How to design a website Don’t.
Unless you are a web designer.
There are people much better at certain aspects of your business, and they are much cheaper than the opportunity cost of doing it yourself.
Use them.
Sam Hazledine, author Unfair Fight
"He who dares wins..."
Here's an interview with Kathryn Ryan that has just played on Radio New Zealand. In it I share the story that has defined and shaped my life, and some of the core strategies that I've used to create success in multiple different areas of my life. I hope you enjoy it and find value in it. CLICK HERE
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Spinning your wheels
Spinning your wheels I am all for positive psychology, I believe that success lies at the intersection of mindset and action.
But it doesn’t matter how enthusiastic I am, or how religious I am with my positive incantations, if I’m running east looking for a sunset.
Creating your business’s strategy just based on what you want fails to address the fact that no one cares what you want. It’s a great way to spin your wheels enthusiastically and get nowhere.
Creating your strategy based on diagnosing the real challenge in your market, creating a guiding principle to solve that challenge, and then designing a coherent set of actions to make progress is much smarter.
And combined with a positive psychology you’ll be unstoppable.
Sam Hazledine, author Unfair Fight
It’s the best you can do, right?
It’s the best you can do, right? No.
The answer to “Is that the best you can do” is always “no”.
It’s the best I can do is a great excuse and is much more palatable than “I failed to do whatever it took.”
Sam Hazledine, author Unfair Fight
What are ‘blink’ decisions costing you?
What are ‘blink’ decisions costing you? Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, popularised the idea that people’s first judgement, their gut instinct, is the usually the best one.
He says that people are able to assimilate complex information almost instantly and draw meaningful conclusions.
Blink is a fascinating read, but, as Gladwell would put it, let’s examine the idea that we come up with our best judgements in the blink of an eye.
Yes we are able to make snap judgements about people and social situations, we have to, evolution has dictated that we need to be able to instantly assess whether a situation is safe or not.
But there is a good deal of research that demonstrates that most people are poor at making many types of judgements. At the top of that list are judgements about the likelihood of events, one’s own competence relative to others’, and about cause-and-effect relationships.
So if you’re looking to run your business on ‘blink’ decisions then expect to fall into the common traps that lead to costly mistakes.
Although the attraction of this approach is you don’t have to subject yourself to any real thinking and you can continue substituting popular slogans for insights.
Or if you are prepared to give up the excuse that gut instinct is the best way to run your business and you’re prepared to do the mental heavy lifting that sound strategy requires, then you might have a chance at real success.
In the words of Rudyard Kipling: “If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs…”
Sam Hazledine, author Unfair Fight