The goal here on this newsletter is that each issue gives you one small idea that will aid your marketing and your business. This is partly because I hate to waste people’s time. But it’s also because effective marketing is down to lots of little, small ideas, the kind followed by exclamations such as: “Fantastic point”, “Ahah!”, “Yesss – exactly”, or just an involuntarily smile.
You need 1000s of little ideas like that to design and execute a successful marketing campaign. They’re worth a lot more money than big ideas.
If you’ve ever run a Google Ads funnel, you know that it’s not something you “design and turn on”. It’s the exact opposite. You turn it on, then you design it – weekly or daily. An ad campaign that is not refined iteratively and frequently is a complete . waste . of . time. Don’t deprive it of its little ideas.
The passage down below, however, from Edith Eva Eger’s The Choice: Embrace the Possible, revolves around more of a big idea: that within your own mind there is either imprisonment or freedom – and you get to choose which you want.
Is that a new idea? No. Is it the first time you have heard it? Probably not. It’s not like Eger hasn’t appeared on Oprah. Or others touting the same message.
But if you understand how this woman arrived at this idea, it becomes new. Her story of survival – both of Auschwitz itself and later of her own “concentration camp of the mind” – makes it a fresh, new idea. Contextualize everything.
Step 1 is to read it as is because it’s beautiful and like other passages I’ve written about, it cannot be improved on.
“Whether you’re in the dawn or noon or late evening of your life, whether you have seen deep suffering or are only just beginning to encounter struggle, whether you’re falling in love for the first time or losing your life partner to old age, whether your healing from a life-altering event or in search of some little adjustments that could bring more joy to your life, I would love to help you discover how to escape the concentration camp of your own mind and become the person you were meant to be. I would love to help you experience freedom from the past, freedom from failures and fears, freedom from anger and mistakes, freedom from regret and unresolved grief-and the freedom to enjoy the full, rich feast of life. We cannot choose to have a life free of hurt. But we can choose to be free, to escape the past, no matter what befalls us, and to embrace the possible. I invite you to make the choice to be free.”((Again, this passage comes from Edith Eva Eger’s The Choice: Embrace the Possible, from the final page of the introductory chapter, “I Had My Secret and My Secret Had Me))
Big ideas can and should be applied to multiple contexts. Step 2 is to read it again but scope it down from your life to something less important (but still important): your business. A hack for doing so is to try these substitutions here and there:
- life = business
- person = business person
- falling in love = finding your focus
- life partner = area of focus
Now imagine delivering this message to your favorite client – the one who believed in you first and signed you to that significant contract, the one that made you feel like your company was an important part of their business.
“I would love to help you discover how to…”
From here you can take it 100 directions because now it’s possible for your business to be something different than it was last year, and without discarding your unique expertise and intellectual property.
Choose to invest in content marketing, to believe that it can work. Choose never to bill hourly again. Choose to build a permanent, ongoing marketing program that becomes part of the DNA of your business.
My best,
Rowan