Greg's Right FIT #560–This week: Numbers, Doing stuff, Goth

Quick notes to help you find new business in less time with less effort. . . sometime next week.

In this issue: 

• Thoughts about Numbers
• Being Human
• Random Stuff
• Back In The Day

Thoughts about Numbers

• We know we can make the law of large numbers work for us by being patient. We can use the law of small numbers too. Assume short run results are not predicting the future. Add some perspective.
• No one makes a decision because of a number. We need a story. There is no point laying out the odds of success if the buyer doesn't believe the numbers or doesn't want to know them. Most people's understanding of numbers is rough, so add context with story tools like metaphor and analogy. 
• When troubleshooting a problem ask a couple of questions around the numbers being thrown at you to get a sense of size and scale. "How often is this happening?" and "How many people are affected?" 
• Every organization has numbers they track. When we're looking for new business, we want to know the numbers they look at and who looks at them. It's critical for determining not just the opportunity, but the project's success.

Being Human – How did you do that?

Have you heard of the mentalist Derren Brown? He has a number of shows and I've mentioned him a few times in these notes (#115, #128, #147, #201, #262, #420) because watching him do mentalist magic is a masterclass in persuasion.

He had one show (The System) where he flipped a coin 10 times and it lands on heads each time. Impossible, right? It's a single uncut video and though some of the "flips" are a little suspect, he does it. Later, he tells us how he did the trick. He deleted all the takes where he only flipped 4, 5, 6, or 9 heads in a row. It took him over nine hours of filming, he said. Nine hours!

Humans can get really good at things. But sometimes, to get a thing done, nothing beats sitting down and doing the same thing over and over. It's not optimized, it's not scaleable, it's just brute force effort.

I got a great quote about this from a guy at a trade show. I was in the apparel business and into my booth walked the retailer all the buyers wanted to talk to and other retailers envied. He had specialty stores all over, multiple homes, and rumor had it, was never at work. I asked how he did it and he said, "do you want the photo or do you want to sit through the movie version?" Then he sat and gave me the long and short of it. It's a great story and I'm happy he survived. (but he didn't place an order)

There's luck that can happen, but not a lot of shortcuts. The best way to get really good at something is repetition. Do the work.

Random Stuff

In the early twentieth century one of the West's earliest media moguls lived here in Omaha, George Joslyn. He and his wife built the biggest house in an area of big houses and today we call it the Joslyn Castle. One of my lovely bride's co-workers runs events out of the castle. She always makes time for it and I tag along on occasion, like last Sunday night.

The evening was drizzly, the place big and spooky, and the lecture was on the Gothic era novella, "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," by Robert Louis Stevenson. Good stuff about the stiff Victorian upper-middle class culture and life in London at the time.

After the lecture we were treated to three small one-act plays based on other Gothic literature. In the first one, "The Yellow Wall-Paper," by Charlotte Perking Stetson, a young actress dressed in a pale lacy dress did such a good job I got goosebumps. She got the crowd to gasp.

In the late 1980's I went through a Goth moment. The style was having a day. Bands like the Cure, Bauhaus, and The Sisters of Mercy were a thing. I had their posters on my walls, signaling to the world that this preppy guy had a dark side. I even had a high school crush on a moody Goth girl who wore too much black eye liner and Doc Martens.

The reason I'm telling you this is the audience at this event were dressed like kids I went to high school with. Most of them were young. Definitely younger than me. A lot of black lipstick and black tshirts. I stuck out in my dad-core garb.

But I felt edgy again. I kind of liked it.

Back in the Day

What I was thinking about last year, five years ago, and ten years ago.

• Last Year: Right FIT #508 – We had a healthy crop of giant sunflowers last year. They stood anywhere from eight to ten feet tall and were fun to look at. We didn't plant any this year. I stuck to planting from the seeds we have in the box and last year, one of the reasons we had so many sunflowers, was because I accidentally dropped the whole bag of seeds. Sorry birds.
• Five Years Ago: Right FIT #299 – While the daily writing exercise I do isn't quite journaling, and doesn't really happen daily, I still recommend it. Something about trying to write our all your thoughts on a subject in a short time frame is helpful. Pick up Mark Levy's book and give it a try.
• Ten Years Ago: Right FIT #37 – I was recommending books back then too. A different Mark wrote a book about managing clutter in the digital age. I paged through it again and it still holds up! Inbox zero and to-do lists for the win. (and naming files, especially images. . .so helpful) Give that one a try too. Mark Hurst, Bit Literacy. And if you're near the Husdon Valley Oct 2-3, check out the GEL Confrerence.