Posts Tagged ‘Seth Godin’
Mentor Yourself – An Interview With Drew Dudley, Founder & Chief Catalyst Part II
May 4th, 2012 | 
Author: Invisible Mentor: Drew Dudley, Founder & Chief Catalyst
Company Name: Nuance Leadership Development Services, Inc.
Website: http://nuanceleadership.ca/
Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Drew Dudley: The way I make my living is by using more than a couple of sentences at a time. I’m a professional speaker, an educator, and trying to be a writer and I absolutely love what I do.
Drew Dudley - Cartoons by Scott Mooney - TedxToronto (Photo credit: Ann Douglas)
Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?
Drew Dudley: Because I was looking for mentors in a conventional sense – who your boss is, who does what you do, and who you look up to – for most of my life I didn’t have much of that. My father was a tremendous mentor, but in terms of my career, there wasn’t very many. I didn’t work for people who really inspired me, and do things the way I would have been proud of doing. My perceived lack of mentors made me feel as if I had to take care of things on my own. The older I get, the more I realize that I had mentors every step of the way. They were my friends, they were my students. Those were mentors, but I thought mentorship was, only if you’re older, if you have more money, or you have a bigger title, those are the people who teach you things so you get the same stuff. I realize now that that perception of mentor had an impact on my life that was detrimental.
My mentors are students who forced me to apply to be a speaker at TED Toronto, which had a massively, positive impact on my career. Those were mentors, so when I look back, mentors had a big impact on my life in ways I did not recognize. I encourage people to look around and see who are the mentors in their life and to let go of the idea that they have to be older, have to have more money that they have to have bigger titles. I think mentors are the ones who live their lives in a way that you respect, and that you’d be proud of living your life. If you took money out of the world, and all we had as currency was how much value people add to others in terms of intellectual capacity, social, and spiritual capital. Look around and ask who pour most of that into the world, and those people should be your mentors. Once I started focusing on those people in my life, my life got tremendously better.
Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn things from by observing them from afar, in the capacity of an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?
Drew Dudley: Seth Godin says, “Never trust anyone who gives you a list of tips.” But I think if I had one piece of advice, it would be this, go back and think of the regrets in your life and reassess if they are still regrets. We spend a lot of time thinking less of ourselves because of the mistakes that we make. We keep remembering mistakes the same way we thought of them right after we made them. So go back and think of the regrets you have in your life now. When someone asked me “what’s the biggest regret you have?” I started to list all the regrets I had based on how I felt when I had them and I realized at the moment that I wasn’t sad that that happened.
It was a big disappointment at the time, but it allowed me other things to happen later in my life. My biggest advice to people is to reassess your regrets and recognize that probably 80 percent of them you don’t regret anymore. That allows you the freedom to believe that every mistake you make, every regret that you have, is going to be one of those 80 percent.
Avil Beckford: How do you integrate your personal and professional life?
Drew Dudley: My personal and professional life is almost completely integrated as it is. The workshop and facilitation parts of my business are growing. All the lessons I use in the debrief come from my personal experience. When I speak, it’s me delivering messages about the mistakes I have made in my life. What my personal life is, is really a constant generation of ideas and content that I can share with other people, not just here is the success, but if you look at my presentations, most of them are on mistakes I made and what I learned from them.
It can be tough sometimes, but my personal and my business life, because of the nature of my business, are inextricably intertwined. Everything that goes on in one, leads into the other. A lot of people talk about work-life balance, but work-life balance insinuates that they are two separate things on opposite ends of the scale. I look at it the way you mentioned – integration. Because of what I do, everything I do businesswise is personal, and everything I do personally is business. Someone once told me that people don’t care about how much you know until they know how much you care. I can’t compartmentalize what I do for business because it means I don’t care, and there isn’t enough passion because I need to make what is business, personal and what is personal, business.
Avil Beckford: What are five life lessons that you have learned so far?
Drew Dudley:
- Leadership is not about getting better. Leadership is realizing there is nothing wrong with you. Change the way you think and act to remind yourself of that more often.
- Almost anything bad that can happen to us has probably happened to us in some degree, so realize that you’ve survived everything that has happened to you so far – that you’ve dealt with every problem that you’ve ever had because you’re still here and we should give ourselves more credit for that.
- Give yourself more credit and that’s related to the point above.
- You matter – I matter.
- The basic unit of human understanding is the story. We need to recognize what our story is, be willing to tell it, and believe that it’s extraordinary.
Avil Beckford: How do you define success? And in your opinion what’s the formula for success?
Drew Dudley: I very consciously try not to define success in a general sense. I think the formula for success is a whiteboard, and something that can be erased, and new things drawn on it. And in fact, many things can be drawn on it. I define success as definable only for each individual situation. The formula for success is a blank board that allows you to rewrite it constantly. That’s a big part of me, I don’t define success in a general sense, I’ll define success in what’s today, what’s my definition for success today? and then I write that on my whiteboard.
When I come up with a different task, I wipe off the whiteboard, and figure out how I define success for that task. Allowing ourselves to define success differently in every context, we are able to recognize just how much flexibility we need to have in our lives. As a result we allow ourselves to have more success. If you say this is what success is, then you have to fit the things in your life into that definition, wherein if you say what success means right here, then you can make sure that there are many more successes that you can give yourself credit for in your life.
Avil Beckford: What are the steps you took to succeed in your field?
Drew Dudley: The first step was to get started, and the second was to get over the fear of starting. So the biggest steps to success for me, were the first and second to begin. And the third biggest step was a wrong one which took me down a path that I realized eventually wasn’t the one for me. The fourth biggest step was when I was willing to go backwards to start on a new path, and the fifth was the one I took where I couldn’t see where I was going to land. That’s not specific, but each one of these steps may be several years or several contexts, but those are the biggest steps to my success.
Avil Beckford: If trusted friends could introduce you to five people that you’ve always wanted to meet, who would you choose? And what would you say to them?
Drew Dudley: I would talk to myself because ultimately we are the only ones that we listen to about why we are awful and why we are great; about why we can do it and why we can’t. Hearing questions like the ones that you ask are ones that lead to revelations about ourselves. When people ask us questions about who we are and what we stand for, these are sometimes things we don’t think about, we just act on.
If I can be introduced to five people, and we’re suspending belief here, I’d like to talk to myself at five, as I was still discovering the world and being reminded of how I thought at five; I’d like to talk to myself at 12, 18, 45 and I’d like to talk to myself at 80. I’d ask myself at each stage, “What’s making you happy right now?” I think that would be an extraordinarily revealing conversation with all of them. To be able to ask yourself 10 years from now what’s making you happy now, to ask yourself 40 years from now, what’s making you happy now, and to be able to chase that earlier. If I ask myself at 12 what was making me happy, as I said before, one of my biggest regrets was not starting earlier. It would be awfully cool to have me older tell me what to start looking for now and to remind myself of the things to be educated out of, or experienced out of when I was younger and didn’t have so many things I was worrying about.
Avil Beckford: Which one book had a profound impact on your life? What was it about this book that impacted you so deeply?
Drew Dudley: I can’t even remember the name but it was the first book I read that made me want so many more books. It opened me up to the fact that there is so much joy to be had there. I grew up consuming any book I could. And if I take a step back and say the first book led to so many things – joy, happiness, knowledge – why would I ever say no to the first of anything?
Avil Beckford: You are one of the 10 finalists on the reality show, So, How Would You Spend Your Time? Each finalist is placed on separate deserted islands for two years. You have a basic hut on the island and all the tools for survival; you just have to be imaginative and inventive when using them. You are allowed to take five books, one movie and one music CD, and whatever else you take has to fit in one suitcase and a travel on case. What would you take with you and how would you spend the two years? T he prize is worth your while and at this stage in the game there really aren’t any losers among the 10 finalists, since each are guaranteed at least $2 million?
Drew Dudley:
Two Years
If you’re alone for two years you have lots of time to think about yourself, but we’re a part of everyone who we have ever met, and they are a part of us. We don’t take enough time to truly get to understand ourselves, or the people who love us and we love. I would take three books they said changed their lives. In reading those books I would learn about them, if that book was profound to them. The messages would speak to what they value and care about and I would like to know about that.
Five Books
- Macbook loaded with as much information as I can on how-to. Specifically, how-to build a power source for a Macbook. This is a commentary on the state of life because one of the things in life is to be flexible. Be ready to deal with whatever comes. Why not embrace what this amazing world has given us in terms of the ability to know things? You can load hundreds of things on a Macbook. Maybe I’m ducking your question, but I don’t want five books, I want a thousand and load them on a Macbook and take them with me.
- I would take a book from my youth called My Book About Me
by Dr Seuss because it asks you to fill out all these things about yourself when you are three years old. If you have two years on a deserted island, it’s an extraordinary opportunity to sit and think about yourself and your life, and we don’t do that enough on an everyday basis. I remember seeing this book in storage at my parents’ place and opening it up and being reminded of that kid at three years old and how I always thought about what my favourite thing was, what I liked to do, and what made me happy. This book was filled with questions. Two years alone is an amazing chance to become more of who you are.
- I’d ask the most important people in my life which books changed theirs and I’d take those with me. Most people would take books that they read before and want to read again, but if I’m allowed to take my Macbook, I’d fill it up with both fiction and non-fiction, and the work of authors that I don’t know.
Movie & Music CD
I would take the 1988 baseball movie Bull Durham (20th Anniversary Edition)
Bull Durham – trailer
Cannot view this video, click here. Uploaded by johnmatrix1 on Jul 22, 2010
Avil Beckford: What excites you about life?
Drew Dudley: Tomorrow! I get today. People often ask the question, “Where so you see yourself in five years,” and what excites me is that I don’t get the urge to answer that question. Maybe what excites me about life is that maybe I haven’t seen the best part yet. Life just keeps on getting better, and what excites me is that there is something better yet to come, and you don’t have to figure out what it is.
Avil Beckford: Complete the following, I am happy when…..
Drew Dudley: I allow myself to be happy! I really do. Sometimes you look at the things where you should be happy and for some reason you don’t let yourself be happy. And there are times when doing things, there is a moment I wasn’t happy because I didn’t allow myself. I can be happy anywhere if I let myself do it. Most of the times I’m unhappy is because I won’t let myself be happy because of silly reasons.
Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.
Related articles
- Mentor Yourself – An Interview With Drew Dudley (theinvisiblementor.com)
- Mentor Yourself With Miranda Vande Kuyt (theinvisiblementor.com)
Booked for Mentoring: Review of The Flinch by Julien Smith
The Flinch is a great book for mentoring because it teaches us to step outside our comfort zone, and it assures us that we are not our mistakes. Because we have failed before, doesn’t mean we will not succeed. Failure is feedback, inventor Thomas Edison said, “If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.”
The Flinch by Julien Smith is one of the books in Seth Godin’s Domino Project, and is distributed for free to spread the message. I read it on my computer (I have the Kindle apps) and it takes under an hour to read. Smith includes homework assignments for the reader to do.
According to Smith, “This is a book about being a champion, and what it takes to get there. It’s about decisions, and how to know when you’re making the right ones. It’s about you: the current, present you; the potential, future you; and the one, single difference between them. It’s about an instinct – the flinch – and why mastering it is vital.”
The content of the book isn’t new, but it is presented in a different way, and it is easy to consume. This shouldn’t prevent you from reading The Flinch, because we often have to hear a message about nine times before it sticks. As I was reading the book, I was reminded of Martin Luther King’s quote, “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase,” and Susan Jeffers’ awesome book, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway.
There are many times in our life, when we flinch, and do not do the things that we know will make a major difference for us, and to make ourselves feel better, we work hard at justifying our actions, yet we wonder why we never have major breakthroughs in life. The Flinch is not about feeling no fear, it is about having the courage to move forward despite the fear. We avoid the perceived pain and flinch, instead of dealing with it.
I have heard that 92 percent of the times, what we worry about never occurs, yet we waste time worrying and not take action because of what we think may happen. But the funny thing is that most of the time what we worry about never occurs, and if it does, it seldom is as bad as we imagined. The author encourages us to take back our life, to take control and stop flinching.
If we stop flinching and just do the work, our future self will thank us. When you see children playing in a park, they are fearless, and when they fall down, they get up, dust themselves off and continue like nothing happened. The Flinch is about going back to that time, when we brushed ourselves off when we got knocked down. The formula for success in life is really about trial and error, experimenting until we find what works, and it helps us to understand the environment that we exist in.
In The Flinch, Julien Smith says, “…The lessons you learn best are the ones you get burned by. Without the scar, there is no evidence or strong memory…Firsthand knowledge, however, is visceral, painful, and necessary. It uses the conscious and the unconscious to process the lesson, and it uses all your senses. You fall down, your whole motor system is involved…”
A research report by The William Glasser Institute about how we learn backs up what Smith says, we learn:
- 10 percent of what we Read
- 20 percent of what we Hear
- 30 percent of what we See
- 50 percent of what we See and Hear
- 70 percent of what we Discuss with Others
- 80 percent of what we Experience Personally
- 95 percent of what we Teach to Others
If you experience something, you are 80 percent likely to learn from it. Nothing beats trying and testing your limits besides teaching what your learned from the experience to another person. You constantly have to test yourself to see how far you can go.
Smith recommends that you do the opposite of your habits to build your tolerance to the flinch, and the power it holds over you. In a Seinfeld episode, George Louis Costanza discovered that when he did the opposite of what he usually did, he had great success. We are socialized to respond a certain way, which is seldom the way to blaze a new trail.
The Flinch by Julien Smith is a great reminder of how important it is to stretch ourselves beyond our comfort zone. And the best part is he demonstrates how to do so in the book. Give The Flinch a read, all it will cost is an hour of your time. Even though the content isn’t new, we need a reminder. Download The Flinch today.
Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.
Book link is affiliate link.
2011 Books for Mentoring
Reading gives me great pleasure, so I spend a lot of time indulging myself. I also find that I am mentored by the books that I read, even novels, and books often shape my thinking. I try to read many different genres in a quest to be more creative in my thinking. I recently discovered that the books that I read were not as diverse as I thought, if you look at where the authors originate from.
Below is a list of some of the books that I have enjoyed this year, how many on the list have you read? This is a sampling because I have read over 150 books since the start of 2011. If I have reviewed the book, I have included the link to the review. From now on, when you read, assume that the book that you are reading is an invisible mentor and try to glean as much as possible from it.
Cover of The Hunger Games
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series
- Foundation
- Foundation and Empire
- Second Foundation
- Foundation’s Edge
- Foundation and Earth
- Forward the Foundation
Review of Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
A Look at Foundation’s Edge, Foundation and Earth and Forward the Foundation by Isaac Asimov
After reading most of the books from the Foundation series, I started to enjoy science fiction and fantasy more.
Alex Archer’s Rogue Angel Series
Alex Archer is a pen name for a number of authors who write the books which come out every other month. The books will unlikely win any literary award but I happen to like the protagonist Anja Creed. Trouble finds Anja wherever she goes, and I like the books best when she uses her brain to get her out of tight situations. She has inherited Joan of Arc’s sword, which she uses in fights. Anja is a globetrotting archaeologist.
- Phantom Prospect
- Restless Soul
- False Horizon
- The Other Crowd
- The Oracle’s Message
- Tears of the Gods
Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games Trilogy
- The Hunger Games Boxed Set
- Catching Fire
- Mockingjay
The Hunger Games is This Year’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Catching Fire and Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
Other Books
- The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
- Enchantment, Guy Kawasaki
- The Way of the Samurai, Inazo Nitobe
- How to Read Like a Professor, Thomas Foster
- The Rime of The Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- The Collectibles, James Kaufman
- Hold Tight, Harlan Coben
- The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie
- Four Seasons The Story of a Business Philosophy, Isadore Sharp
- How to Write & Sell Simple Information for Fun and Profit, Bob Bly
- The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam, Translated by Edward Fitzgerald
- Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu
- The Art of War, Sun Tzu
- Analects of Confucius
- Keeper of the Light, Diane Chamberlain
- A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen
- Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
- Evil Plans, Hugh MacLeod
- Poke the Box, Seth Godin
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D H Lawrence
- The Last Lecture, Randy Pausch
- Empire State of Mind, Zack O’Malley Greenburg
- The Big Leap, Gay Hendriks
- The Gambler, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Geronimo’s Story of His Life, S. M. Barrett
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Bronte
- A Short History of the World, J. Milnor Dorey
- Greek Gods and Heroes, Robert Graves
- Stories from Greek Drama, Winifred Mulley
- The Hypnotist, Lars Kepler
- The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
- Agnes Grey, Anne Bronte
How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.
Some of the book links are affiliate links.
Posted in Book List, Book Review/Summary, Mentor Yourself, Summareview | 
Tags: A Doll's House, A Short History of the World, Agatha Christie, Agnes Grey, Alex Archer, Analects of Confucius, Anne Brontë, Bob Bly, books for mentoring, D H Lawrence, Diane Chamberlain, Empire State of Mind, Enchantment, Evil Plans, F Scott Fitzgerald, Foundation, Foundation series, Four Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gay Hendriks, Geronimo’s Story of His Life, Greek Gods and Heroes, Gustave Flaubert, Guy Kawasaki, Harlan Coben, Henrik Ibsen, Hold Tight, How to Read Like a Professor, How to Write & Sell Simple Information for Fun and Profit, Hugh MacLeod, Inazo Nitobe, Isaac Asimov, Isadore Sharp, J. Milnor Dorey, James Kaufman, Keeper of the Light, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lao Tzu, Lars Kepler, Madame Bovary, Oscar Wilde, Poke the Box, Randy Pausch, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Robert Graves, S. M. Barrett, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Seth Godin, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Stories from Greek Drama, Sun Tzu, Tao Te Ching, The Art of War, The Big Leap, The Collectibles, The Gambler, The Great Gatsby, The Hypnotist, The Last Lecture, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Rime of The Ancient Mariner, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam - Translated by Edward Fitzgerald, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, The Way of The Samurai, Thomas Foster, Winifred Mulley, Zack O'Malley Greenburg | 
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Booked on Tuesdays: Review – Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness: The Science, Design, and Engineering of Contagious Ideas
I finally got around to reading my complimentary copy of Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness: The Science, Design, and Engineering of Contagious Ideas
We’ve all seen videos, blog posts and ideas that spread like wildfire over the internet.
But what makes them spreadable? Is it because they are good?
Not necessarily, says Dan Zarrella, since some of those videos, blog posts and ideas aren’t good. They spread because they have contagiousness factors. They spread because they are able to reproduce themselves. “In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins coined the word “meme” to mean a “unit of cultural inheritance.” His point was ideas evolve like genes do, and their success is based on their ability to spread, not on their benefit to provide to their hosts,” says Zarrella.
What I liked about the manifesto is that it’s researched-based and the author loves to tests things. Before an idea is spread, there are three criteria that must be met first:
- Exposure: People have to be exposed to your content, so that means that they have to subscribe to your blog, be on your email list, or follow you on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook. To win at this you have to increase the number of people who subscribe to you blog, are on your email lists, and who connect or follow you on the various social networks.
- Attention: They have to be aware of the content that you want to spread, so they have to read you blog post, open your email or read you status update. To win at this, you have to write better headlines/subject lines for your blog posts and emails, as well as more engaging status updates.
- Motivation: They have to be motivated to share your content. Always have a call to action so people know what they are supposed to do next.
And the key to the above is really to experiment to determine what works and what doesn’t work so well.
Zarrella takes each criteria, and delves into them in their own chapter and gives deeper insight into exactly what he means. For instance, we are often told that if we have a small engaged list, our idea will spread, but the science doesn’t really support that. Yes, there are times we’ll get lucky, but for an idea to spread, it’s better if it’s exposed to a larger audience because not everyone will read it, and of those who read about your idea, even less will be motivated to share it.
In addition, certain words such as official, founder, speaker, expert and so on give us authority and increases our exposure. Another interesting piece of information is that people prefer information from you that’s positive because they are bombarded with so much negative information every day. And when you write, they want to hear your voice, your unique take, they want you to be authentic, but they do not want to hear about you. It’s what’s in it for them.
To grab attention you have to cut through all the clutter, but to do so, you have to say something new in a way that is familiar, or say something old in a new way, and one of the examples Zarrella gave was new adaptations of Romeo and Juliet. Another way is to personalize your message, or even broadcast your message at counterintuitive times such as on the weekends. Email messages that were sent between 5 and 6 am had the highest click through rates.
Certain types of information are more spreadable than others:
- People have to be eager for the information.
- Have to know what information people already have and what they lack.
- Have to have an understanding of what moves them – their hopes, fears, hostilities.
- Have an understanding of how they deal with their hopes, fears, hostilities, and so on.
Some of the reasons people are motivated to spread your ideas include: Personal relevance, humour, usefulness, shared common interest and so on. And the easier it is to read and understand your idea, the more spreadable it becomes.
3 Great Ideas
- Talk as yourself, not about yourself.
- Add to the conversation with interesting content.
- Scarce knowledge is power
I recommend Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness: The Science, Design, and Engineering of Contagious Ideas
Other Resources
How to Write Magnetic Headlines, Copyblogger.com
How to Write Headlines That Work, Copyblogger.com
102 Proven Social Media Headline Formulas, Chris Garrett
Idea Starters: 52 Headline Archetypes to Get Your Creative Juices Flowing
How to Spread Your Ideas, Leo Babauta
How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.
Book link is affiliate link.
Booked for Mentoring: Review – Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions by Guy Kawasaki
Image via Wikipedia
“Good enchanters are likable, but great enchanters are likable and trustworthy.”
Guy Kawasaki in his new book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions
There is a shift taking place in the universe today. The consciousness is changing as evidenced by the kind of books that are being written. We have passed through the Information Age and entering into a new one, one that is more tribal in nature. Power and information is no longer filtering down from the top. Instead, the funnel has been turned upside down and information is moving from the grassroots up to the top.
More and more people realize that life is more than about them, and they are interested in causes that matter, that change lives. Success now comes with greater responsibilities, and to captivate audiences require different actions. And you have to be likeable and trustworthy – you have to be authentic.
That means you have to become an enchanter!
And that’s where Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions comes in. The book has 12 chapters with titles such as:
- Why Enchantment?
- How to Achieve Likability
- How to Achieve Trustworthiness
- How to Prepare
- How to Launch
- How to Overcome Resistance
- How to Make Enchantment Endure
- How to Use Push Technology
- How to Use Pull Technology
- How to Enchant Employees
- How to Enchant Your Boss
- How to Resist Enchantment
To become likeable, Guy Kawasaki suggests you should strive to create win-win situations, accept others, seek common ground, not impose your values on others, try to default to yes, among other things. To be trustworthy, you first have to trust others, be a Mensch, disclose your interests, give for intrinsic reason, gain knowledge and competence, show up, bake a bigger pie, enchant people on their own terms, position yourself and be a hero. And he goes into great detail to explain what he means.
For instance, to be a mensch, Guy Kawasaki paraphrased his friend, Bruna Martinuzzi’s 10 ways to achieve menschdom and added two of his own.
- Always act with honesty.
- Treat people who have wronged you with civility.
- Fulfill your unkept promises from the past.
- Help someone who can be of absolutely no use to you.
- Suspend blame when something goes wrong, ask “What can we learn?”
- Hire people who are as smart as or smarter than you are and give them opportunities for growth.
- Don’t interrupt people; don’t dismiss their concerns offhand; don’t rush to give advice; don’t change the subject. Allow people their moment.
- Do no harm in anything you undertake.
- Don’t be too quick to shoot down others’ ideas.
- Share your knowledge, expertise, and best practices with others.
- Focus on goodwill.
- Give others the benefit of the doubt.
To me, living the 12 precepts of “menschdom” is not easy but it’s something to strive for. And we have to recognize that we won’t be on top of them all the time.
Guy Kawasaki: The Pillars of Enchantment
If you cannot view this YouTube video from Forbes Video, please click here.
There is some unexpected wisdom in Enchantment. I particularly liked the idea of conducting a pre-mortem. A post-mortem is dissecting after the fact to determine cause, but in a pre-mortem, before you launch a new product, service or whatever, you project into the future with a mindset that you failed and why. The team is uninhibited in brainstorming the many reasons for failing because the project hasn’t launched yet so they will not be offending anyone. After the failure brainstorming session, they make the necessary changes to the product, service or whatever, to safeguard against those failures. Isn’t that a brilliant idea?
I also liked the sections on how to use technology to become an enchanter, and I appreciated that Kawasaki consulted with experts to get their tips to share, and they are tips that you can implement right away. Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions by Guy Kawasaki is well researched and as a reformed researcher, that gave him even more credibility in my eyes. At the end of each chapter, you experience enchantment in action via vignettes from many ordinary people. There is also a quiz at the end of the book.
If you want to be more likeable and trustworthy, then Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions is the book for you because it has concrete steps on how to become an enchanter. But I also recommend that you read Linchpin and Poke the Box by Seth Godin, Do the Work by Steven Pressfield, Evil Plans by Hugh MacLeod because all these books help you to reach your highest potential, which I think is part of being enchanting.
Guy Kawasaki mentions Apple and its products a lot in Enchantment, and people may find that annoying or offensive, but I know that he is an Apple evangelist so it doesn’t bother me. I would like to mention that I received a copy of Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions from the publisher to review.
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