Keep It Simple, Go With What works

This is two of the great rules of life that I can apply to almost anything.

On the face of it, it sounds lazy. So we should add the qualifier that learning new skills, expanding your knowlege, and improving yourself are noble endeavours.

But these all have an end goal.

Start by setting the goal. Define what the goal is. Then understand that everything else is in service of that goal.

Your goal may not be someone else’s goal. We might get frustrated and perplexed when people shun what we are offering. Their goals were quite simply not the same as yours. What you are passionate about is incremental to their lives. If you are in the way too much, you run the risk of becoming a nuisance and illiciting hostility.

Let’s define this a bit better.

Suppose you need someone to mow your lawn.

You contact a professional lawnmower. You are doing this because you are short of time and would rather pay someone else to do it.

On the face of it, pretty lazy, but also keeping it simple and going with what works.

Maybe you’re not a very good lawnmower yourself. You have no equipment or you do but its poorly maintained, and you can’t cut grass evenly for shit. Also you are allergic to cut grass.

Easier just to pay a pro.

Try to remember at this point that the professional is themselves after a degree of convenience. They could’ve spent the day trying to ferment alcohol, but that’s a pain. Better they stick to what they know can earn them money to buy a beer at the end of the day. In this instance this knowledge set is cutting grass for a fee.

If they are effective in marketing their services they will make it the easiest thing in the world to contact them.

Thus we enter the realm of marketing methods: a fridge magnet, word of mouth, letterboxing flyers, a branded ute, radio ads, a social media page, letting friends and relos know, google ads.

The savvy businessman knows to try more than one approach and to allow time for the planted seeds to sprout into an income generator. We’ve all gotta start somewhere but getting a consistent flow of products/service for income isn’t a a flick of the switch. Overnight success pretty much never happens and emotionally-driven big-plays often faceplant into embarrassing failure that can be sometimes hard to recover from. In fact, a lot of overnight success you might hear about conceals years of quiet trial and error.

If you are trying to get an audience, your audience (which you’ve hopefully also spent some effort trying to define), you’ll make it as easy as possible for them to reach you when they want you without you intruding on their lives so much as to be a nuisance.

Ambush marketing is quite often resented. It’s seen as missionary work. Jehovah’s Witness style behaviour. And yet the missionaries do sometimes get their converts. Maybe not immediately, but later on, when the targeted convert has had the time to process the offer and made an independent decision to pursue it.

What happens if you are in a crowded market? You might have to just wait until the bigger, more known players start demonstrating too many signs of visible dysfunction for their customers to tolerate. That’s when you might find people jump ship to a new upstart. And sometimes the first thing this new customer will say is “I got so sick of dealing with those guys!”. Often they won’t, but they might be seeing you with an obvious sense of relief that you are going to fix their problem with as little disturbance to their lives as possible. This is also when you need to remember to “Keep it Simple” (aka KISS: keep it simple stupid) because they are “going with what works”.

Any organised human collaborative endeavour seems to go through cycles of formation, maturation, decay, death and rebirth. Even ancient institutions like nations, monarchies and religions go through these. You on the outside might be baffled as to why other people are sticking with rotting institutions for so long. Mostly its convenience. They are sticking to what works and trying to keep their lives simple. When sticking with the status quo in itself becomes too hard, and it feels like changing would be a relief, that’s when they’ll change.