How Disney Innovates and Stays Relevant and Strong

Walt Disney certainly never worried about getting the old thoughts out of his mind, did he? He was always 3 steps ahead of just about all his competitors and would-be competitors. Very good at how disney innovates and spotting trends.

And once spotted, he certainly knew what action was required to take advantage of them. It is a very important skill and a factor in Disney’s innovation, even today. An important way to start the process of managing business change and adaptation.

Most businesses do not manage change. Change takes them by surprise. Not a good thing. What these businesses do best is manage the conflict wrought by change.

Reacting does not equate to anticipating … you must improve your trend watching and anticipating skills so you can change before you have to. A good thing.

Let’s get back to Walt Disney and his abilities in trend spotting and rifts. Rift … what is a rift you may ask? A rift is a big tear in the rules we live by. Not a small tear, a fundamental change in the game type of tear. One that creates a small number of BIG, new winners, and bunches of losers who were sticking steadfastly to the old rules.

Walt was a three-time rifter. Can’t think of any others in that category. He was one of the few people who have successfully managed to find a rift in the continuum of business life, to bet everything he had on it, and to then make great profit in doing it. And, amazingly, he did it three times. Let’s examine these rifts as a way to learn about spotting trends and acting on them.

Rift 1 … Motion Pictures
The first rift, or trend, that Walt discovered was the motion picture. He noticed early on that movies would drastically change the world of entertainment. Anticipating that there would be a high demand for family-oriented entertainment, he pioneered the development of the animated movie. His first film perfecting the form was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937. And the fantastic growth of the rift was launched.
But he was not one to rest on his success … not at all. He kept looking for another chance in the rules that would create further opportunities for his business enterprises.

Rift 2 … The automobile
The second rift was in the form of the automobile. Walt speculated that the car was going to change the way that families would get to entertainment. His vision was a strategically located, extravagantly designed theme park that could add a new leg to family entertainment and vacations. And take advantage of the new way of family travel rift. So, beginning with California’s Disneyland in 1955, he added a new business around this rift and it has dominated the theme park industry to this day.

Rift 3 … Television
He was now a giant in the entertainment business, but he was able to spot a third rift and opportunity: television. Many people regarded television simply as in-home movies. Walt, however, saw it as an entirely different medium. So with properties like the Mickey Mouse Club, he established a third business to produce a never-ending stream of content for this new market.
Walt Disney was a three-time winner, someone who had a great vision to not only spot important trends but also to see the opportunities that these trends created.

So what recommendations can we draw from Walt’s experiences? Here are three that we offer:

Culture of Revolution
An organization’s culture underlies its ability to adapt and times of dramatic change magnify culture’s importance. Work to create the culture of change of revolution. From this culture, you can spark a new paradigm for creative change from which your strategies will be derived.

Spotting trends and rifts
Innovation and competitive advantage hinge on your effectiveness in anticipating trends and identifying the next big thing. Invest energy and continuously work to improve your abilities to anticipate the important imminent changes. Filter through all the noise and chaos, cull out the trends and identify the opportunities that will be created. Focus your team’s creativity on the most important of these opportunities.

Adaptive innovation
Our government and the business world have invested billions of dollars and significant time and energy to perfect human creativity. Apply the best of these practices to jump-start your teams’ abilities in your own field focusing on the end state of new customer priorities.

How to Improve the Creativity Skill

Don’t fall prey to the myth that only some people have the creativity skill and you are not of the chosen few. We are all creative; it’s just a matter of figuring out in what way. So find things you’re curious about and are interesting to you, use your imagination a little, stay motivated and work at it, and surround yourself with others who are doing the same.

So how do you boost creativity? Here are 8 suggestions to improve your ability to exercise ideation:

Be a detective
Creatives and innovators always have enquiring minds. Are you asking enough questions to get deeper and understand the problem as much as you can?

Make quiet time
Most ordinary days of the average people include an enormous amount of multitasking. Multitasking is, of course, is very destructive to the time and space of good creative thinking. Set time aside for team members’ quiet time to stimulate and let the mind wander until ideas flow.

Challenge good
The phrases good enough, this has always worked, and this is all the time we have to devote to this problem, etc. are very destructive to team creativity. Avoid these at all costs as they are enemy #1 to the best results.

Foster Autonomy
We all prefer control over our environments. According to a 2008 study by Harvard University, there is a direct correlation between people who have the ability to call their own shots and the value of their creative output. An employee who has to run every tiny detail by her boss for approval will quickly become numb to the creative process.
The act of creativity is one of self-expression. Granting autonomy involves extending trust. By definition, your team may make decisions you would have made differently. The key is to provide a clear message of what results you are looking for or what problem you want the team to solve. From there, you need to extend trust and let them do their best work.

Divergent thinking
Try the quantity approach to new ideas. Use brainstorming to improve divergent thinking. Study and then connect ideas to get new ideas.

Add play to the equation
When looking for fresh new thinking to solve a problem, shake things up by adding some fun and play to the process. It always has the ability to shed stress and pressure on a team.

Avoid these myths: Myths on Creativity … 17 to Stop Telling Yourself Now

Explore new experiences
Open up your new idea thinking. Do things in new and untried ways. Avoid the set ways of solving problems.

Experiment
Do as much experimentation as you can. Don’t worry about failures and allow the team to question any and all assumptions and consider even the craziest ideas.

My Favorite Google Chrome Extensions for Social Media Marketers

What has changed in the world of Chrome extensions? A great deal. New extensions are continually emerging that can drastically change the day-to-day habits of social media marketers. Plus, a few classic extensions have undergone impressive upgrades.

Check out this list of the best Google Chrome extensions for social media marketers, and start saving some valuable time and effort at work.

Momentum

Sitting down at work and firing up your computer only to be faced with an overflowing inbox isn’t the best way to start your day. This extension offers a beautiful way to get in the right headspace before getting bogged down with scheduling posts, replying to followers, monitoring hashtags, creating new content, and everything else a busy social media manager is responsible for on a daily basis.

The Momentum extension replaces your “new tab” homepage with a gorgeous new photo every day along with a personalized greeting. Momentum also allows you to set one main goal for the day and keep track of a longer to-do list, helping you stay focused throughout the day. You’ll see the local weather in the top right corner, a list of links you frequently visit to the left, and a motivational quote at the bottom of the page.

Stay Focused

Just because social media managers get paid to be on the sites that other people use to waste time doesn’t mean they don’t suffer from bouts of intense procrastination elsewhere on the web. Thankfully, technology can be a source of discipline as much as it is a source of distraction.

StayFocusd is an extension that limits the amount of time you can spend on certain websites (a.k.a. the ones that you visit instead of doing work). Once you’ve used up your allotted time, you can’t visit the site again for the rest of the day. You can get pretty granular with what you choose to block as well, whether it’s an entire site, a specific page, or even certain types of content like videos, games, or images.

Evernote Web Clipper

Social media managers typically have to switch between their creative and strategic hats throughout the day, often needing to wear them at the same time. Jumping back and forth between these two dynamics during a busy day can cause even the most organized person to feel a little frayed. Enter: Evernote.

The Evernote Web Clipper extension allows you to clip any article or web page and save it in one place. Alongside the notes and to-do lists that you can create in Evernote itself, this extension allows you to pull in key text from any website or article you find while doing research online. This is also a great way for you to collect content to share on social without having to keep 20 tabs open all day.

Grammarly

Publishing a post with a spelling mistake is a nightmare for social media managers—and rightly so. While the occasional error happens to everyone from time to time, consistent mistakes can damage your brand’s credibility. Grammarly can help catch them all, including the mistakes that manage to evade the usual red squiggly line: an incorrect verb tense, a missing article before a plural noun, or the misuse of a comma.

The Grammarly extension can catch over 250 types of errors, many of which aren’t typically caught by spellcheckers. Along with catching your mistakes, Grammarly can actually help you write better overall, by offering synonym suggestions in line with the context of what you’re writing.

Figure it Out

The biggest challenge when working globally often has nothing to do with language barriers or cultural nuances—it’s figuring out what time it is in a different region without doing the math on your fingers under your desk. The Figure it Out extension allows you to add up to 10 time zones to your “new tab” screen, which should help make scheduling posts or setting up meetings with different regions super easy. Figure it Out also displays regional national holidays, so you can avoid posting your best social content on a day when no one will be paying attention.

Actions That Are Limiting Your Business Innovation

On December 9th, 1968, a research project funded by the US Department of Defense launched a revolution. The focus was not a Cold War adversary or even a resource rich banana republic, but rather to “augment human intellect” and the man driving it was not a general, but a mild mannered engineer named Douglas Engelbart. The key was business innovation.

His presentation that day would be so consequential that it is now called The Mother of All Demos. Two of those in attendance, Bob Taylor and Alan Kay would go on to develop Engelbart’s ideas into the Alto, the first truly personal computer. Later, Steve Jobs would take many elements of the Alto to create the Macintosh.

So who deserves credit? Engelbart for coming up with the idea? Taylor and Kay for engineering solutions around it? Jobs for creating a marketable product that made an impact on the world? Strong arguments can be made for each, as well as for many others not mentioned here. The truth is that there are many paths to innovation. Here are some of them.

Innovation Is Never A Single Event

Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, but it wasn’t until 15 years later, in 1943, that the miracle drug came into widespread use. Alan Turing came up with the idea of auniversal computer in 1936, but it wasn’t until 1946 that one was actually built and not until the 1990’s that computers began to impact productivity statistics.

We tend to think of innovation as arising from a single brilliant flash of insight, but the truth is that it is a drawn out process involving the discovery of an insight, the engineering a solution and then the transformation of an industry or field. That’s almost never achieved by one person or even within one organization.

Innovation Is Combination

The reason that Fleming was unable to bring Penicillin to market was that, as a biologist, he lacked many of the requisite skills. It wasn’t until a decade later that two chemists, Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain, picked up the problem and were able to synthesize penicillin. Even then, it took people with additional expertise in fermentation and manufacturing to turn it into the miracle cure we know today.

This isn’t the exception, but the norm. Darwin’s theory of natural selection borrowed ideas from Thomas Malthus, an economist and Charles Lyell, a geologist. Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA was not achieved by simply plowing away at the lab, but by incorporating discoveries in biology, chemistry and x-ray diffraction to inform their model building.

Great innovation almost never occurs within one field of expertise, but is almost invariably the product of synthesis across domains.

First, Ask The Right Questions

Too often, we treat innovation as a monolith, as if every problem was the same, but that’s clearly not the case. In laboratories and factory floors, universities and coffee shops, or even over a beer after work, people are sussing out better ways to do things. There is no monopoly on creative thought.

But that leads us to a problem: How should we go about innovation? Should we hand it over to the guys with white lab coats? An external partner? A specialist in the field? Crowdsource it? What we need is a clear framework for making decisions.

As I wrote in Harvard Business Review, the best way to start is by asking the right questions: (1) How well is the problem defined? and (2) How well is the domain defined? Once you’ve asked those framing questions, you can start defining a sensible way to approach the problem using the innovation matrix.

Clearly, no one method can suffice. Look at any great innovator, whether it is Apple, Tesla or Google, and you’ll find a portfolio of strategies. So the first step toward solving a difficult problem is asking the questions you need to define your approach. To paraphrase Voltaire, if you need to solve a problem, first define your terms.

There Is No Optimal Size For Innovation

When most people think about innovation, they think about startups. And certainly, new firms like Uber, Airbnb and Space X can transform markets. But others such as IBM, Procter and Gamble and 3M have managed to stay on top for decades, even as competitors rise up to challenge them and then, when markets shift, disappear just as quickly into oblivion.

While it’s true that small, agile firms can move fast, larger enterprises have the luxury of going slow. They have loyal customers and an abundance of resources. They can see past the next hot trend and invest for the long term. There’s a big difference between hitting on the next big thing and developing it consistently, generation after generation.

Leverage Open Innovation To Expand Your Capabilities

When Microsoft launched Kinect for the Xbox in 2010, it quickly became the hottest consumer device ever, selling 8 million units in just the first two months. Almost immediately, hackers began altering its capabilities to do things that Microsoft never intended. Yet instead of asking them to stop, it embraced the hackers, quickly releasing a software development kit to help them along.

Like Microsoft, many firms today are embracing open innovation to expand capabilities. Cisco outfoxed Lucent not by developing technology itself, but by smartly acquiring startups. Procter & Gamble has found great success with its Connect and Develop program and platforms like Innocentive allow firms to expose thorny problems to a more diverse skill set.

As was the case with Alexander Fleming and penicillin, most firms will find that solving their most important problems will require skills and expertise they don’t have. That means that, at some point, they will need to utilize partners and platforms to go beyond their own internal capabilities of technology and talent.

Simplifying Your Marketing Content

Let’s not mess around with it. Here is how simplifying your marketing content pays off.

We all get stuck sometimes. We think we know what to write. But when we open a Word doc, the words don’t flow.

We try to blame it on writer’s block.

But the hard truth is this …

We’re still confused about what we want to communicate. We wrestle with complexity. We don’t know the essence of our unwieldy idea.

Sound familiar?

A few simple principles can help you distill the essence of your message, and communicate with power and clarity.

Want to know how?

1. Start with the right question

Ever feel like an idea is too multi-faceted with threads of thoughts moving in all directions?

And you can’t figure out how to weave all these ideas together into one coherent piece of content?

Step back and isolate one simple question.

In their book The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking, Edward B. Burger and Michael Starbird suggest:

Consider a subject you wish to understand, and clear the clutter until you have isolated one essential ingredient. Each complicated issue has several possible core ideas. You are not seeking “the” essential idea; you are seeking just one—consider a subject and pare it down to one theme.

Let’s say you want to write a post about how to build a thriving business online. This question is complex and unwieldy.

Firstly, what type of online business are we talking about? Promoting a freelance writing business online is different from building a Software-as-a-Service business.

Secondly, when you want to know about building an online business, do you want to learn more about business processes or marketing tactics or about picking the right idea?

So, instead of trying to answer all ideas in one go, start with one simple question. Write about how to generate business ideas, how to do a quick feasibility study, or how to pick one business idea.

To simplify your ideas, simplify your question first.

2. Reduce clutter

The principle of cutting away the clutter to clarify an idea sounds straightforward.

But what is clutter?

When is nuance helpful and when does nuance become clutter?

Imagine a remote control with only an on/off button. It’s simple, but not very useful, is it? To add more functionality, you need more buttons, so complexity increases.

But how many buttons does a remote control need?

The answer depends on the user’s wishes and what product he wants to control.

In his book The Laws of Simplicity, John Maeda describes this as the balance between “How simple can you make it?” and “How simple does it have to be?”

A similar tension exists in writing. How simple can you make your message? When have you cleared so much clutter that your content becomes meaningless?

To understand when nuance becomes clutter, think about your reader. What information is essential so he can understand your ideas and follow your advice?

3. Rewrite and rewrite again

Achieving simplicity requires taking a step back and then looking at your content again with fresh eyes. What’s the aim of your content? And how can you simplify your writing to achieve that aim?

Simplicity is hard to achieve.

Shane Parrish suggests that even Charles Darwin found it hard to express himself clearly and concisely. Darwin wrote down his ideas quickly, and then went back to them again and again.

Rewrite, rewrite, and rewrite again.

When you give your ideas time to blossom, you give yourself an opportunity to make your writing clearer. So write your content over several days.

And don’t stop writing after you’ve answered one question. Revisit topics to deepen your understanding. Find an even simpler question or branch out to follow different threads of thought.

You can understand anything better than you currently do.
~ Edward B. Burger and Michael Starbird

4. Organize

One blog post has the perfect length to answer one simple question.

But what if your readers ask complex questions? And what if you want to help them make sense of complexity?

This is where organization comes in.

Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.
~ John Maeda

Let’s think about a book. Each chapter of a book answers one simple question. Together, these chapters answer a bigger question, like this:

You can apply a similar principle to your blog.

First, create a series of blog posts answering the simple questions. Then, create a page or blog post as a collection of these questions—show how you break down a complex question into smaller questions. Such content is often called cornerstone content.

My blog post about how to improve your writing skills is an example of cornerstone content. First, it breaks down the question of improving writing skills into:

Which writing techniques do you need to learn?
What writing habits can we nurture?
How can we write with substance?
Where do we find inspiration to keep improving our writing?

Next, it breaks each of these questions down into simpler questions. For instance, the question about writing techniques includes:

What’s a good sentence?
How do you choose words?
How do you make your writing flow smoothly?
How do you use metaphors?
How do you write mini-stories?

Once you’ve answered the simple questions, answering a big question becomes easier. A matter of organization.

5. Draw pictures

When I wrestle with an unwieldy topic, I start scribbling.

Even writing down a few words and drawing arrows can help clarify my thoughts.

Stop thinking of drawing as an artistic process. Drawing is a thinking process.
~ Dan Roam

How to communicate with power and clarity

Learning to write well means learning to think well.

And that means re-learning how to ask questions.

Remember when you were a kid, and kept asking questions?

Look at the world again with fresh eyes. Be a child again. Learn to be comfortable with not knowing answers, and you’ll discover new lessons and fresh ideas.

Follow your curiosity.

That’s how you learn more and enrich your life.

Looking for Something New in Creativity?

What I lack in natural writing talent I make up for in experiences. Over the years, I have worked in a number of different businesses and business cultures. that led to something new in creativity. I also read widely and have worked with some really talented and smart people. That gives me a lot of raw material to work with.

Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire find the same thing in their new book, Wired to Create. “Openness to experience, one of the “Big Five” personality traits, is absolutely essential to creativity,” they write. “Openness to experience comes in many forms, from a love of solving complex problems in math, science and technology to a voracious love of learning, to an inclination to ask big questions and seek a deeper meaning in life.”

So one simple way to improve your creativity is to simply try to get more out of life. Seek out things, people and places that you wouldn’t usually encounter in your ordinary routine. Truly great creativity comes from synthesizing across domains, not just drilling down in one single area.

Many people assume that there is an inverse relationship between quantity and quality and, logically speaking, it would make sense to focus on fewer projects rather than to spread your energy over many. It would seem that would allow you more time to concentrate on the work most likely to make an impact.

However, creativity researchers have consistently found just the opposite. The more work you produce the more likely you are to come up with something truly creative. Part of that is probably just the numbers game. A masterwork is a low probability event, so those who produce more increase their odds.

Yet there is also another factor at work. The more you produce, the more skilled you become and the more you can experiment with different combinations. Those experiments invariably lead you to see more possibilities and try them out. So producing a lot will help you see things that others don’t and increase your ability to pursue new possibilities.

The truth is that creativity is hard work. There are no silver bullets. The only way to create successfully is to get your ideas out there, find the flaws and get to work fixing them.

Einstein once said that “If I had 20 days to solve a problem, I would take 19 days to define it.” It’s important to build in constraints that will frame a possible solution and, as Robert Weisberg points out in his book Creativity, brainstorming often fails for exactly this reason.

The evidence on this point couldn’t be clearer. Successful creative people spend years learning their fields before they begin to change them. So if you want to create something truly new and different, your best bet is to start by learning your field extremely well.

As I’ve written before, breakthrough innovation happens when ideas are synthesized from more than one domain. Pick any important discovery, whether it is Darwin and natural selection, Picasso and cubism, Einstein and relativity and invariably they used concepts from two or more fields.

Remember, creative geniuses tend to be less the ones with the quickest answers and more the ones who keep working till they get it right.

Looking for Something New in Creativity?

What I lack in natural writing talent I make up for in experiences. Over the years, I have worked in a number of different business, new in creativity, and in a variety of different countries and cultures. I also read widely and have worked with some really talented and smart people. That gives me a lot of raw material to work with.

The truth is that creativity is hard work. There are no silver bullets. The only way to create successfully is to get your ideas out there, find the flaws and get to work fixing them.

Remember, creative geniuses tend to be less the ones with the quickest answers and more the ones who keep working till they get it right.

11 Ways Your Hard Work Will Get Overlooked

You put in the time, you feel like you’re giving 110 percent to the job and to your agency/company, but it just doesn’t feel like you’re getting something out of it. Maybe you want recognition? Maybe you want growth? You maybe even want a promotion? How do you make sure that all your hard work gets noticed and yields what you want out of your job? Here are some tips.

First off, it isn’t always about working harder. There are numerous times when, as a manager, you see people who are working incredibly hard, but doing the wrong things. Or they are doing too many things to such a degree that the most important things aren’t getting the attention they deserve. Obviously, the manager’s responsibility is to help redirect that activity, but sometimes that is even harder to do than it sounds.

So many of us are driven to get everything done all the time with 110 percent effort — A+ work. However, that is rarely a possibility given the time and budget constraints of every business and employee. So, more important than knocking out an impossible task list, are you doing the right things and doing those at the 110 percent level while getting comfortable with letting go of the least important things? It’s OK to get a D- in some classes here in Working World University; that gets you valedictorian status here as long as you’re getting A++ in the right places.

Care about the details

I can’t tell you how often I hear from college students that they’re really good at “strategy” and that’s where they’re best suited within a business. They see strategy as big-picture thinking and idea generation. I find that, typically, they’re overlooking everything it takes to get into a role like that.

First and foremost, you have to be able to execute first and get the details of your role right every time. That means crafting coherent, productive communications consistently, doing your timesheets properly (if those are a part of your job), being on-time and prepared for meetings, and managing your to-do list (aka “Get shit done”). These sound like the basics and maybe even obvious, but they are also the foundation from which you can launch into anything else you want in your career and some of the easiest things to prove that you deserve the next step up in your career.

What matters most to the company?

What are the things that tend to get noticed around your organization? It isn’t the same thing everywhere, and I am sure that, in your organization, there have been other projects, successes, or people that have been noticed or rewarded in your time at the company. What story was told as to why those involved were recognized for their work? What did you observe actually happened? Between those two things (which aren’t always the same thing), you will find the formula.

The unfortunate reality is that, sometimes and in some organizations, no matter how hard you try, if your work doesn’t meet a certain set of criteria, it is easily overlooked. For example, (and I am not saying this is right) new business is king and current client wins are second fiddle. Or award-winning creative gets noticed while the daily grind is less-than. If recognition is what you want, then find your way on to some of the more noticeable projects.

Don’t just do your job, do some others!

To be noticed, doing your job may not be enough. Volunteer for high-visibility projects or activities. Get to know other people in other groups to understand your team’s relationship to another. This might inspire some of your own thinking about what the company needs and how you can solve an important problem. That gets noticed.

Anticipate needs

When you are thinking ahead and prepared for what comes next, people take notice. If you’re the one with the Plan B when a Plan B is needed, then you and your preparation will definitely be noticed.

Start new things

This can feel contradictory to the idea of staying focused on the handful of things that make the most difference. However, this is a worthwhile exception. If you are the person who is leading the way in areas that will make the company better, even in small ways, then it is easy to notice who a group may be following. So even if you’re the one leading the charge to happy hour (tactfully and responsibly, mind you), then leaders see you as someone who takes initiative. That’s a good thing.

Make others look good

If wherever you go, the work around you elevates, then good things happen whether or not you get recognized formally. Team players tend to get more opportunity because the captains picking teams tend to pick people who make the team better.

Show up

When there are opportunities to be seen, you should seize those opportunities. All-company meetings, outings, optional meetings — those are all chances to increase your visibility, learn, interact, and build rapport. With rapport and visibility, your ideas get heard and opportunities arise.

Build relationships

As you interact with others, including your manager or senior leaders, you have the chance to build a relationship. It is OK to make it personal, but only to a point. Keep it professional, too.

Craft your narrative

What is the story you want to tell? What do you want to be known for? That is dependent on the role you want later in your career and what your company values most. If you want to be the hard-worker, then there are ways to illustrate that through effort. If you want to be seen as an invaluable strategic resource, then you need to contribute fresh thinking and new, practical ideas. Be ready with your story and repeat it often because, frankly, managers have other things on their mind and aren’t always the best at providing recognition despite probably wishing they were better at it. You are helping them help you by telling your own story.

Be clear on the win-win

Ultimately, if you’re trying to make the case that you should be recognized for your work or get promoted, you have to not just think of yourself, but also think about the value you have created and will create for the company. It is all about the win-win, and if you’ve started by thinking about what you have done and/or can do beyond what anyone else in your position might do, then you’re in the best possible position to receive the recognition you deserve.

Conclusion

Hopefully, through this article you have distilled these 11 ways into a couple themes. In thinking critically about what I am saying, you will notice that this is generally about creating value beyond your current role by doing a few things well. Then, increase your visibility broadly. And finally, have a good communication plan to feed any future accolades. As with any of the pieces I write, I hope this was helpful in developing your career in marketing. Best of luck!

10 Bad Habits That Are Killing Your Success

When it comes to productivity, the little things make all the difference. Quit sabotaging yourself with these bad habits that are killing your success.

You are the sum of your habits. When you allow bad habits to take over, they dramatically impede your path to success. The challenge is bad habits are insidious, creeping up on you slowly until you don’t even notice the damage they’re causing.

“Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.” — Warren Buffett

Breaking bad habits requires self-control — and lots of it. Research indicates that it’s worth the effort, as self-control has huge implications for success.

University of Pennsylvania psychologists Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman conducted a study where they measured college students’ IQ scores and levels of self-control upon entering university. Four years later, they looked at the students’ grade point averages (GPA) and found that self-control was twice as important as IQ in earning a high GPA.

The self-control required to develop good habits (and stop bad ones) also serves as the foundation for a strong work ethic and highproductivity. Self-control is like a muscle — to build it up you need to exercise it. Practice flexing your self-control muscle by breaking the following bad habits:

Using your phone, tablet or computer in bed.

This is a big one that most people don’t even realize harms their sleep and productivity. Short-wavelength blue light plays an important role in your mood, energy level and sleep quality. In the morning, sunlight contains high concentrations of this blue light. When your eyes are exposed to it directly, the blue light halts production of the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin and makes you feel more alert. In the afternoon, the sun’s rays lose their blue light, which allows your body to produce melatonin and start making you sleepy. By the evening, your brain doesn’t expect any blue light exposure and is very sensitive to it.

Most of our favorite evening devices — laptops, tablets and mobile phones — emit short-wavelength blue light brightly and right in your face. This exposure impairs melatonin production and interferes with your ability to fall asleep as well as with the quality of your sleep once you do nod off. As we’ve all experienced, a poor night’s sleep has disastrous effects. The best thing you can do is to avoid these devices after dinner (television is OK for most people as long as they sit far enough away from the set).

Impulsively surfing the internet.

It takes you 15 consecutive minutes of focus before you can fully engage in a task. Once you do, you fall into a euphoric state of increased productivity called flow. Research shows that people in a flow state are five times more productive than they otherwise would be. When you click out of your work because you get an itch to check the news, Facebook, a sport’s score or what have you, this pulls you out of flow. This means you have to go through another 15 minutes of continuous focus to reenter the flow state. Click in and out of your work enough times, and you can go through an entire day without experiencing flow.

Checking your phone during a conversation.

Nothing turns people off like a mid-conversation text message or even a quick glance at your phone. When you commit to a conversation, focus all your energy on the conversation. You will find that conversations are more enjoyable and effective when you immerse yourself in them.

Using multiple notifications.

Multiple notifications are a productivity nightmare. Studies have shown that hopping on your phone and e-mail every time they ping for your attention causes your productivity to plummet. Getting notified every time a message drops onto your phone or an e-mail arrives in your inbox might feel productive, but it isn’t. Instead of working at the whim of your notifications, pool all your e-mails/texts and check them at designated times (e.g., respond to your e-mails every hour). This is a proven, productive way to work.

Saying “yes” when you should say “no.”

Research conducted at the University of California in San Francisco shows that the more difficulty that you have saying no, the more likely you are to experience stress, burnout and even depression, all of which erode self-control. Saying no is indeed a major self-control challenge for many people. “No” is a powerful word that you should not be afraid to wield. When it’s time to say no, emotionally intelligent people avoid phrases like “I don’t think I can” or “I’m not certain.” Saying no to a new commitment honors your existing commitments and gives you the opportunity to successfully fulfill them. Just remind yourself that saying no is an act of self-control now that will increase your future self-control by preventing the negative effects of over commitment.

Thinking about toxic people.

There are always going to be toxic people who have a way of getting under your skin and staying there. Each time you find yourself thinking about a coworker or person who makes your blood boil, practice being grateful for someone else in your life instead. There are plenty of people out there who deserve your attention, and the last thing you want to do is think about the people who don’t matter when there are people who do.

Multitasking during meetings.

You should never give anything half of your attention, especially meetings. If a meeting isn’t worth your full attention, then you shouldn’t be attending it in the first place; and if the meeting is worth your full attention, then you need to get everything you can out of it. Multitasking during meetings hurts you by creating the impression that you believe you are more important than everyone else.

Gossiping.

Gossipers derive pleasure from other people’s misfortunes. It might be fun to peer into somebody else’s personal or professional faux pas at first, but over time, it gets tiring, makes you feel gross and hurts other people. There are too many positives out there and too much to learn from interesting people to waste your time talking about the misfortune of others.

“Great minds discuss ideas, average ones discuss events and small minds discuss people.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

Waiting to act until you know you’ll succeed.

Most writers spend countless hours brainstorming their characters and plots, and they even write page after page that they know they’ll never include in the books. They do this because they know that ideas need time to develop. We tend to freeze up when it’s time to get started because we know that our ideas aren’t perfect and that what we produce might not be any good. But how can you ever produce something great if you don’t get started and give your ideas time to evolve? Author Jodi Picoult summarized the importance of avoiding perfectionism perfectly: “You can edit a bad page, but you can’t edit a blank page.”

Comparing yourself to other people.

When your sense of pleasure and satisfaction are derived from comparing yourself to others, you are no longer the master of your own happiness. When you feel good about something that you’ve done, don’t allow anyone’s opinions or accomplishments take that away from you. While it’s impossible to turn off your reactions to what others think of you, you don’t have to compare yourself to others and you can always take people’s opinions with a grain of salt. That way, no matter what other people are thinking or doing, your self-worth comes from within. Regardless of what people think of you at any particular moment, one thing is certain — you’re never as good or bad as they say you are.

In Conclusion

By practicing self-control to break these bad habits, you can simultaneously strengthen your self-control muscle and abolish nasty habits that have the power to bring your career to a grinding halt.

10 Terrible Mistakes That Will Kill your Content Strategy

According to the Ascend2 2016 State of Content Marketing survey of both B2B and B2C marketers, lead generation, customer engagement, and brand awareness rank as the top three most frustrating problems for marketers. Content marketing is an effective way to tackle all three, but it requires a content strategy that fits your business needs. And this is where too many of us fail.

Establishing a content strategy is tough work. Refining and constantly improving it is even harder. As a Column Five co-founder, I’ve lived and breathed this reality for the last decade. I’ve often struggled with it, too. But in working through content strategy for both Fortune 100 brands and tiny startups, not to mention our own agency’s efforts, I’ve found that we all face the same struggles—no matter how big our budget is.

We slave and sweat over content. We try to keep publishing pace, but sometimes the work you’re most optimistic about doesn’t pan out. This is often because one step of the execution was off base.

Just because you have a strategy living in a Google doc somewhere doesn’t mean it’s effective. Over and over, the same easy-to-overlook issues have sabotaged seemingly “solid” content strategies (ours included).

The fix? Reassess your strategy through a fresh lens, on a constant basis. Here are 10 things that I believe will help you craft a successful content strategy for your business, all of which I’ve learned the hard way. I hope you won’t have to.

1) Don’t PUT YOUR AUDIENCE FIRST

The is the most crucial part of content strategy that is somehow often overlooked from the get-go. You sit down to craft your strategy and the first question is, “So, what are we going to create?”

(We’ve been guilty of this too from time to time.) You’re so focused on creating, you forget who you’re creating for. The very first conversation—and the most constant conversation—should be focused on your audience.

Their wants, needs, and desires should guide everything you do. I realize sometimes this is murky. You have a general idea of who you want to talk to or who you think you’re talking to, but usually you haven’t done the legwork to figure it out. Understandably, it can be difficult to put the audience before your own marketing goals.

Tip: Carefully crafted marketing personas, which accurately describe the different customers you’re trying to target, are a good starting point. Good personas are highly detailed. They cover the obvious demographic elements, such as age, income, and job title, as well as the not-so-obvious things, such as career aspirations, personal fears, and regrets—the psychographic elements.

This helps you get a sense for who your target audience consists of, what problems they’re facing, and how you might provide the solution to those problems. (I’ve detailed how to craft these personas in under 60 minutes. You can even do it over lunch.) The goal in this effort is to put yourself in your audience members’ shoes, to empathize with them and ask, “What kind of content do they need/want to engage with?”

2) Ignore YOUR CLIENTS

This one goes hand-in-hand with identifying your audience and developing personas. In fact, it should be treated as the second stage of persona mapping. You can’t create those marketing personas based on guesses. The only way to identify how to help your audience is to get to know them intimately.

It’s important to reach out both to clients and to those who interact with them (e.g., the sales team). That will enable you to gain much-needed perspective and make sure your ideas match with your audience’s reality.

Tip: Identify opportunities to get regular customer interaction and feedback at every touchpoint. These can be both technical (e.g., surveys, project wrap-up reports) or personal. We sometimes have a catch-up lunch or shoot off a simple email to a prospect to get inside their mind. Some starting points:

What are your goals this quarter?
What do you wish you knew more about?
What are the biggest frustrations weighing you down?
What resources do you wish you had?

The answers here are a great way to guide content strategy and come up with specific ideas for articles that will resonate with your target audience.

3) Don’t set SPECIFIC CONTENT THEMES

Building out a long-term strategy can seem overwhelming. But identifying content themes helps ensure everything you create aligns with both your short- and long-term content goals. If you’ve done your homework with your audience, this will be easy.

The more you talk with your customers, the more you’ll notice the same themes arise. You’ll be able to identify their pain points, problem areas, knowledge gaps, resource gaps, and more. Some themes will be more effective for you to cover than others (e.g., issues where you can position your product or service as the solution). Map content sprints focused on tackling these issues.

Tip: While you should always retain some degree of flexibility, identifying themes to tackle will help ensure that you 1) are creating targeted content and 2) have a healthy mix of different types of content. An easy way to do this is to choose both a quarterly goal or focus (e.g., lead gen), as well as three specific themes per quarter.

You don’t have to be super detailed here, nor do you need to publish on these themes sequentially. But it will help you make sure you’re covering all bases and angles in a strategic way.

4) Don’t set PRIORITIes

The key to a successful content operation is a solid infrastructure. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and a great content operation isn’t either. This is a common trap when it comes to implementing any good strategy. You may have a ton of brilliant ideas and grand plans, but they’re worthless if you can’t properly execute.

Be mindful of the volume of content you produce, as well as consistency. It’s tempting to hit the ground running, to want to do everything all at once, but it’s much easier to scale up gradually. You’ll generally get more value from a few stellar pieces than a ton of passable work. Before our team proceeds with an idea, we carefully examine whether we can execute a project that is:

High quality
Original
Useful to our audience
Something we can write authoritatively on
Produced in a reasonable amount of time

If we can’t say yes to all of these, we table it.

Tip: Start small, then scale from there (e.g., start with written articles, then build up to infographics). Above all, the best way to build your machine is to build the right team. Include the right stakeholders to make sure everything gets done efficiently, on time, and within budget. (Here are some tips on how to build a great content marketing team.)

Remember: Content marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. There’s no finish line.

5) don’t CREATE A ROAD MAP FOR EVERY PIECE

Quality content is the key to content success. Sometimes it’s easy to focus on larger strategy themes and forget that every single piece is meant to support that strategy. Certainly, you might strike gold with a random piece, but that’s not a reliable way to achieve long-term success.

You put so much work into your strategy; it’s a waste not to follow through. Each piece you create should be vetted through the same strategic thinking.

Tip: When you have a great content idea, do as much as you can to ensure its success from the get-go.

1) Measure your pieces accurately: Decide how you’re going to measure success ahead of time. If you’re creating brand awareness content, don’t judge the efficacy of your efforts based on a metric that you reserve for lead gen content, and vice versa.

2) Make the editorial calendar your friend: As you come up with your ideas, vet the hell out of them. For example, we identify the following for each piece of content:

Subject
Angle
Keyword
Target persona
Pain point
Solution
Headline
Subject line

6) Do not FOCUS ON PROVIDING VALUE

Your audience will only connect to your content (and, as a result, your brand) if they believe it provides value. It can entertain, educate, or inspire them—but they have to benefit from it in some way. Talking to your audience and identifying those themes can help guide you here. Your job is not just to address a subject; it’s to provide some tip, insight, or new perspective.

Your audience doesn’t want to be sold to or talked at. First, establish that you care about helping them—not helping yourself make money. When you approach content this way, they will be more eager to engage with you, and some of your audience will turn into customers over time.

Tip: Approach all content ideation from a value/benefit perspective first. What problems can you help solve? How can you help enhance their lives? These are the questions that put you on the right path.

7) Don’t SHOW YOUR UNIQUE EXPERTISE

I’m gonna take a wild guess and assume you’re not the only player in your space. There are plenty of competitors trying to reach your same audience through the same tactics. How do you differentiate? By upping the value through your expertise. Odds are you know everything about your industry, you are always looking for new solutions, and you have a ton of experience under your belt.

Demonstrating this in your content is the best way to serve both your customers and your goals.

Tip: Good content is about coupling the right angle, the right value, and the right expertise. As you ideate for a particular subject, ask yourself:

What’s already been written? Look for ways to expand or hone in on a topic.
Have I failed in this area before? Share what you’ve learned. (See: This entire post.)
Did I have a breakthrough or particular success? Help others do the same.

Fun fact: After much reflection about what we’re doing and where we’re blowing it, we identified the very weak points of our content strategy I’m discussing here. After we revamped our strategy accordingly, we doubled our blog traffic in four months.

8) Don’t SHOWCASE YOUR CULTURE

No one wants to talk to a brand. They want to talk to people. They want to know who you are, what you believe in, and then they’ll decide whether they want to buy in or not. Your company culture is an important part of your identity, and your content is a great conduit to express that.

For example, our agency specializes in data visualization. We also have a long-standing tradition of Beer Friday. We married the two to create this infographic:

This doesn’t mean you should blog a ton about your company BBQ, but you can think of clever ways to express yourselves.

Tip: From your newsletter popups to your articles, showcase your culture at every touchpoint.

Create a strong brand voice.
Craft a solid visual language to help reinforce your brand.
Cultivate a culture that lets you tap into your team’s ideas.

For more, download our free e-book on how your company culture can help your content marketing.

9) Don’t LEAVE SALES TO just THE SALES TEAM

Content marketing is not sales collateral. (Put this on your wall!) It’s about starting a conversation, providing value, and building a relationship. Content is the first step here—it also makes people more receptive to sales collateral. (A recent Nielsen study found that interacting with editorial content made consumers more willing to hear a brand’s hard-sell messages down the line.)

If you do your job well, people will want to work with you, and you don’t have to really sell anyone. You just have to facilitate a great buying experience. Your job as a marketer is to tee excited buyers up for the sales team, and let them handle the rest.

Tip: You are a storyteller, not a salesman. Approach content as brand publishing and look for unique stories to tell (not sell)! Employ tactics like data-driven storytelling and visual storytelling to help you do that.

10) EXPERIMENT rarely

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. True. But sometimes things may be broke and you don’t know it.

Like all things in life, you have to evolve if you want to stay competitive and differentiate yourself. This means always being willing to experiment, fail, tweak, iterate, and most importantly, never get complacent. Complacency is the devil.

Another way of putting this: A solid strategy is important, as is staying the course. But you also need built-in room to be responsive and flexible. Allow some room for failure. In my eyes, strategy must be iterative. As you learn, fail, and succeed, you refine and improve over time.

“I never lose. I either win or I learn.”
— Nelson Mandela

Adopt that mantra in your content efforts. Hell, make it your life mantra. It’s liberating.

Tip: Look for opportunities to experiment with new mediums, new distribution platforms, and new editorial approaches. Schedule regular postmortem meetings to assess content performance, what did or didn’t work, where you might improve, and what new tactics you could test.

Doing content well is an ongoing struggle that takes patience and persistence, but you can succeed as long as you remain proactive and flexible.

This post originally appeared on the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions blog.

If you need a little help with your content strategy, we’re happy to chat. To learn more about creating effective content marketing, check out these 5 mistakes to avoid in content creation and find out what content distribution tactic will get your content featured in major publications.