Answering a question for someone, I realised this was a good summary of my latest thinking on selling.

Here are a few basic truths about selling:

1. People don't buy needs, they buy wants. If you're positioned as a 'need', they buy on price. Selling at the lowest price is rarely a good way to do business.

2. Businesses don't buy based on quality, or the best presentation, or even, who's a friend of the boss. They buy what will fit into their existing infrastructure with the least amount of red tape and politics.

3. People don't change from what they have to a competitor. They'll change to something entirely new, if it fits #1 and #2 above, but convincing them simply to switch phone services means that first you have to convince them that their previous choice was wrong. This is a losing battle.

4. People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. You must earnestly believe that your product or service is going to change the world, or why should anyone bother?

So, to summarise: whatever you're selling must be sexy and irresistable, something you believe in deeply and passionately, something fundamentally different from what they're doing now, yet which will fit into their existing infrastructure without pain.

And that's why selling things like phone systems or services, office supplies, cleaning services, and the like, is so very hard.

If you'd really like to find work during difficult economic times, consider this: think of something you absolutely love doing. Not a business idea, just a thing you love doing. Now, think of the money you or others spend on that. See how you can build a business around your passion.

Doing something you love will not just make your life more fun, you will be much more valuable to others, and selling will become the natural process of sharing something you're excited about, and finding others who feel the same.

If you'd like to discuss that further, and get some suggestions, please feel free to give me a shout, either here or at my email address joel@bizba6.com

Yesterday I was daydreaming about Tom Peters inviting me to take over his next TED talk, announcing his retirement and introducing me as his successor.

In the end, even if it's all about me, it's all about you. Daydream this for yourself and see.

What are you waiting for?

I heard what was in your head just now. "Wow; Tom is retiring. Wow." Okay, that part wasn't brilliant, but what about the next thought you had: "Maybe someday that'll be me."

That doesn't have to be you, and it doesn't have to be someday. I'm not the next anybody. I'm me, right now. You do not have to be the next anybody. You are you, right now.

You can't be the next Tom Peters. There's only one. Wanna know why there's only one?

Because that's all we need.

We don't need a whole raft of Toms or Druckers or Seths. Was Tom the next Pete Drucker? They'd both laugh at that. Is Seth the new Tom? Not unless one of 'em changes their hair style.

We don't need another Tom Peters, any more than we need another Seth Godin or another me or another you. We sure as shootin' need the ones we've got, though.

[Must have nodded off briefly; the next bit is about how having a job does not equal security, but I have no idea how I got there. Note to self: stay awake during your own speeches.]

You don't need anyone's permission to be brilliant. Well, unless you have a job; in that case, you need your manager's permission, and he needs his manager's permission to give you his permission.

What you really don't need is a job.

Smart people have been going to jobs for decades, over a century in fact, and it's all wrong.

"But I need the security of a regular paycheck!" I heard you think. Let me tell you about the security of a regular paycheck, and how my father got hit by a truck because of it.

Dad moved from Wisconsin to Beverly Hills to preserve his job security and provide for his family. He worked for 17 more years for this company, moving once again to San Diego so he could work in Tijuana, Mexico, just across the border.

And one day they said to him "Wes, we still need you, but we don't want to pay you as much. So we're going to fire you, but you can work for us as an independent contractor. The nice thing is you'll be paying all your own expenses, so we get the same work for a lot less money."

He spent the last 18 months of his life wondering why his loyalty and hard work had been so betrayed. Then one day, riding his bike to work (he would have been riding his bike no matter where he was going, it just happened to be work) he was, literally, hit by a truck. He was dead before we found out he hadn't made it to work that morning.

Charles Handy realised over 30 years ago that jobs were obsolete. He quit his job at BP and, as Handy calls it, went portfolio. Had my father had the same insight, he might not have died shortly after Handy made this change in his own life. (Yes, I hear you thinking something about fate; fate is for the lazy and the stupid; the rest of us have to make our own choices in life.) He might have gone portfolio himself, and instead of making significantly less money, made significantly more, for less work. He might still have been in the same place on the same day, but somehow, I don't think so, and I knew him better than you did.

[Fairly sure there was another 12 minutes of brilliance here, but I seem to have nodded off and forgotten it. Hopefully the summing up comes to me . . . ah, yes; here we go . . .]

We're all on this rampage to duplicate someone else's success—instead of creating our own.

Creating your own success is hard. It's scary. It's a bumpy road with potholes and cul-de-sacs [what, you actually want me to write 'culs-de-sac' ? I don't speak French, let alone write it] and plenty of wrong turns available.

It also has rest stops, where you can park, and nobody will ever make you get back on the road again. And then you die. Well, at least metaphorically.

If you spend your life trying to duplicate or support someone else's success, if you spend the rest of your life doing a job, if you spend the rest of your life trying to be the next anybody, you might not end up dead in a ditch. Might not.

But you're not the next anybody. You're you, right now.

What are you waiting for?

Entrepreneurs push. We don't just do what's easy. We push to finish, to deliver, to take the next step. We push to find new ways or new stuff or new ideas.

It's easy to push ourselves too hard; to start forcing it.

You need sleep. Caffeine is not a substitute for sleep.

You need time to relax. Doesn't mean expensive recreation or long vacations. It just means you need five minutes away from the computer, right now. It means spending the evening with someone or something you love instead of finishing that project early.

You need to eat. Yes, pizza is a food group, and if you have it delivered, you can waste less time cooking and spend more time getting things done. You also need to go stand in the kitchen sometimes and stir stuff in a pot, fry things in a pan, bake something in the oven. Nutrition, the kind vital to the entrepreneurial brain and body, does't come in a box or a pill.

I've started forcing it lately. I've been juggling too many things and I'm starting to drop some.

My Best Beloved and I have begun an experiment to see if our ability to work remotely will allow us, in fact, to live without a home, perhaps even without a car. We've started blogging about this grand adventure at Canfield Of Dreams. It's something we're both giant excited about, and the work just flows.

I just might be around here less often; might be spending less time actively promoting this particular aspect of my business heresy. I love the video and the writing and all that. I'll still be doing it. Might get back to a radio show, but that has largely fallen by the wayside.

Like everyone else, I have exactly 24 hours to use, each day. Rolf Potts reminds us that if we think of wealth in terms of time spent doing what we want, instead of in dollars and cents, we can all choose to be rich.

It's time to rebalance the boat, to shuffle some stuff around below decks and above, and keep on an even keel.

New Business Heretics Weekly Radio Ballyhoo thing posted wherein Tom and I talk about quality, real and perceived, tough ethical decisions, and finding a diverse brainstorming group.

So, how's this working for you? High enough signal-to-noise ratio? Anything we should be talking about, but aren't? Wanna join us?

Look; there's a comments section down there! Maybe you should say something.

The primary reason I'm an entrepreneur instead of an employee is schedule. There are a dozen subsidiary reasons, like choosing what work I do and who I do it for; doing business the way that makes sense to me instead of someone else calling the shots; things like that. But mostly, it's about working when I want to work, and not working when I don't want to work.

Yeah, many entrepreneurs complain about the long hours, how their clients are too demanding, deadlines are deadlines. You can make every excuse in the book for losing control of your schedule, for not having time for yourself.

It's still your fault.

If you're an entrepreneur, you choose the work you do.

You choose the hours you work.

You set the deadlines.

You delegate or don't.

You're the boss. The buck stops with you.

And if you don't take some time off, it's gonna stop like a plane crash, in a big fiery ball, with you in the center.

Your brain and body know their limitations. You can ignore them, but that doesn't change them. At some point, your brain and your body will take some time off. I highly recommend you do it before you crash and burn.

No plane stays in the sky forever; they all come down, one way or another.

You can either land gracefully, or crash and burn. Your choice.

Don't believe me? Right there below, in the comments, tell me why you can't possibly take time off, and I'll show you how you can.

I've waited my whole life for someone to give me permission to do the things I wanted to do.

Many of the folks I talk to are also waiting for permission.

So, here it is. Oh, and way down at the bottom is the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything, and it's not, by the way, 42.

Do you want to write a book? Permission granted.

Are you writing a book, but wish you could just shelve it for a while, maybe even (gasp!) permanently? Permission granted.

Do you want to start a business? Permission granted.

Would you like to go out in public without 'doing' your hair first? Permission granted.

Wanna eat dessert first? Permission granted.

How about singing in public? Permission granted.

What if you'd like to say something that's not what everyone else is saying, or not what others expect you to say? Permission granted.

Make plans to move to another country? Permission granted.

Talk to strangers in the coffee shop? Permission granted.

Join a club of some kind, any kind? Permission granted.

Leave a club you just don't care as much about any more? Permission granted.

Sleep during the day, and work at night? Permission granted.

Go for a walk instead of pushing to hit that deadline you know you're gonna miss anyway? Permission granted.

Stop working for an hourly wage, and just charge what you want for what you're doing? Permission granted.

Tell somebody who's not gonna be completely comfortable with it that you love them? Permission granted.

Tell somebody who's going to be heartbroken that you don't love them? Permission granted.

Sleep late? Permission granted.

Go to bed early? Permission granted.

See, here's the thing: you don't need anybody's permission. You don't. Which means, my permission is as good as anyone else's, because you don't need it. That's the biggest secret in life: you do not need anyone's permission to be you. You don't have any choice, so why are you fighting it so hard?

Stop waiting for someone to discover you and proclaim your genius and take responsibility for what you've wanted to do all along.

Stop waiting for permission.

Everybody is talking about impostor syndrome and the enormous fear some of us have that since I'm such a fraud it's only a matter of time before someone finds out.

After lots of reading and pondering the past week, I've realised that my greatest business fear is that, after I've taken someone's money, they'll be seriously unhappy with me, and I'll fail to find a satisfactory resolution.

What? Lemme see here; the Lord High Master of Selfless Customer Service might "fail to find a satisfactory resolution" ? What kind of blunt force trauma would cause that thought to even be in my head?

Guess what. My worst case, the most appallingly bad, embarrassing, uncomfortable, esteem-crushing case, has already happened.

The Agony of, Um, What was That?

It was excellent. Superb. One of the best business events of our collective experience. No; not talking about the euphemistic 'learning experience' of making a mistake. I mean, the outcome, the upshot, the net benefit to me and mine, has been personally, professionally and financially stupendous.

The end result has been

1. a casual client becoming a lifelong diehard raving fan
2. my learning a fantastic tech skill I didn't realise I'd even care about, and
3. lots of paid work. Lots. Of. Paid. Work.

Chatting with Best Beloved just now, as I was describing my greatest business fear, we both started laughing before I even finished because we were both thinking about exactly the same client, exactly the same event.

The Giant Horrific Mistake

Short and fairly anonymous version: we did a job for a client. At the last minute, far too late for anyone to do anything but print an explanatory apology to be tucked in with the product, client discovers that the product we created has the wrong name on one part. And they're giving away 300 copies in a few hours. At a huge event a few blocks from our house, of all places.

Mind you, at this point, this is a casual client, not even of mine, but of Best Beloved. The email we got was a classic example of defusing a situation with non-inflammatory prose. The client simply explained what was wrong and the remedial steps taken since a true fix wasn't possible, and stated forthrightly that they felt we'd want to do something about it.

Well, yeah. Like lay on the closet floor in the fetal position, sobbing and rocking.

Anyway, here's what we did instead. (Okay, afterwards.)

Resolution

1. We gave the client work from Best Beloved's business (remember, they were already a paying client so this was actual usable stuff) equal to the entire cost of the product we'd created for them. Mind you, they didn't lose that entire value, the product was still usable, just flawed. Didn't matter; she wanted to give the client the full value.
2. We clarified that, should such a thing ever happen again, we expected a phone call, middle of the night or not, so we could drive to the client's house, and print and stuff the explanatory apology ourselves. Our client should not be doing manual labor to compensate for our error.
3. I pushed it over the top by offering the website we'd been negotiating to build for this client, also coincidentally valued the same as the faulty product, free.

From Resolution to Results

So, #1, the client, who already uses Best Beloved's service, got a big project (one he was planning to pay her for) done absolutely free.

In #2, the client might never do it, but genuinely believed that if it was necessary, we'd get out of bed and drive across town to make it right, if we ever ever ever made a mistake like that again.

And #3 made them gasp in awe. No, I'm not kidding. As far as I recall, the exact words were "Joel, I was pretty much expecting what Sue offered, and I thought that was more than fair. But this; this is way over the top. This is so far beyond the call of duty. You guys are awesomesauce." Okay, maybe that last wasn't the exact word, but it sounded that way to me.

What I Learned (It's Not What You Think)

More upshot from the downfall: client gently nudges me into learning enough about WordPress to build a completely totally custom website, based on a WordPress framework, which allows me to use my mad coding skillz whilst providing all the grooviness of WordPress. It is universally acclaimed as a thing of beauty; by the client, client's associates, our clients. I now have some advanced skills with a wonderful tool, which has become an integral part of my web development business over at Spinhead.

Referrals Galore

Three referrals from Disgruntled (Not) Client in the first week after the site is done. One turns into some pro bono work for a charitable group made up of some just super people doing something truly important and unselfish. Another has turned into a really fine paid project with another super guy (did I mention that Not Disgruntled Client's contact list is filled with people you I wish I was more like? Polite, generous, smart, hard-working, driven. People I want to be around. (Third referral, I dropped the ball. Must pick it up and run with it, since the other two have been touchdowns, plus the extra point thank you very much.

Men, Let This Happen to You

So, to sum up:

Pointless Stupid Fear: 0
Life-Altering New Way of Thinking: 1

For the win.

Should I send a newsletter, or just let folks subscribe to my blog?

Should I write about the topic that everyone's talking about, or should I try to find something original? Post once a week, twice a week? Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday?

Live radio show, or pre-recorded podcast?

This networking group or that training session?

The latest business fable or the hottest new fiction you've been waiting for?

Sometimes, there's just so much information about so many choices that we end up agonising over business decisions.

I'd like you to consider the possibility that, if the answer isn't obvious, perhaps it doesn't matter as much as you think it does.

Perhaps, what really matters, is to do something, anything, other than burning more time trying to decide.

It's probably just me.

I have in my inbox not just one, not just two, but three emails outlining product launches that have happened recently. In them, they glibly refer to "making five figures in XX number of days or hours"

Five figures. That's, minimum, $10,000 (unless they're counting pennies, in which case it's $100.00 which I sorta doubt.)

Really? Folks I've never heard of are making what I would consider two solid months' income in a couple days? Does anyone else ever feel like maybe, when their ship came in, they were at the airport waiting for a train?

It's probably just me.

Ever been at a party and heard your name from across the room? Through all that noise, you heard a tiny bit of information which is, understandably, important to you.

Reticular Activating System

How is that possible? The same way you can even follow a conversation in a crowded room: it's your reticular activating system. (It's in that picture over there. Isn't it lovely?)

Here's another cocktail party game: remember that time the person you were stuck talking to was so boring you were considering pulling your own ears off, but instead, you started listening to the folks sitting behind you? Never took your eyes off the snoozing boor in front of you, and you could even still hear their voice if you chose to, but your attention was elsewhere. (Oh, come on; you've done it. Yes you have.)

Sometimes, there's just so much going on that you jump back and forth, mentally, between two conversations—without moving a muscle. Just shift focus; over here, then over there.

So what on earth does your reticular activating system have to do with business?

Your clients have one, too.

Ask most small business operators who their target client is, and they'll say "everyone!" Remember the cocktail party? When some random person across the room says "hey; wanna hear a joke?" you don't even hear them, because your RAS doesn't pick up stuff like that. It's a focus tool, and you don't focus on random.

Neither do your clients.

When your marketing materials speak directly to a specific narrow niche, you cut through the clutter, and they hear you. If you're writing to 'everyone', guess who hears you? No one.

But if you're writing to single moms with school age children trying to start a service business they can operate while the kids are in school, which the kids can help with during the summer—all of a sudden, when those folks read your blog or hear you speak at an event, they hear you loud and clear. Their RAS focuses them on your message, because it is obvious that you're speaking to them, not to the room in general.

Specific narrow niche. Choose one, speak to it, get heard, and grow.