Come on, give me the chills

Thoughts about changing, life, and whatever comes to mind.

Author: Andrea Grassi

  • miss a beat

    When you miss a beat of any habit you slowly start losing it.
    The only way to keep it stable is to acknowledge and share the failure and keep going l.

    Yesterday, for example, I skipped a blog post.

  • the lies behind every **urgent** matter

    You probably already know that emails are a way for other people to allocate your time (and if you don’t, learn it now).

    The thing about emails and urgent emails is even more interesting.
    Urgent, is something referred to a situation.
    The email containing the “URGENT” element in the message usually answer the “what” question.

    What is urgent?

    Thing is… what’s really important is why, which is often forgot.

    Why is it urgent?
    Is it urgent because you will lose your job?
    Is it urgent because you won’t get paid?
    or because you forgot it to do it before?

    Urgency is a very delicate matter, adding it requires exposing a lot of vulnerability and therefore it is a practice that’s ignored by many peopl.

    Still, sharing the urgency could enlighten us in 2 ways

    – by letting understand how much urgent it is (once we write it down we might realize it’s not that urgent).
    – by empowering the people we are communicating to, allowing them to help us in the best possible way.

  • share the joy

    Share the joy as a way of life, don’t settle for a rule.

    Joy is one of the most powerful elements in this world and is the result of feelings mixing into your mind and heart.

    In today society we might want to hide joy because it makes us appear “different”, not in line with what we’ve showed until now to them.
    But this, this way of expressing freely, is our most true reaction and behavior. Is something that could define us in the future if only we would allow it to do so.

    Keeping away from the beauty of joy is pretending to ignore our best part, the vulnerable one and that is the worst thing we can do to ourselves.
    The best, instead, is to keep sharing, to show hidden parts of our personality.
    To show up and not be afraid.
    To be honest and heartwarming.
    To love deeply with no fears.
    To take hard decisions because we want joy to be part of our world.

  • never forget the family

    I was taking a look at some old photos today and I realized I’m missing photos of my family.

    many of them.

    Over time your family may change, or may not.
    But if inside your heart it stays the same and you find photos missing, then it’s time to change something, to regain that time together and build some new memory together.

  • 7 questions to discover and understand your niche

    It happened some weeks ago when I was talking to my fiancè and she wasn’t sure about her skills in finding a niche.

    “How do I find where to sell a product to them?” she told me.
    Then I decided to do a small test with her, to see if this was something a total newbie in any area could do.

    We were talking (as an example) about a new kind of wine (or something related to it), and we wanted to discover where the possible clients were.

    I asked these questions and we got a LOT of examples

    1. Is your product high-priced or low priced?
      useful to targeting group of people and their interest
    2. Your ideal client, what’s his/her name, where does he live, what he wears usually and what does he do for a living?
      we discussed a random guy named John who is a bit of a rich man, has eyeglasses and so on.
      The point here is to be very specific about our guy or our girl.
    3. Where you can usually find wines?
      this is where the interesting thing start. We are looking for places.
      You should stop 2 or 3 answers later the “I can’t find any more of that” affirmation 
    4. What are the things (selleable, like objects) related to wines?
      – 4bis: where you can find them?
      here we are tackling side-related places that still have a context that’s relevant to wines. The first questions helps you understand what other topics exists and then you search out for places.
      Move on, as usual, 2 or 3 answers later the “I can’t find any more”
    5. Where do people like John who like wines hang out in real life?
      Now we’re moving onto discovery places related in other ways to the wines.
    6. where do John hangout in the internet?
      Here we think about the places online we might find John and his network of wine related friends
    7. What kind of movies/book our dear John likes?
      Now we’re getting somewhere different, our goal is to find a topic that’s related to wine to include wine as part of the offering.
      Our John was a fan of Lars Von Trier, a famous film director.
      We imagined how nice would it be to create an event that included rare movies and good wine as a possible idea.

    If you have any product, you can dive into this 7 questions to find more about your users.
    The key elements are

    1. You are allowed to ran out of ideas only  3 ideas after your first “I can’t find any more…” (this will ensure that you are trying hard)
    2. To think about new questions, try to be as much unrelated and rambling as possible.
      If you stick between the frame you can’t get out of it, and our point is to find new things. So wherever you are truly stuck, use a question that seem foolish.