Mark Levy

Freeing Yourself From Gurus

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A consultant named Tim was telling me about the field he worked in. He, in fact, wanted to write a book about it. Tim admitted, though, that he was intimidated by a famed guru who has spent years speaking and writing in that same field as he.

What, Tim wondered, could he possibly say that hadn’t already been said by the guru?

I’ve heard that lament before. What it comes down to is this:

Tim was confusing the guru’s contribution to the field with the totality of that field. He was looking at the guru’s opinions, excellent though they might be, as the only ones  possible. It was as if the guru’s smarts, charisma, and accomplishments were blinding him to all the alternate ways of approaching the subject.

“Let the work of this guru inspire you.” I said. “Be grateful that such a vivid thinker has shared so much. Celebrate him and parade his work to others. But don’t let the strength of his voice stop you from using your voice.”

Each of us has something distinctive and interesting to contribute if we give ourselves the freedom to do so. We have experiences, stories, and ideas that can add texture to a subject, or take it in new directions.

At times, though, we must free ourselves from the magnetic pull that we’ve let others have on our thinking.

One way of giving yourself distance is by studying the subject you want to write about more comprehensively. You may, in fact, be unduly influenced by a guru’s work, because you’re focused too narrowly on their thinking to the exclusion of others.

Another way of giving yourself distance is by examining your career, not at first for abstract ideas, but for concrete success stories. Once you’ve jotted down a few stories, study them and see if any insights appear organically. You may be sitting on an unusual approach or helpful anecdote, and you don’t even realize it. Let the facts lead you.

Remember, each of us can contribute. We have knowledge and perspective that could help others if only they knew about it. Don’t let others’ outstanding work blind you to the value of your own gifts and experiences.

A Problem Well-stated is Half-solved

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Charles Kettering, the famed inventor and head of research for GM, said “a problem well-stated is half-solved.”

Here, then, are six steps you can take to state a business problem so its solutions become clearer:

1. State the problem in a sentence. A single sentence forces you to extract the main problem from a potentially complex situation. An example of a problem statement: “We need to increase revenue by 25%.”

2. Make the problem statement into a question. Turning the problem statement into a question opens the mind to possibilities: “How do we increase revenue by 25%?”

3. Restate the question in five ways. If you spin the question from a variety of perspectives, you’ll construct new questions that may provide intriguing answers.

For instance, try asking: “How could we increase revenue by 25% in a month?” “How could we increase it by 25% in an hour?” “How could we increase it by 25% in a minute?” “What could we stop doing that might cause a 25% revenue increase?” “What ways can we use our existing customer base to affect the increase?”

4. Give yourself thinking quotas. An arbitrary production quota gives you a better shot at coming up with something usable, because it keeps you thinking longer and with greater concentration.

When I asked you to “Restate the question five ways,” that was an example of an arbitrary quota. There’s nothing magical about five restatements. In fact, five is low. Ten, or even a hundred, would be far better.

5. Knock your questions. Whatever questions you’ve asked, assume they’re wrong-headed, or that you haven’t taken them far enough.

You might ask, “Why do we need an 25% increase at all? Why not a 5% increase? A 500% increase? A 5,000% increase? What other things in the business might need to change that would be as important as revenue?

6. Decide upon your new problem-solving question. Based on the thinking you’ve already done, this step may not even be necessary. Often, when you look at your situation from enough angles, solutions pop up without much more effort.

However, if you still need to pick a single question that summarizes your problem, and none seems perfect, force yourself to choose one that’s at least serviceable. Going forward is better than standing still.

Now you can start brainstorming.

The First of Its Kind

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Everyone knows how important an elevator speech is to a business. The right speech gets people excited about what the business can do for them. The wrong one makes them yawn.

A snappy attention-getting elevator speech doesn’t just work for a business. If you’re an author, you need a speech to describe your book, too.

A few years ago, the great Mac King and I co-wrote a book called “Tricks With Your Head.” How do I describe it? This way:

“Tricks With Your Head’ is the first of its kind: a book of magic tricks where the human head is the main prop in every trick. Readers learn how to stab a fork in their eye until it pops, suck a French fry up their nose, and read people’s minds with a drinking straw.”

From the twelve second speech, listeners immediately get a feel for the book’s premise and tone, and understand the kind of things they’ll learn from it. A lot is accomplished in a few sentences.

A key to that speech is its opening: The book “is the first of its kind.” That phrase opens listeners’ ears and piques their curiosity. We all want to hear about firsts and distinctions.

If you’re positioning a book (or yourself or a company or a cause), a good exercise is to scour your material for slants that might make it “the first of its kind.” Ask yourself questions like the following:

Does my book speak to an audience that’s been ignored? Does it name a concept that’s never been named? Does it explain a methodology that’s brand new? Does it combine ideas that have never before been combined? Does it tell a story no one has ever heard?

If a first jumps out at you, use it. If one doesn’t, consider revising it until a first appears.

Your book doesn’t have to be “the first” to do anything. Working to make it so, however, may help you build a work that stands out from the pack.

My challenge to you, then, is to look over the book you’re writing — or thinking about writing — and ask yourself:

  • What are all the ways my book is a first?
  • What are all the ways I can convert it into a first?

(By the way, if you’re interested in understanding why being first in people’s minds is important, do yourself a favor and read any book written by Al Ries and Jack Trout. The work of these men on positioning is astonishingly valuable.)

Uncovering Your Own Career Biases

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One of the readers of the first edition of my book, “Accidental Genius,” is Allan Bacon. Allan told me the story of how he used exploratory writing to change the course of his life.

With a PhD in Physics, Allan was working as an R&D engineer for a defense contractor that built lasers which, in his words, “knocked things out of the sky.”

The contractor encouraged its employees to stay up to date on their learning and seek out advanced degrees.  Allan decided to go for an MBA — figuring it would help him become a better manager of people and projects.

As part of his MBA application, Allan had to write a personal essay. He’d never written much about himself, but tried freewriting as a means of thinking about the jobs he most enjoyed. When he looked over what he’d written, he saw a pattern he’d never noticed before.

All his favorite previous jobs – including the work he did as a volunteer and as a representative for his college at career fairs — in one way or another involved selling.

Allan hadn’t thought of himself as someone who liked to sell. He had spent his career to that point in an academic culture that looked down on salespeople. In fact, if you had approached him before he did the writing and suggested Sales as a career for him, he’d have been offended. Why go into sales when you have a PhD in Physics? He always considered the field beneath him; it was something you went into when you didn’t have other skills to fall back on.

The exploratory writing woke him up, and exposed a perceptual block that kept him from doing something he loved. As Allan says: “We tell ourselves emotional stories about who we are. I was telling myself one. Making that perceptual shift from engineer to sales professional is probably the biggest shift I ever had to make.”

Since then, Allan’s career has taken off.

He began working for high-tech start-ups as that rare sales expert with a PhD who knows how to speak to and persuade engineers. He’s also an author, and is working on a book on how to use experiments to create a more fully realized life. The working title is “Start Something You: How to Discover, Develop, and Fund Your Own Version of the Good Life (Without Quitting Your Job).” It’s due out in the next few months.

Allan’s choice has been happy and lucrative, and was triggered by writing. Perhaps you’d like to try a similar writing experiment?

For the next week, take twenty minutes a day to explore your work life through writing. For each session, set a timer, write quickly (as Ray Bradbury says, “In quickness there is truth”), and don’t stop for any reason whatsoever.

Write about every job you’ve had – even those you normally think of as inconsequential. Talk to yourself on paper, or through your computer keyboard, about who you worked with, the tasks you accomplished, the things you enjoyed, and the things you hated. In particular, jot down any stories or images that come to mind.

At the end of a week, read over all your writing. Do you see any patterns? Can you make anything connect? Have you had any insights that might suggest a new way forward?

Jonathan Fields' Best Blogging Tip (Told In Under a Minute)

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Tens of thousands of people read Jonathan Fields’ blog, “Awake @the Wheel,” each month. I asked Jonathan for his best tip on building a blog’s readership:

Want to see some examples of Jonathan’s own flagship content?

Go to his blog and scroll down until you see thumbnails of his two PDFs, “The Firefly Manifesto” and “The Truth About Book Marketing.” Download and study them, and pass them around to friends and colleagues.

Think, then, about following Jonathan’s sage advice. What pet concepts of yours might be turned into flagship content that gets passed around?

Making Independent Musicians Independent

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My client, Jill Maurer, has a business that’s a week old. It’s called Bukoomusic. Here’s the story behind how it started.

A couple of years ago, Jill and a friend were sipping wine in a restaurant, when they saw a young waiter they hadn’t seen for weeks. They asked where he’d been, and he said he’d been on tour with his band. A couple of the other waiters, in fact, were his band mates. During the upcoming year, the group had lined up over 200 gigs.

Jill was impressed. Here was a group that could write and perform  their own songs, and arrange a lengthy tour. What puzzled her was why they still worked at the restaurant.

The waiter told her that without a record label backing the group, they couldn’t get enough exposure to break into the big time. They were knocking on record company doors, looking for representation, but still hadn’t caught a break.

Jill and her friend were back a few weeks later, when the waiter approached the table with good news. The group’s diligence had paid off, and they had secured a contract with a small label.

Jill again asked when he and his band mates would resign as waiters, so they could concentrate on playing music. The young man said they couldn’t ditch their jobs yet, since the deal they signed gave the label most of the rights to the music, as well as heavy creative control. They signed it because they didn’t think they had any options.

When Jill went home, she couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d heard. The idea that dedicated artists had to sign away the rights to their work and couldn’t make a living wage doing what they were born to do aggravated her.

What’s more, she thought about all the great music the listening public was missing out on, because the labels were acting as gatekeepers. Executives were deciding what constituted sellable music, and some of their decisions were likely based more on the artists’ looks and gimmicks than their sound.

That’s when Jill decided to start Bukoomusic. It would be a website that acted as a central location for all types of independent musicians: professionals, struggling artists, even novices who had never sung before an audience. Anyone who wanted to be on the site, could be on the site. (“Think ‘YouTube for audio,’ says Jill. “Anyone can put their work on YouTube regardless of its quality.”)

The musicians would upload their songs, and could either give them away to the public for nothing, or charge a nominal fee for each download.

Even better, these musicians would retain full rights to their work.

They also wouldn’t have to pay  for uploading their music to the site, and would only pony up a percentage of the actual sales if the public bought a download of one of their songs or albums.

After months of development, Bukoomusic went live last week. Jill, an experienced entrepreneur who cofounded the pioneering software company, SlickEdit, decided to do a soft opening so she could work out any bugs.

As of this writing, seven independent artists have uploaded songs and albums to the site. Take a listen. And, if you have any musical talent yourself . . . .

The Story of Bella and the Hawk

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For years, Kate Purmal had been an executive at Palm and SanDisk. To her own admission, she was a left brain thinker. Every initiative she undertook had to make linear bottom-line sense.

Kate told me she wanted to write a book, but didn’t want it full of conventional ideas and perspectives. As a means of shaking up her thinking, I taught her freewriting – a technique I’d learned in school and later through the works of Peter Elbow and others.

“Take seven minutes a day,” I said, “and write as fast as you can, without stopping for any reason, about whatever happens to be on your mind. And, if during the writing you feel like digressing, by all means follow those digressions.”

Kate approached her assignment with determination. She’d sneak in seven minutes here and there, and would write about the business problems she was facing and the decisions she had to make. Then, one day, she had what amounted to an epiphany.

She and her children were in the backyard when they noticed Bella, their six-pound gray-and-orange tabby, climbing a tree. The cat had her sights set on a hawk—twice her size—perched on a high branch. As Bella inched closer, the bird swooped down at the cat, talons first. Bella retreated to a hard-to-reach part of the tree. When the hawk landed, Bella again stalked it. The back-and-forth battle lasted several minutes. Eventually, Bella withdrew to the house, and the hawk, minus a few feathers, flew off.

Kate was so impressed by her petite cat’s tenacity that she decided to write about it. That is something she wouldn’t have done before:

“Normally, I’d have been embarrassed to write that story, because it wasn’t about business. But, for some reason, I knew it was important, it was something I had to write about, and the abandon of freewriting gave me confidence.”

Kate wrote up the story, added photos she had taken with her phone camera, and emailed the result to friends. They loved it. That encouragement was exactly what Kate needed. She started writing and sharing more stories. Eventually, Kate began blogging – a mixture of personal anecdotes and business posts.

She later opened her own firm, Kate Purmal Consulting, where she helps start-ups get seed money, and coaches executives on how to run enterprises. Now she teaches all her clients freewriting.

Says Kate: “If you write everyday, every so often some inspirational things are going to show up.”

Consider, then, writing outside your norm. If you only write about business matters, write about your family, a trip you took, or a scene from your neighborhood. If you only write about personal matters, think about a business project, and write about that.

The Power of a Writing Prompt

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If you’ve done any freewriting before, you may have heard the term “prompt.” A prompt is a common freewriting exercise. Instead of beginning a session with whatever appears in your mind, you begin with a predetermined phrase (called a prompt) that guides the direction of your writing.

How would using a prompt work?

If you were about to loosen up with a ten-minute freewrite and wanted a prompt, I might say, “Complete the following sentence: ‘The best part of my workday is . . . ’

You’d answer that question, at least initially. You could stay on it for the entire ten minutes, or you move to another subject minutes or even seconds after beginning. Your choice.

The number of prompts you could use are endless. You can come up with them on your own. A few more examples:

“Yesterday I saw a curious thing . . . “

“If I didn’t have to work I’d . . . “

“I threw a stone and it landed . . . “

Now, I’ve used prompts many times, but have never considered them part of my regular repertoire. After speaking with Robyn Steely, though, I have a new admiration for the technique.

Steely is the executive director of a non-profit organization, “Write Around Portland,” which works with social service agencies to build community. According to its website, the organization runs no-cost writing workshops for “people living with HIV/AIDS, veterans, survivors of domestic violence, adults and youth in addiction recovery, low income seniors, people in prison, homeless youth and others who may not have access to writing in community because of income, isolation or other barriers.”

The central principle driving Write Around Portland’s workshops is freewriting.

Participants sit in a circle with pad and pen, and a facilitator begins the session by offering up two prompts, such as “The thing about you and me . . . “ and “The night smelled like . . . .”

Each participant chooses one prompt to kindle their writing. Later, they share what they’ve produced and offer feedback to other writers. In giving feedback, participants keep their comments on the parts of the writing that are strong.

Steely says prompts don’t hem thinking in, they open it up. Given the same prompt, one participant might write about what they eat for breakfast while another might write about a battle they fought in during a war.

Prompts, then, can help people approach material that they may not have thought to write about. They can give a small push in an unexpected direction.

When I asked Steely about what makes for a superior prompt, she gave the following advice: “Make your prompts short and open-ended. For instance, ‘After the storm . . . ’ is a good one. It’s only a few words, and it could be about a childhood rainstorm, a thunderstorm, a fight, or it could have nothing to do at all with storms.”

As a short exercise, why not try a writing prompt now? Choose one of these two, and do a ten-minute freewrite that starts with it:

“The project I’m proudest of is . . .” or “This sounds inconsequential, but . . . “

Lean-in Moments

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A few months ago, the publisher of my book, “Accidental Genius,” asked if I’d like to revise my ten-year-old work. I figured revising it would be easy. The book, after all, already existed. Reworking it would be like cheating off myself. I said sure.

They emailed me the original manuscript, and let me have at it. I opened the file, clicked out after three minutes, and didn’t open it again for weeks. Why? In scanning the text, some questions hit me:

What if my skills have deteriorated, and I was a better writer then than I am now? What if I’ve been fooling myself all these years, and the book wasn’t as good as I remembered? What if I couldn’t think up enough new material to warrant a revised edition? What if the book comes apart in my hands while I’m revising it, and I make it worse than when I began?

I didn’t have answers nor the mettle to return to the manuscript to hunt for them. Instead, I moved the project forward through the best way I knew how: through freewriting.

“Accidental Genius” is a book about freewriting so, as you can imagine, I’ll be writing about the technique at length in future posts. For now, though, I want to mention what my earliest freewriting sessions centered around: images of unusual client interest, concentration, and surprise.

What I call “lean-in moments.”

Through my writing, I tried conjuring up every scene I could think of where a client leaned forward in their chair, because what they heard me saying intrigued, startled, or delighted them.

  • What had I told them?
  • What had I asked them to do?
  • What insights did they have?
  • How did they build on what I said in a way that excited them?

You could say I was looking at my consulting past for moments of intense client reaction and emotion. I figured these moments might lead me to stories and ideas for the book. They did. In the forthcoming edition of “Accidental Genius” you’ll find these moments seeded throughout.

Thinking about your own lean-in moments is a great way to develop books, posts, talking points, speeches, products, and services for your business. The key?

Don’t think about your material first. Instead, think about your clients. See them in your mind’s eye. Hear their voices on the phone.

They experienced surprising moments that made them laugh, clap, or focus on what you were saying with an almost supernatural intensity.

What did you say? What did you do?

Start from there.

Book Surfing, or "How to Get Good Ideas While Cleaning Your Room"

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For me, thinking divergently is a mania. I do it as much as possible. That is, I push myself to see things from odd angles and slam together ideas that don’t conventionally connect. (Steve Woodruff might say I’m restless.)

Because of this self-induced push to be creative, I’ve come up with some curious ideation techniques. I call them “situational techniques,” because they help you use your immediate surroundings to produce ideas.

One situational technique I often use is book surfing. I stumbled upon it years ago while organizing my home office.

My office was a mess. The bookcases were jammed with hundreds of books. There were so many books, in fact, that they spilled onto the floor. What’s more, the subjects were shuffled together: fiction, science, sports, psychology, poetry, history, magic, pop culture. Finding a specific book was rough. When I wanted to read one, I first had to recall its thickness and jacket color, and then I’d go on a tedious and uncertain hunt.

After one particularly frustrating hunt, I pulled the books from the cases, piled them in the center of the room, and started to shelve them in a more logical order. Doing that required that I think about each book’s content.

Would I, for instance, ever again open this copy of “The Executioner’s Song,” or should I donate it to the library? Would I more likely read Ray Bradbury’s “Zen in the Art of Writing” if I shelved it with the author’s novels and stories, or if I put it with the other books I owned on writing technique? What about my copy of “Send ‘Em One White Sock” by Rapp and Collins? When I first read it, I’d found many of the strategies useful. What were those strategies again?

In giving each book a cursory look, ideas started coming to me without much trying.

I got ideas based on a book’s content (“Bradbury says to write a story out of ‘pure indignation.’ So, if I were to write such a story, I’d write about the time . . . “) and title (“‘Send ‘Em One White Sock’ is actually one of many tactics in the book. So, if I were to write a book about positioning and wanted to title it by a single intriguing tactic, I might call it . . . ”).

The ideas also came from picking up two unrelated books at once (“Hmm, ‘Moneyball’ is about using metrics to measure a ballplayer’s ability, and then there’s ‘The Collected Screenplays of the Coen brothers.’ If I combined these two, I’d get a statistical way of measuring a Coen brothers’ screenplay. Or, I’d get a dark, funny screenplay about a baseball statistician”).

By the time I’d shelved the last book, I’d written down 87 ideas I didn’t have when I started my impromptu project.

Why, then, does book surfing work and how can you surf, too? First the reasons:

Reason #1. To get ideas, we regularly need to fill ourselves with new thoughts, stories, and experiences. That way, we have a fresh inventory of stimuli to draw from. The more information we take in and actively think about, the better we’ll be at using it.

Reason #2. The randomness of the information coming at you keeps you on your toes. It’s almost like attending an improv class. You’re forced to deal with what comes up.

Reason #3. In my version of book surfing, reorganizing my books really was the primary goal. Coming up with new ideas was secondary. The pressure to create, then, was off.

Now that you understand the purpose of this exercise, I challenge you to stand in your office (even if it’s on top of your book piles) and come up with three new ideas to write about. Send me photos of you amongst your books, and I’ll share them with blog readers.