriguing points is that he loves self help books in all forms. He doesn’t discriminate. He buys emotional self help books, financial, entrepreneurial, relational, the whole nine yards. When my father goes out and buys these things, he gets really into them for several weeks and mentions them all the time, and then nothing changes. The finances stay the same, the house stays the same, the girlfriend (or lack thereof) stays the same. But he reads these things because he has never actually believed in himself fully. He cannot commit to his ideas gung-ho because he has never proven to himself that he has any follow through.
Here are two of my dad’s favorite self help guys in one single radio podcast. Tim Ferris, author of the Four Hour Workweek, and Ramit Sethi, author of I Will Teach You To Be Rich, discuss how wonderful they are and where they came from. Two off the wall guys talk about using persuasion psychology to basically make millions of dollars off of other people. Sethi talks about how he and his friends are completely different from the pack. They don’t talk the ways other people do in interviews, they completely and whole heartedly believe in themselves when they walk into a room. They are assured of their adequacy by others because they pretend to have it at all times. What is this and where does it come from? Why isn’t there a woman in this conversation? How do we get a woman in this conversation?
Marketing is all about believing that what you have is the RIGHT thing. What you have to give to the world is the only answer and whatever you do with it has to be right? Or am I wrong in that belief?
Sethi tells a story about how he was writing a blog for three years without any readership but he kept emailing the Wall Street Journal to let them know when he posted a new blog or when he did a talk somewhere. They couldn’t figure out how he got their emails and they wanted him to go away but he didn’t. How does a person decide that they are allowed to do that? He was basically intellectually harrassing them and nothing was done about it except that he was rewarded for it by finally getting an interview with them. That day his blog got 9000 views. He says it taught him that if you just stay in the game for a little longer than everyone else, you can get ahead. But is that what I take away from that? What I see is a person who wouldn’t stop annoying a bunch of people and they finally gave into him, and now he is a success. Is it in the interest of every person trying to reach mass audiences to stop caring what other people think and focus on just disturbing them as much as possible, knowing that eventually your ideas will sink into their heads?
Tim Ferris goes on to talk about how his climb came when his work was guest published on other people’s sites. Neither of these guys made it without the help of others and that is so extremely important. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from, if you don’t have people in positions of power helping you along the way, you have no readership. The biggest way to get out there is to connect with other people. So now we need another self help book…about socializing. And Go! Here’s where my dad would recommend starting:
