What I’ve read
This is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn To See by Seth Godin - If you haven't heard of Seth Godin before check out his blog here, as an aside his post on the world's worst boss is a favourite…
This is Marketing is a remarkable book, I highly recommended it for absolutely anybody who cares about making their business, focusing on a new way that talks about your work in a way that builds trust.
You can find a free excerpt here
A few powerful things that stood out for me: 1. The smallest viable audience - whereby you find the corner of the market that can't wait for your attention. Begin with an audience worth serving, begin with their needs and wants and dreams, and build something for that audience. This involves going to extremes, finding an edge, standing for something not everything. 2: Introducing Sonder - When you realise that everyone has noise in their heads, which is as rich and conflicted as yours. People don’t believe what you believe; They don’t know what you know; they don’t want what you want; its true, but we'd rather not accept this. 3. Our actions are primarily driven by one question… "Do people like me do things like this?"
And finally a key take away quote
“What your customers want from you is for you to care enough to change them - to create tension that leads to forward motion. And if you need to charge a lot to pull that off, it’s a bargain”
What I’ve Seen
Derren Brown: The Push - The most unbelievable experiment of how suggestion can convince and lead an ordinary person to push a man off the roof to his death. The point of this? To show the power of where suggestion can lead to and to push back against ideology which seeks to manipulate through conformity.
If you're a fan of this sort of thing and Derren Brown I'd also recommend Sacrifice - where he tries to convince somebody to taking a bullet for a stranger.
What I've Heard
The discovery of Ikigai a few years ago had a profound impact on me and changed my outlook, becoming an important framework for me and one which I often come back to. But its quite overwhelming and difficult to find the things that make you come alive and give a sense of purpose and meaning…
I mainly avoid things with big claims like how to find your life's meaning in five simple steps… but this is different, firstly the good life project is a great podcast and the curator Jonathan fields has committed several years of work to break this down and discover “How do you figure out what kind of work will fill you with a sense of purpose and meaning" distilling it down into a simple set of 10 core imprints or archetypes (Sparketypes) for meaning and work.
You can take the free Sparketype Assessment and hopefully it helps to give you a perspective which you can relate to and explore a bit further…
The results were really powerful for me, no surprises on the results but certainly helped to remind me of the things that I get joy from and how often you're guided by what you believe is required of you from others or simply fall into the trap of following their example or guidance without acknowledging your differences and the thing that lights you up.
My Primary Sparketype: The Essentialist
As an Essentialist, distilling, organizing and simplifying is your call. It doesn't matter where you go, whether at work or home or on vacation (or a restaurant, store, experience, etc), you see chaos, mess, complexity and it triggers a near-primal urge to create order and simplicity. It could be complex information, ideas, spreadsheets or data-sets, toys in a room, items in a display, clothes on a rack, books on a shelf, physical or digital, it doesn't really matter. Your brain immediately goes into distill and simplify mode. You think in systems and processes designed to create space, order and efficiency. It's what breathes you.
My Shadow Sparketype: The Advisor
You are driven by, and find a deep sense of satisfaction when you play the role of the trusted advisor, mentor or coach. But, for you, when you're really being honest, that drive is almost always in service of doing the work of your Primary Sparketype at the higher possible level. It's more a means than an end.