Category: book

I don’t consider myself a marketing expert, but I do consider myself a better than average -small marketer- and the reason for this is that I was able to sell things to people and write things that resonate with others.

It’s hard to market something. I am a developer and for many year I hated marketing.
This, until I discovered that marketing was _not_ what I saw on tv.

Marketing is much more than that. Have you ever got to a city you loved so much that, by talking to your friends, you made them visit the city?
Well, you just sold something to someone.

Word of mouth is, basically, a form of personal marketing and it works because it has three main components that are working well together.
First: You are passionate about the subject (in this case the city)
Second: You know it (you visited the city and can tell what’s great and what’s not).
Third: It’s honest (you are a friend)

That’s why it works, and this is something you can try to apply to as many areas you’d like.
Passion, Knowledge, Honesty are enough for basic marketing.

But yet we fail at marketing, aren’t we?
Why does this happen? Well, for one reason it’s selfishness.
Being passionate doesn’t mean shouting “IT’S BEAUTIFUL, IT’S THE BEST THING IN LIFE”.
These arguments are not worth it, nobody believes it.

If you think about it, when you’re passionate about a trip to a city and you tell the story you don’t simply start by saying “it’s amazing”, you add information that _you_ liked.

For example you might say:
_”When I was in Venice I loved the silence that you get because there are no cars around, it’s so strange to walk at night and hear the sound of water. It’s as if you’re in a jungle, but then you realize you’re walking into a city filled with people”_

That’s way different than saying “Buy my product, it’s the best”. That is the key difference.
What we miss when we try to sell things to others is that we tend to focus only on saying “it’s good” instead of explaining what does it for you.

Start by sharing how and in which things the product you’re selling will improve your life, work, whatever. Tell how it helped you, what it helped you to achieve.

Be honest about it, don’t be fake, share the struggle if you had it (like, for example, “I wasn’t able to do X because of Y”) and, last but not least: READ IT OUT LOUD.

It must feel like a talk with another human being.
If it doesn’t, it’s not ok, if it does, you’re off to a great start.

Some people would like to know how to write better because if you read their emails they’re in a strange, unusual language. They feel fake, they feel as if they were written from a robot.

This is the foundation to many marketing tutorials and at its core there is a simple principle: Write like you talk.

In writing we tend to use expressions that are too articulated and not suited for the medium. We’re not discussing the law of geometry here, we’re talking to people and as such we should communicate the way they expect it: In words that are simple, easy to comprehend, easy to digest.

How do we get there? There are many ways, if you need to learn how to write one idea could be to first record a reply by voice so that you start by a talk, and then arrange that talk so that you put it into correct form.

Otherwise you can do it the other way: You first write and then read it out loud or, even better, read it to another person as if they were the beneficiary.

The other person can easily spot the issue in your talk and you will feel them too.

The last thing to do is to write more, and take more time to write so that by practicing you reach a better skill in this area.

Iterate until you reach confidence in the writing and you’re done.
You won’t become the next Stephen King by doing this, but you’ll at least improve the basic writing skills.

To get great answers you need to learn how to make good questions.

Making good questions seems hard. How many times were you in a room and someone asked the teacher a stupid question? It happens all the time.

But guess what? It’s perfectly fine. Because if you want to learn how to ask good questions you’ll have to first ask the stupid ones. You’ll have to ask them and then go through a much deeper discovery of what the real problem is.
So let’s say you’re discussing a new project, how to get to the good question? Start by diving into the project by asking simple questions and then try to ask question to go deeper into the subject. Ask questions on how it works even in detail. 

See, the problem is that we think stupid questions are useless. They’re not, even though sometimes they can be easily avoided they are still part of the learning process.

The worst part of stupid questions is that we have learned, through social behaviour, that we should refrain from asking them. But how do we know if we’re asking a stupid question? We don’t have any reference and therefore we tend to keep our mouth shut. 
This hurts our learning because we don’t ask question at all, while we should do the exact opposite.

But how can I learn it to ask good questions? 
There’s a nice exercise I love which is based on the iteration, we can use it in many learning areas. The idea behind it is to find a way to explore a subject by iterating over ideas or, in this case, questions.

Let’s apply it to a simple example: A pen writing on paper. 
The goal in this case is to produce an amount of subsequent questions “after we feel exhausted”. So basically you need to get to the point when you think “there’s no way I can come up with another question”, and then get at least another 3 questions .

First question might be:
How does a pen write on paper?

Well, let’s suppose it’s a rolling pen, so in our case the ink rolls onto a piece of metal and gets to the paper.
But how does the ink stays on paper?

Well, probably the ink, being liquid, is absorbed by the paper.
And how come paper absorb the ink? What’s the process that allows paper to absorb liquid?

Etc etc etc.

The first question had a clear, stupid answer right? But we got fast to the point of “How paper absorb things”, and then you can still move on for at least another 6 questions.

The whole point of the exercise is to learn to go into detail about how things work so that your questions go into a deeper level of knowledge.

A couple of question for you

• How do you think? Are you a fast-thinker, a slow thinker?
• How do you decide? By impulse, after cooling down, by documenting, after confronting with others?

In other words: How do you handle your life?
It’s important to know it because you have to be prepared in both cases.

The slow ones.

I know. Slow has a negative connotation, but in fact slow in this case means: Taking time.
You might be slow in making decisions because you need to have a clear view of what’s happening.

You need more data, or you need to be relaxed.
_You have to know this_. Why? Because there will come a time when you’ll be asked for a quick answer and you’ll need a backup plan.

You need to know exactly what to say to gain more time, you need to know how to gain more time and how to get back into a relaxed mindset.

This way you’ll be yourself and be true to what you do best.

**The Fast Ones**

If you’re fast you have to know it too. Because sometimes you’ll be put in slow situations, waiting for a call or whatever.

This will test your temper. It will test your character and you have to be prepared so that you will avoid falling into these traps.

Or you might know what your fast-making ability is great _only_ in some cases and if so you’ll have to learn when to take time and when to speed up.

In both cases, we’re talking about understanding how you work, how your mind works, how your emotions are triggered so that you know how to act in any situation.

If you don’t know, you can’t act.

What is the one thing you would not like to do?

At work, at home, what is it?

When I think about this question many boring things come to mind. Cleaning for example is one of them.
But none of these answer is the correct one.

The hardest thing to do is to do a thing well when you don’t want to do it. 
Is to show up, do your work in the best possible way in your worst possible day.

That is the hardest thing to do. It might happen during work, during life, during a night out.
In those moments everything leads you to surrender, to give up, to stop, and it’s only when you do your best work anyway that you’ll discover the value of persistence, of doing the thing each and every day.

That is what I call Being Professional.
It means thinking rationally even when you are in bad mood, it means working even when you don’t want to, it means creating value even at your lowest energy.
It means exceeding the standard, because what you provide cannot be easily obtained elsewhere.