Think I’m being overly meta with an editorial franchise about editorial franchises? You ain’t seen nothing yet. The New York Times Magazine’s weekly ‘Meh List’ is one of many editorial profiles within the umbrella editorial franchise that is the One-Page Magazine. Every week the One Page Magazine appears within the first few pages of the print version, featuring an assortment of recurring bite-sized features which are by turns interesting, poignant, informative or funny.
Examples include:
The dubious “adjudication” of reader-submitted dilemmas and disputes by humorist John Hodgman in the Judge John Hodgman Rules micro-column (a multimedia franchise – find the podcast, here).
There is no one standard definition of an editorial franchise that I’ve ever been able to find. And among people who “do” content for a living, the usage of the term varies. Some consider any container for serial content to be an editorial franchise, whether it be a single blog post with a list of the Top 10 what-have-yous, or an entire blog, video series or Tumblr.
As I see it, these are all useful, but they are really content programs. I don’t like to apply a term of art, like editorial franchise, unless it adds clarity, guidance or other utility to people who want to understand or implement it. So here’s my definition:
To know me is to know that I am a joyous, if relentless, goal-setter. I love the chaos of working in the moment, but also relish the clarity of sitting down and resetting or course-correcting the flow of my daily work and life on track to specific targets.
Over the years, I’ve done loads of experiments in an attempt to nail both the art and the science of the level-up. And there are specific systems and projects that I know work. For example, I pride myself on setting my New Year’s Resolutions a month ahead of time so I can do all the prep-work to keep my 80% success rate intact. I also incorporate micro-systems like 7x7s (a rubric for prioritizing 7 key initiatives for 7 week time-blocks) and Q4 sprints into both my personal and business target-setting.
We recently took a field trip to visit the experiential content marketing event that is Vanguard’s At-Cost Cafe, during its 3-day stint at San Francisco’s Justin Herman Plaza, on the waterfront Embarcadero.
The coffee was bold, and the story was, too – the “sales pitch” much less so. Just as it should be.
Here’s what we found – with lots of takeaways for Lean Marketers and anyone with a financial or decidedly un-sexy message you want to deliver in a highly digestible way:
At certain transition times, it’s tempting to make a move — a big, game-changing power tweak — to the who, what, when, where or why of our lives. You learn something about what does and doesn’t work for you any longer; you go through a breakup, lose weight or start a business, and all of a sudden you want to change jobs, move towns or fire friends.
In 12-step programs, they call this “pulling a geographic:” making external changes, like moving, to solve internal problems.
About once a month I get a call from company desperately seeking a content or social media program turnaround. Sometimes, metrics are ailing. Follower-building is flat, no one is clicking or sharing, comments are nearly nonexistent and engagement? Forget about it. Other times, the issue is more existential in nature: someone in a C-Suite or board chair has issued an ultimatum: if this program is not helping the company grow, we either need to fix it or stop spending on it. Stat.
To kick off 2013 I decided to dream big. I pulled together all of my favorite sources of inspiration: books, TED talks, thought leaders and tech tools and I used them to build 12 Days of Transformation.
But it doesn’t have to be the new year to kick off the big changes you want to make in your business and your life. Start where you are. Start today.
If you are ready to bring a new spark to your business and life, look no further. I’ve got all the inspiration you can handle right here.
Get started with my personalized video message to you. Then scroll down to find each day’s slideshow and links to all of the resources highlighted in each day of the 12 Days of Transformation.
This week, a legit beekeeper. No joke – check the picture! During my writing retreat this week at Carmel Valley Ranch, I donned the hood and suit and sopped up as much information and experience with something like 40,000 honeybees as I could in a couple of hours.
Carmel Valley Ranch has an in-house beekeeping expert, John Russo, who has an encyclopedic knowledge and affectionate philosophy toward his tiny charges. John tends not only the bees, but also the Ranch’s extensive lavender gardens. In-between teaching us all about the various roles bees play, from undertaker to queen and playing Fact-or-Fiction with the youngest hotel guests around their Bee Movie takeaways, John made mention of an elemental truth about bees from which I think we can draw inspiration at times of transition.
You see, I actually want to raise bees in my backyard. So going into the session, I’d asked John to verbally annotate his normal curriculum with notes I might find useful. As he began to talk about bees and their natural GPS systems, he threw in one such note. When you move bees, he explained, you seal up the hive and take them to their new home. But the home must be over 2 miles away from their old one, or they just fly right back. When they get to their new home, he went on, they do what’s called an orientation flight, an intricate set of circles around their new place of residence. They fly around something like 20 times and, in the process, permanently reset their internal positioning systems around their new home’s location.
Sometimes we are knocked out of our comfort zone, by life or by changes in the marketplace. Often we think of these displacements as involuntary, like when a competitor swallows up the other companies in our space and we’re immediately rendered the little guy. Or when someone leaves us, dies or we get a troublesome medical report or a pink slip. We should take care, though, not to underestimate the disorienting power of even the smallest steps we intentionally take toward our deepest, most desired dreams. They can make us feel like imposters, like we are operating in something other than the reality we’ve always known. (Because, in fact, we are.)
That disorientation can cause us to backslide on our goal and habit change efforts, to play smaller than we really are, or to get stuck clinging to a past that is long gone – and not coming back. Just like the bees who aren’t moved far enough away.
It is in these moments that perhaps we should consider doing our own version of an orientation flight – our own set of practices and check-ins to remind us who we really are and what we are really about. These are the times when we must sit still, in the dark of the mornings; the times when we should revisit our intentions and targets for the era; the times when we should engage our advisors (personal or otherwise) and read what nourishes us. These are the times in which moving and caring for our physical bodies is elevated from medical mandate to sacred routine.
In our businesses, these are times when the mission and vision statements, roadmaps and objectives that once seemed like silly academic exercises now seem like orienting lifelines – or require revision or rewriting.
With these “orienting flights,” we can be resilient and adapt quickly to the changes that have been forced upon us – or move out of imposter syndrome and into the process of becoming the newest version of ourselves with joy and ease.
I’ve long thought that conceptualized real estate decision-making — the intention and strategy that underlie our choice of location, mortgage, price point and property type — is the ultimate exercise in lifestyle design.
The place we live is inextricably intertwined with our relationships, our work and how we spend our leisure time, both impacting and being impacted by all these areas of our lives in innumerable ways, some of which we can’t even anticipate until the web of impacts have begun to be spun.
I’ve seen homebuying impact adult children’s relationships with their parents, when the son or daughter accepts a down payment “gift” that is given with many, unspoken strings attached. And I’ve seen a previously fearful homebuyer grow more assertive than ever before in pursuing the lifestyle of her dreams, starting a new business and traveling the globe, emboldened by her success at this complex, daunting transaction.
This web is why I so often encourage homebuyers to write out, journal or otherwise lay out their holistic vision of the life they want to live after they move into the home they are about to hunt for, before drilling down into the minutiae of bedrooms, bathrooms and square feet.
And this web is beautifully detailed in the new, third edition of the international best-seller “Repacking Your Bags: Lighten Your Load for the Good Life” by professors and coaches Richard Leider and David Shapiro.
This is by no means a book about real estate; it is a book about how to compose and recompose a fulfilling, inspired and plain old “good” life, as often as you need to, throughout your lifetime. In fact, part of what is unique about “Repacking” is that the authors have written three editions of it over 20 years, and comment transparently throughout about how the philosophies, tools and systems contained in “Repacking” have evolved as they have lived their own “good life” journeys.
But Leider and Shapiro provide a succinct definition of what the good life is, and home is an essential element: “living in the place you belong, with the people you love, doing the right work, on purpose (emphasis added).”
The whole of “Repacking” is devoted to helping readers unpack and repack these four elemental “bags” that we all carry through life with a framework that helps us to carry no more and no less than what makes us happy at the various transition points in our lives where we crave to figure out what’s not working and course-correct.
“Repacking” guides readers through assessing where they stand and where they want to stand vis-à-vis each of the four “bags” — place, relationships, work and purpose — then offers dozens of stories to inspire any repacking that needs to take place, and dozens more tools to execute it. Here are a few of those tools:
1. Reboot. First-gen repackers were often prompted to rethink things by a midlife crisis; now, say Leider and Shapiro, people repack early and often, throughout their lives.
But our busyness makes it difficult to stop, seek and find meaning while we’re on the treadmill the authors call “hurry sickness — always going somewhere, never being anywhere …” They encourage readers to reboot their lives by taking a 12-hour media fast, consuming no TV, radio, Internet — not even using the phone — for half a day, instead devoting that time to consider some key questions about our relationships, our lives and our purpose.
The next step, for those who dare take it, is a 24-hour vacation from speaking. For both steps of their “reboot,” Leider and Shapiro offer “purpose points,” “core questions” and “repacking reflections” that readers should examine to take full advantage of these self-imposed time-outs.
2. Resharpen your growth edge. Unique to this edition is Leider and Shapiro’s repeated call to readers to reinvent and repack their bags, not just out of ennui, but in order to keep up with the rapid changes in the workforce and marketplace. They write, “[i]f the rate at which you’re learning is not equal to or greater than the rate of change today, you’ll soon be obsolete.”
The authors encourage readers to conceive of their personal development as just as essential to thriving as a company sees its research & development initiatives. Ideally, “Repacking” involves constantly exploring new opportunities and building new skills, always looking to learn something new that excites you.
3. Reframe. Leider and Shapiro urge readers to reality-check themselves on how they are “spending two of (their) most valuable currencies: (their) time and (their) money” by sitting down with their actual calendars and checkbooks and asking themselves how satisfied they are with where these resources are going. If you find yourself spending either on things you wouldn’t deem priorities, then it might be time to repack in one or more area(s) of your life.
For hundreds of years, the intersections of our visions and our realities, our beliefs for the future and what actually comes to pass, the things we say and our state of affairs have long fascinated theorists and researchers in a strange mix and wide range of fields, from medicine to religion to sports performance.
Neuropsychologists now know that our brains fill in the blanks of our senses to create our perceptions. But the power of our expectations to craft our reality has tended, through the generations, to be perceived with skepticism, distrust and the imprimatur of gullibility at best and occult or demonic influence at worst.
Journalist Chris Berdik, in his new book, “Mind Over Mind: The Surprising Power of Expectations,” surfaces the history, science and anecdotes around the power of imagination, expectations, placebos and anticipation to create powerful conclusions, in order to leverage this power for good and avoid the pitfalls to which they render us susceptible.
Here are a few fundamental truths about the power of expectations that Berdik surfaces in “Mind Over Mind”:
1. “The expectations of want are more powerful than the here and now of liking.” The objects of our desire and the experience of desire itself are not, as we might think, the same thing, according to Berdik. Wanting more powerfully activates the brain’s reward system, which motivates us to work hard to achieve our goals, but can also snowball into extremes like addiction and compulsive behaviors.
What Berdik calls “too much wanting” holds the destructive potential to “blind us to dangers, diminish our performance, and make us work doggedly for what we don’t even like.”
Fortunately, if we work at the level of expectations, we can actually harness the power of expectations to promote our behavior-change efforts. For example, consciously linking our thoughts of spinach to expectations of health rather than just wrestling against our taste expectations of a Snickers bar is one way to manage our brains’ reward centers to further the behaviors we want to promote.
2. “The future is rosier than the past.” The fact that the brain is the most engaged and attentive when imagining happy future events, Berdik argues, accounts for homeowners’ optimism despite past market crashes — and optimism is, in fact, a primary and necessary driver of the economy.
Even after learning their true statistical likelihood of experiencing various traumas, research subjects were much more likely to correct their earlier forecasts of their own probability of everything from developing Alzheimer’s to having their car stolen if the hard numbers suggested they should be more optimistic.
While it’s tempting to try to seek ways to correct for this overoptimism, it is precisely this element of human nature that, over a lifetime, “keeps us moving, doing and propagating even though we know nothing lasts.”
3. “Having the right expectations about failure can be crucial to ultimate success.” Berdik relates the lifelong research of psychologist Carol Dweck, who contrasts those individuals who have a fixed mindset (the belief that “people are born with a certain mix of strengths and weakness”) with those who possess a growth mindset (the belief that “people define their abilities and limitations through effort”).
Because the growth mindset focuses on learning and sees failure as an opportunity to improve, children who failed but were lauded for their effort were much more likely to try again than kids who failed but had been praised for being smart. (In conversations with researchers, the latter group was much more likely to lie about their scores and ask about how other kids scored than the kids who had been instilled with a growth mindset who were more likely to flat-out ask researchers for the tips to solve the problem they’d been given.)
Berdik cites this phenomenon as partially responsible for the failure of increases to self-esteem to create increased academic performance. In reality, he writes, “[h]igh self-esteem makes us overestimate the role our talents and intelligence play in our accomplishments [and can] disrupt the balance between our expectations for success and our ability to achieve it.” Rather, Berdik says, the beneficial sort of self-esteem we should be instilling in our children and promoting in ourselves “isn’t focused on who [we] are but on who [we] may become.”
