In a knowledge based economy, one in which knowledge is key to success, not strength or length of time, it is critical to accumulate knowledge at a much faster and more effective rate than before. This means that learning cannot end after college or you will get downsized or outsized.
Every morning I spend an hour a day reading various newspapers, articles and blogs in an effort to learn and to ultimately think differently to produce superior results. One of the great marketers and bloggers is Seth Godin. He had a great post yesterday about changing your situation and gave 45 suggestions of things you can do to jump start your business and/or life. Enjoy!
Can you change everything?
You might not be as permanently stuck in a rut as you think. The rut you're in isn't permanent, nor is it perfect. There are certainly less perfect ruts, but there may be better ones as well. The certain thing is that you can change everything...
- Buy a competitor
- Sell to a competitor
- Publish your best work for free online
- Close your worst-performing locations
- Open a new branch in a high-traffic location
- Hire the best salesperson away from the competition
- Join the competition
- Host a conference for your competitors
- Connect your best customers and organize a tribe
- Fire the 80% of your customers that account for 20% of your sales
- Start a blog
- Start a digital bootstrap business on the weekends
- While looking for a job, spend 40 hours a week volunteering and freelancing for good causes
- Go on tour and visit your best customers in person
- Answer the customer service line for a day
- Learn to be a killer presenter
- Let the most junior person in the organization run things for a day
- Delete your website and start over with the simplest possible site
- Call former employees and ask for advice
- Move to Thailand
- Listen to audio books in your car instead of the radio
- Sell your cash cow division to the competition and invest everything in the new thing
- Find more products for your existing customers to buy
- Become a gadfly and tell the truth about your industry
- Quit your job
- Move your operations to another city
- Become a vegan
- Have all meetings in a room with no chairs, and everyone wears a bathrobe over their clothes
- Open your offices only four hours a day
- Open your offices 24 hours a day for a week
- Find every project that is near the danger zone (in terms of p&l or deadlines) and cancel it, no appeals
- Go for a walk during lunch
- Get an RSS reader and read a lot more blogs
- Go offline for longer than you thought possible
- Write five thank you notes every day
- Stop sending spam
- Do your work somewhere else. Set up your chiropractic table at the mall
- Have everyone at work switch offices
- Give your most valuable possessions to a stranger
- Go see live music
- Start a company scrapbook and take daily notes
- Hire a firm to make a documentary about your organization
- Buy some art
- Make some art.
- Do the work.
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