It’s the battle for enoughness.

Once you’ve gotten the beast out of your system, filled all your
ego holes and flushed all the selfishness away.

Once you’ve earned enough attention, approval, applause,
respect, validation, celebrity and popularity to make you feel worthy.

Once you’ve achieved and produced and executed enough to prove to the world that you
can do it on your own terms.

Once
you’ve kicked your addiction to yourself and your body tells you that the buzz
won’t have the same effect anymore.

You can finally say, from a place of pure peace, honesty, gratitude
and liberation, that you’ve done enough to be okay with yourself.

And from that place, the possibilities are goddamn
beautiful.

Riddle me this.

What do doctor’s appointments, getting haircuts, working
out, tech support, taking pets to the vet, visiting the hospital, filling out
forms, buying a car, sitting in waiting rooms and going to confessional all
have in common?

They’re experiences most people have always hated.

And
in every business, there’s a parallel experience. Some transaction, some
activity, some part of the process that customers usually view as a hassle.

This is the golden opportunity.

Paddi Lund, a renowned dentist from down under, completely redefined the patient experience. In his office,
there’s no reception desk, cappuccino machines, fresh baked buns for clients, thirty
varieties of tea in fine china, and an overall vibe of happiness unmatched by
any dentist on the planet. His
team members never leave and his customers are clamoring to buy his services.

He turned a
painful process into a pleasurable practice. He gave people an excuse to spend
more time doing something mundane. And he proved that the dental experience
doesn’t have to be torture after all.

I wonder what activity, that people have previously avoided
as a badge of honor, you could make them obsessed with?

When you sell a commodity, you differentiate through the uncommon.

Language, purpose, emotion, education, interaction, technology,
leadership, narrative, culture, platform, design, connection, interactivity, community,
service, soul, support, responsiveness, honesty and humanity.

These are the features that distinguish your organization, these
are the real reasons customers do business with you. Since there is never a
shortage of competence, what’s scarce, and therefore valuable and remarkable,
is this running imperative that drives your behavior, this nobility behind your
work and the posture with which you approach your interactions.

Next time you’re thinking about beating the competition on
price, try raising the value of your uncommon service.

Add something that cannot be bought or measured with money.

Otherwise you’ll just be another grain of sand lying on the beach.

The web isn’t just a connection machine, it’s a cutting machine.

We’ve traded analog dollars for digital pennies, and the
smart people and organizations who are taking advantage of this trend are
seeing massive dividends.

We’ve lowered the cost of gratitude, which means saying thank you to people has never been
easier. How are you using social media as a hearing aid to become a hero on a
moment’s notice?

We’ve lowered the cost of sharing, which means making our ideas spreadable through people has
never been easier. How does your content give people bragging rights and
increased status when they share it?

We’ve lowered the cost of generosity, which means giving ourselves away to people has never
been easier. How are you delivering a daily gift to the world that builds up a
huge surplus of goodwill?

We’ve lowered the cost of communicating, which means taking a risk and extending ourselves to
people has never been easier. How can you quickly identify unsatisfied customers and reach out to help
them?

We’ve lowered the cost of collaborating, which means taking a risk and extending ourselves to
people has never been easier. How could you bring your humanity to the moment
and find a new voice together?

We’ve lowered the cost of production, which means if you own a laptop, you own the factory.
How will your organization come to power through its creations of code, not its
construction of steel?

We’ve lowered the cost of engagement, which means the emotional labor of doing something
difficult with people has never been easier. How can you appease problems and
do marketing at the same time?

We’ve lowered the cost of distributing, which means making our work available to people has
never been easier. How could you implement a pricing strategy that would make
the competition want to come to your office and choke you?

He who cuts the most, wins.

We don’t even have to leave the house anymore.

Next time we want to watch movies, play video games, check
out a book, do some shopping, attend a seminar, conduct a meeting, take a
class, get a job, find a date, do some research, cast our vote, get in shape,
eat a snack, start a business, prospect for clients, send a package, join a
club or tune into the game, we just fire up our laptop, whip out the smart
phone, slap down a tablet, and make it happen.

Unbelievable.

And yet, despite the unparalleled possibility that
technology can provide, I’m still kind of wondering when our hunger for life
beyond the screen will swallow our addiction to convenience.

I’ve said it a million times, the purpose of online is to
get offline.

If we never endeavor to communicate beyond digital, if we
never connect to each other by more than just pixels, we fail to experience the
truest, highest form of human interaction.

Get out of the house.

Society flourishes when people think entrepreneurially.

When a natural disaster devastates millions of people’s
livelihoods, the stories that touch my heart the most are the ones involving
courageous people who don’t need permission to take action, the ones who don’t
wait around for the green light from above to help those in need.

According to a recent article, The Red Hook Initiative was joined by about fifteen
people from the Occupy movement who have set up infrastructure and logistics
for running hot meal operations serving, hundreds of people every day, bringing
in medics, gathering information and broadcasting calls for volunteers and
supplies.

Real entrepreneurship isn’t about running a business, it’s
about running the risk. In the words of Douglas Rushkoff, the biggest threat to
the powers that be is anyone who occupies anything.

That’s the exciting part about thinking like an
entrepreneur.

You are the powers
that be.

It is that initiative, that instigation capital, that human
will, and that desire to move forward, that make the world better.

Social capital is built through the hundreds of little actions we take every day.

Every encounter builds trust just a little bit more,
contributes to our reserve of personal bonds, enables fellowship, enhances
reciprocity, stimulates community, nurtures our connectedness and increases our
supply of social opportunities.

Of course, that’s face to face.

What happens when digital enters the equation?

A few years back, the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication
conducted a study that examined if Facebook was related to attitudes and
behaviors that enhance social capital. And although their research
showed that online social networks were not the most effective solution for
social disengagement, they still found small positive relationships
between intensity of social media use and life satisfaction, social trust,
civic engagement, and political participation.

Considering social capital affects everything from
productivity to depression to suicide to juvenile delinquency to test scores to
government response time to divorce rate, I’d say we’re off to a pretty good
start.

It might be digital, but it’s better than nothing.

Netflix popularized binge viewing.

It’s
a consumption model in which every episode of a show is released at once. Fans
are encouraged to catch up on their favorite programs by completely immersing
themselves in the universe of the characters, plowing through entire seasons in
marathon sessions.

It’s
cheap, easy, satisfying and completely reinvents the viewing experience. And
as a result, Netflix now accounts for more than thirty percent of all web
traffic during the week. That’s more than any other website in the country.

The genius of this strategy is, Netflix didn’t just give
more options to their customers, they instilled new habits in their customers,
and then positioned their offerings in alignment with those habits.

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

God bless the app store.

It’s fast to download, seamless to install, easy to use,
convenient to have, fun to explore, simple to navigate and priceless to own.

But what’s truly amazing, what most companies probably
overlook, is that the app store has created nearly a half million new jobs
since its inception.

That’s a platform, not a product.

And
once more organizations accept that there’s no market for their scarcity, once they
give people the privilege to become part of their history, and once they
build a platform that makes it seamless for those people to express their
truest selves, their brand
will become a source of infinite opportunity for the people who matter most.

Next
time you sit down with your team, ask a few of these platform questions:

How
does this give people another reason to stop by? How
can visitors browse an entire collection of experiences? How can we directly
wire this into an existing online ecosystem? How do we make an event happen
beyond the walls of the venue? How do we
curate situations that bring discovery of cool new things? How can we give
people a huge digital sandbox to play in?

How can we let people engage with the project as it’s being produced? How do we
create a system that makes audiences equal members of the stage? How does this
give users an addictive reason to keep revisiting and refreshing? How can we build a soapbox open to anyone and everyone
as a place to speak their minds? How can we create a project that
grows incrementally with each online interaction and reaction?

Surrender is the new control.

Let them express the magic in their hearts, not just spend the
money in their wallets, and you’ll feel people power as wind at your back.

Storytelling isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.

And you can buy all the books, read all the articles, go to
all the seminars, take all the classes and hire all the coaches, but unless you
tell a story that people enjoy believing, none of that matters.

People enjoy believing a story that validates their
worldview, makes them feel powerful and frees them from something.

People enjoy believing a story in which they recognize
themselves and that expresses what they can’t do, think, say, find and feel on
their own.

People enjoy believing a story that serves a purpose, stands
as a truthful metaphor for life and gives them hope about what they can be.

People enjoy believing a story that offers evidence of what
they doubt and makes them proud to take the first step.

People enjoy believing a story that gives them the power to march forward and convinces them
that their life is worth living.

People enjoy believing a story that lets them unconsciously
process their own life, put their own nature into accord discover the journey
they’re on.

People
enjoy believing a story that they can lose themselves in, superimpose their own
meaning onto and spread to the people they care about.

People enjoy believing a story that sucks them in, takes
them to a place they don’t want to leave and makes them a necessary part of the
narrative.

Before you start telling yours, make sure it’s enjoyable to
believe.

Otherwise the story is nothing more than another annoying
interruption.