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It’s interesting how a problem becomes so much clearer in our minds when we explain it to someone else.

Just as the best way to learn is said to be teaching, so explaining a problem in a way a lay person can understand is an excellent way to clarify it for ourselves. I think it’s important that the listener or reader is a lay person, or we can take short cuts, make assumptions of knowledge and miss the crucial point, which almost always has an easy answer.

I was explaining the challenge I had with restating a business in a new location earlier – specifically, relaunching a flat pack assembly business in Jersey – when the incredibly obvious (you would think) solution came to me. I’d hardly bothered with this kind of promotion when I had the business in Suffolk (although I’m not sure why, apart from concentrating on online marketing), but it was the most obvious answer for getting some attention for the new business.

That’s why a news release is winging its way to the Jersey Evening Post right now.  Total investment: a few minutes of my time.

Of course, another way to come up with obvious answers is to ask ourselves what we would advise someone else to do in our circumstances. That helps us get around the tendency we all have to stick to our favourite methods, even when something else would almost certainly bring better results.

What advice did we give to our friend, new to the copywriting and marketing business, before we left England? You can probably guess.

Roy

Yes… it’s not really optional, is it?

Either you believe in what you do and what you say you stand for, or you don’t. And if you don’t believe it, neither will anyone else.

Now, we all have times when we doubt the value of what we do. When that happens, the best source of encouragement (‘the supply of courage’) is the people we’ve served before. But if the belief isn’t there it’s usually best that we don’t try to do our convincing, our selling, at that time.

Wait until you know for sure you have something great to offer – then tell the world about it.

Roy

The fact is, the Law of Attraction doesn’t work – at least, not in the way its supporters and proponents claim it does. If it seems to work, that’s because something else is going on that is almost as magical and mysterious, in the same way that any science or technology looks like magic to the people who don’t understand it.

The big problem with The Secret or the Law of Attraction is that countless millions of people can waste years of their lives waiting for it to work for them. Continue reading Why The Law of Attraction is No Secret

Nobody likes to fail, and that’s quite understandable. But there are times when failure is the best thing that can happen to you.

And those times are the ones where the alternative is doing nothing at all, which is more often than we usually realise.

You see, failure is not just a sign that you tried, it’s actually proof that you’re not afraid, that failure doesn’t usually kill you (or even hurt half as much as you feared), and a lesson in how not to do it next time.

Failing quickly is the best failure of all. Rather than hesitating, sitting on the fence, or wondering if it ‘might work’, you try it, fail, learn the lesson and still have time to try something else.

And all in the time it might have taken to do nothing useful at all.

“You miss all the shots you don’t take”, as Wayne Gretzky said, and that’s real failure.