Today’s unignorable lesson comes from the brilliant Hugh at Gaping Void. How you define what matters is up to you…
27 December, 2009
Business lessons from my Wii
Earlier this year I bought a Nintendo Wii. I hadn’t bought a games console for ten or fifteen years but I’d played with one a few times at friends’ houses and they seemed like a sociable and fun way of passing the time. So on a whim I picked a second hand one up off eBay, making sure to get one with the balance board so I could kid myself that I’d wake up every morning and do an hour’s yoga on it…
Anyway, I’ve been really getting into Wii Sports Tennis of late. It’s a lot more sophisticated than I first realised and I’ve enjoyed learning to play the different shots and seeing my steady rise through the ranks.
There are several training options with the tennis and I found myself testing myself on my ability to time my swing. This is done by returning the ball, with the added difficulty of hitting a moving, and shrinking, target at the far end.
Here’s a video of someone doing that training…
I'd been getting increasingly frustrated with my inability to improve my meagre high score. And then I realised that on returning a ball into one of the corners I was often distracted by watching to see if it hit the target at the far end, when i should have been concentrating on the next ball that was already whizzing its way in my direction. Once I'd hit the ball there was absolutely nothing i could do to improve its chances of ending up in the right spot, so I told myself to ignore everything except the ball coming towards me. A simple enough feat, but I instantly started to improve.
Lesson No.1 - Once you've made a change to your business, concentrate on what's next. Obviously if you've added a new product to your range, or you've decided to treat your customers in a different way, then this all needs monitoring. But don't let that distract you from moving things forward. Don't get hung up on what you did yesterday. Surely what you do tomorrow is more important...?
As you can see from the video the target area moves from side to side. I was attempting to hit the middle of the target each time, meaning I was introducing small variations to my strokes in order to "centralise" each shot. Then it dawned on me that no matter how much it moved from side to side some part of the target area covered the very centre of the court for the vast majority of the early stages of the training. So if I concentrated on maintaining a simple, metronomic swing straight back at the server it would hit the target every time. So, instead of trying to alter my swing for each shot, I did the same thing every time. And it was good enough.
Lesson No.2 - Are you over-complicating your service, trying to modify it for each customer/order/request? Is there one simple action that you can do that will allow you to hit your targets every (or nearly every) time? There's parallels with the Pareto Principle, the Abraham Lincoln mis-quote "you can't please all of the people all of the time", and Ben Hammersley's talking at the Do Lectures about measuring the right thing. In other words, you can achieve a lot more by doing a lot less.
So, next time you feel guilty for playing computer games, just tell yourself you're doing a mini-MBA....
10 December, 2009
Why entrepreneurs should stick to business….
They’re obviously working so hard on their startups they don’t have time for vocal coaching!
Congratulations to everyone involved. They may not be the most brilliant vocalists, but you have to respect the hard work for getting to where they are now!
30 November, 2009
I’m famous, honest!
Well, not quite. The brilliant Simon Edwards of Popup Media has put together a documentary about the Do Lectures.
I’m featured a few times waxing lyrical about why it was one of the greatest experiences of the last few years.
You can find out more about why I thought it was such an incredible experience in my blogs about it (pt.1, pt.2, pt.3, pt.4, a few videos). Most of the talks are up on the Do Lectures website now, so you should check them out.
29 November, 2009
Why I’m doing a triathlon
I got asked the other day why I would do something so “bloody stupid” as attempt a triathlon, something I’ve committed to doing next year.
The truth is I didn’t really have an answer. But when I thought about it, I realised I’ve done a few “bloody stupid” things over the last few years. I ran Berlin Marathon a few months ago, and I walked 100 kilometres in just 24 hours over a range of big hills.
At the time i probably said something about the challenge, or raising money for charity. But I think the reality is simply that I’ve realised that life is just too short not to attempt extraordinary things.
Everyone’s definition of “extraordinary” will be different (having met Everest mountaineers etc in the past the things I get up to are the kind of thing they’d do before breakfast), but I’ll be attempting them for a long time yet. I’ll inevitably fail, but hopefully that won’t put me off.
I’m reticent to talk in these terms, mainly for fear of sounding pretentious and a little bit “self-help”! But I’m intrigued to find out what extraordinary things everyone else has done. Let me know in the comments…
UPDATE: On thinking about it a little more, I suppose this is quite similar to the oft-referred-to theory that life just gets a lot more interesting when you learn to say “yes” to things that your instinct tells you to avoid. How many great adventures would have been missed if people had said “No, I’d rather sit in and watch telly than cycle the length of Great Britain/walk the great wall of china/drive a 2CV down the length of Africa”? By saying yes to these crazy, extraordinary things we give ourselves targets, things to achieve, and something to dream of…
26 November, 2009
24 hour startup
My friend Rob from Nonsense has got together with his colleagues and decided to build a new web-based startup. In 24 hours. From scratch. And then after that they’ll be selling it on ebay.
When they started at midday they didn’t have an idea yet. Now they’re 4 hours in and despite not announcing the idea yet, the company has a bid for $153.50. By my ropey maths I calculate at this rate it’ll be worth $921 when they finish the 24 hours tomorrow at midday, $9,210 by the end of the 10 day ebay listing, and $3,621,165 by this time next year.
If only calculating a company’s worth was that simple. And profitable!
Anyway, you can tune in to see them live at work on the webcam on 24hour-startup.com, read their updates here, and follow the twitter hashtag (#24hourstartup) here.
I wonder if we’ll get to see them in sleeping bags later as the caffeine runs out!
Good luck, guys…. 
Update (23:42) – I disappear for a few hours to have dinner and go to the cinema and all hell breaks loose. They’ve chosen an idea (shopping by colour!), a name (“Dr Hue”), and have got some early logo designs, all of which are great.
Keep it up gents!
Oh, and with 12 hours to go it’s currently on sale for $203….
Update (09:19) – The first thing i did when I woke up this morning was roll over, fire up Twitter on my phone, and find out how the boys were getting on. They’ve been doing amazing things overnight. Although they do appear to have lost the plot a little…
You can now follow Dr Hue on Twitter, check out the holding page, and enter a competition to win stuff!
- Update (09:46)
- We have a sleeper!
- Update (11.57)
- someone’s not happy about running out of coffee….
Update (12.01) –
They did it!
Update (12.35) – Gone to pub….
14 November, 2009
Starbucks rip off the Girl Effect
At The Do Lectures this year I was introduced to a video entitled the Girl Effect. It’s now a very short video that I can’t watch without a tear in my eye. It’s incredibly powerful and makes me want to do something to help. I owe Duke Stump a huge amount for introducing me to it.
So it was a bit strange to see a carbon copy used by Starbucks on a UK TV advert this evening. It was supposedly for a good cause, but I couldn’t help but have mixed feelings about a mega-corp nicking something creative that was purely for the benefit of others.
What do you think? Should they have taken 30 seconds to develop a new concept of their own? Or am I just being a bit “over-protective” of something that’s not important because as long as good stuff comes out of it it’s not important?
12 November, 2009
Committing to stuff in public
One of the ways I get myself to do big things is to commit to doing them in public. That way I face the shame of failure amongst those that know me if I don’t do them.
So, seeing as I’ve just got back from my first run since Berlin Marathon 7 weeks ago (something i did after publicly committing to it!) where my kneecap didn’t feel like it was trying to escape my leg, I feel ready to commit to training again. Here’s some stuff I plan to do:
- By the end of next year i want to have done a triathlon. Anyone with me?
- I’ve been meaning to give 100 push-ups a try for months. I start today.
- I’m going to re-attempt Al Humphries “daily cold shower” thing. Going to be tough over the coming winter!
- I’m going to re-start fencing (think this, not this) after losing touch with it during marathon training.
- I’m going to re-start kung-fu. After a ten year hiatus. Time to dust off those belts!
Finally, here’s two great creative industries sites: SightUnseen (behind the scenes of the creative industries), and Creative Boom (a creative industries news site). And there’s some cracking music industry stuff over on the latest Dizzyjam blog post.
28 October, 2009
Pitching and Blackspotting
That’s it. My blackspotting dreams can come true anywhere. They’ve invented anti-wifi paint!
I genuinely can imagine a time in the not too distant future where cafes advertise that they are blackspots or, through the use of anti-wifi paint, they offer blackspot rooms.
In other news, I did a Dragon’s Den style pitch yesterday in front of a room full of potential investors. As I wrote recently, I’m looking for investment in Nocci, and I got a few good leads. I’ll keep you up to date!
It wasn’t the best pitch I’ve ever given, and there were relevant points that I forgot to say. But I learned a lot from my poor talk at Ignite a few weeks ago, and so I was better prepared for trying to convey a lot of information in a short period of time. If anyone’s interested, here’s the script of the pitch I did (PDF with pictures!).
26 October, 2009
Search Engine Optimisation and the Pembrokeshire B&B
I’ve just been away for a relaxed weekend in West Wales (staying in the highly recommended Old Oak Barn) and while having lunch in a great pub in the beautiful little village of Little Haven got chatting to a local couple. They were middle-aged, owned a local bed and breakfast and blew away all of my preconceptions about who tracks their website traffic and is aware of the dark art of SEO…
I know relatively little about the subject but, while their website could do with a little work, they were more than aware of the benefits of their URL (pembrokeshirebedandbreakfast.com) which puts them on the front page of Google for that search term, and were fascinated by tracking traffic that came from blog posts, international sites and B&B listings sites. And their understanding of their business and their ability to track where a lot of it comes from is probably much improved because of it.
So, any other examples of “unlikely” businesses engaging in digital marketing? Or is it just me thinks it’s still the preserve of young, city-dwelling digital companies? Any carpenters, farmers or rural pubs?
Oh, and hello to Jan as I’m sure she’ll be reading if any clicks went from this blog to their site…!
