A great list from one of the most interesting bloggers I know: Nicholas Bate.
Focused Attention.This is your greatest asset. It has limited battery power and limited bandwidth. Remove distractions and use it with deliberate intent to meet your goals.
Ever-increasing Smartness. You have got to be smarter than the robot that wants your job, smarter than a disappearing market and smarter than the guy who hired you. Start here.
A Portfolio of Project Bs. From your novel to your photography, from your Portuguese to your pottery class, project Bs keep you alert, keep you thinking creatively and may one day become significant revenue earners.
A Return to Basics. Awesome meetings, engaging presentations and leadership which leads. Get brilliant at the basics.
Unstoppable energy. M-E-D-S. meditation-exercise-diet-sleep. The details here.
A New Environment of Minimalism and Simplicity so that not only can you see the wood for the trees, you know where the wood is, you know how many trees there are and why it is daft to keep just cutting down trees when perhaps you should just get out of the wood.
The ability to take decisions, turn those decisions into actions and see those actions through.
The benefits are clear. Here are some thoughts on how to do it.
“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” Buddha
There is only one time and place where you can be and have any control over.
The present moment.
But most of us still spend a lot of our regular days lost in memories, reliving a sunny vacation or maybe more commonly repeating an old conflict or negative situation over and over in our thoughts.
Or we get lost in scenarios about what could happen in the future. Maybe through wishful daydreams. Or maybe by building monsters in our minds as thoughts go round and and round and create scary and dangerous mountains out of molehills or just air.
Or your thoughts may become split and unfocused between several different things and tasks.
If you spend a lot of your everyday moments and time in the future or the past or you have difficulty focusing and you feel this may have a negative effect on your life then maybe you want to learn to live more in the present moment.
Here’s what works for me to do that. Just a few simple things that I use in my normal day.
Thought leadership strategy is essential for getting found in Google but how to execute with the fewest moving parts is elegance! DaVinci said “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” but what does that look like in a thought leadership workflow? Let’s start with some thoughts from Google Plus ‘meister’ Mark Traphagen:
Of Mark’s 5 points, items 1,3 & 5 are what Covey would call ‘private victories’ and items 2 & 4 are related to ‘public victories’. You can possess items 1, 3 & 5 in abundance but unless you using the wonderful tools we have at our fingertips to make your thoughts searchable, findable, knowable, shareable and memorable, you are missing the opportunity to become credible on a bigger scale. You will never be found in the ‘zero moment of truth‘ unless you treat Google as an ally, not an adversary to be tricked or gamed.
So then, if you’re with me so far, let me propose a workflow for thought leadership strategy with only 3 moving parts for you to consider:
A couple of days ago, Craig Badings of the Thought Leadership blog asked me to complete the following sentence: “Thought Leadership is _______”. My response? Fundamental. As in “thought leadership is fundamental”. Craig asked me if he could post my definition on his site with attribution and frankly I don’t know if it’s because he thought my response was stupid or brilliant or somewhere in between. Let me explain however, what I meant…
At a time in history when almost 90% of people searchGoogle before making a buying decision you need to show up in search in a good way. To me a thought leader is someone who uses the incredible good, fast and cheap tools we have at our disposal to get found when people are looking for what they do, or, in what Google calls the Zero Moment of Truth. They use blogging and social media to attract and retain fans who either buy into their ideas or by their products.
It was Leonardo da Vinci who said “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”. I maintain that if you aspire to thought leadership there are only two activities you must master: finding and sharing good information. When I teach my college classes, I call this deepening your expertise and documenting your expertise. Any person who aspires to thought leadership has probably done Malcolm Gladwell‘s 10,000 hours of work to gain their expertise but if you want to be a thought leader you must continue to nourish that expertise and stay current on the things that are important in your field of study. That’s what I called deepening your expertise. The second part, documenting your expertise, simply means to use the publishing tools available on the Internet to provide social proof of your work. If you’re a great thinker who aspire to thought leadership that’s all you need to know — hence my statement that thought leadership is fundamental.
I have developed a simple workflow that I call a ‘Me’cosystem which anyone can use to establish a thought leadership position over time. All of the tools are best of breed, free or freemium, and completely cross platform down to the smart phone level. There are nine different activities in which the thought leader must engage and I outline them here:
I’ll be going into more detail in each of these stages later on in the series. Organized efficiently from the beginning to the end of the process, it looks more like this:
And again, I’ll be going into more detail in subsequent posts. All I think you really need to know at this point is that the process really does work and that it’s simple enough and cost-effective enough that even someone who does TED talks can use my system. :-)
Next week I’ll start with the analysis phase in the flowchart. Questions? Feedback?
My favorite suggestion? “Pay yourself first. Before you get lost down the digital rabbit hole of distractions and socializing, do the work that matters most to you first. Before you check email and social networks and start online reading, do important work. Find distraction-free spaces, and let go of the need to check your online addictions.”
Leo Babauta has an interesting answer to this season of rampant consumerism. Don’t buy anything except essentials until next year:
Today is one of the worst days of the year: overconsumption day (or Black Friday as some call it). Or you could call it one of the best days of the year: Buy Nothing Day.
I prefer the latter — it means we waste less, consumer fewer resources, stop looking to shopping to solve our problems and make us happy, and instead find simpler ways of finding contentment.
And so today I extend a challenge to all of you, and the world: Buy Nothing Until 2013.
Yes, I’m taking Buy Nothing Day and extending it through the end of the year.
Why the hell would you want to do this challenge?
Do it as a protest against consumerism and corporate influences on our lives. Do it as a tool for contentment, for simplicity. Do it to reclaim the holidays as a time of connection and love, not of buying and debt. Do it just to see if you can.
And yes, you can still do it if you’ve already done some Black Friday shopping. We’ll forgive our past sins and start afresh. :)
Me, I think I could easily do this — it’s the other people in my family I’m not so sure about! What about you? And how do you plan to proceed this holiday season?
Kudos to Bill Pevlor of PopsDigital — you see his images here all the time — for his recent post on Darren Rowse’s photography blog:
“I’ll be the first to concede, I am not a great photographer. The eternal optimist in me likes to think all things are possible. The pragmatist in me realizes I have a long way to go on my personal journey to photographic greatness. It may be a long way to go, but I’m on my way and serious about improving. I subscribe to photography magazines, glean articles and tutorials online and follow the work of some truly great photographers. All of that is valuable, but I’ve stumbled upon something that has dramatically improved my images more than everything else, combined.
I use an incredibly simple, two-step program. I revisit the plan every now and then and always gain something new. I believe it is essential for beginners, will advance the intermediate and can even boost top professionals a notch or two. As powerful as I believe this program is, it comes with a natural deterrent – its simplicity.
This program is so simple I’m afraid many will dismiss it without giving it a try. So, before I lay it out, take a moment to relax, inhale deeply, find your happy place and open your mind to a novel concept. Resist the urge to roll your eyes and scoff when you realize how simple it is. I guarantee, if you put it to the test and follow each step fully, your photos will immediately improve. (I’m already upgrading my account to handle all the flood of “Thank You” emails.)
Alright, enough of the sales pitch – let’s move on to my incredibly simple, two-step program for better photos. (Remember, no scoffing.)” Get his two step program here: Incredibly Simple 2-Step Program for Better Photos.
Spoiler alert! It all comes down to RTFM; ‘read the frikkin’ manual’. Life is all about the basics, no?
Two years ago, I wrote an epic post called ‘From Thinker to Thought Leader in one easy workflow’. The original title was ‘By Jove, I think I’ve got it‘ [shows how little I knew about writing effective post titles, eh?]. Well, it took me a couple of years, but I’ve finally found it. It? That elusive personal niche that everyone keeps talking about. I call it ‘content management and marketing for thought leadership‘ and it is my passion and my purpose in life.
What is content management and marketing for thought leadership you might say? First some terms…
Content management?
“Content management, or CM, is the set of processes and technologies that support the collection, managing, and publishing of information in any form or medium. In recent times this information is typically referred to as content or, to be precise, digital content. Digital content may take the form of text, such as documents, multimedia files, such as audio or video files, or any other file type which follows a content lifecycle which requires management.” Source: Content management – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“Content marketing is an umbrella term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation and sharing of content in order to engage current and potential consumer bases. Content marketing subscribes to the notion that delivering high-quality, relevant and valuable information to prospects and customers drives profitable consumer action. Content marketing has benefits in terms of retaining reader attention and improving brand loyalty.” Source: Content marketing – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I like the perspective Mindy Gibbins-Klein’s shares in her book 24 Carat Bold:
“What does a real thought leader look like? How would you go about finding one, or becoming one, if that is of interest? Well, let’s start with the Wikipedia definition stated earlier: ‘A futurist or person who is recognized among their peers and mentors for innovative ideas and demonstrates the confidence to promote or share those ideas as actionable distilled insights.’ Not bad, but there is one important word missing here: market. It’s not just about being recognized by your peers and mentors. To effect real change, you need a market, or followers, or fans or constituents or a congregation… you get the idea.
Gibbins-Klein, Mindy (2009-09-01). 24 Carat BOLD: The Standard for REAL Thought Leaders (Kindle Locations 309-313). Ecademy Press. Kindle Edition.
So to me, a thought leader is a person who…
Is an expert in their field
Has innovative ideas or perspectives
Promotes and shares those things using the “good, fast, and cheap” tools available on the internet
Becomes recognized
So then what is ‘content management and marketing for thought leadership‘? My simple definition goes like this: It is “becoming and being known as the expert“.
Here’s a little riff that I did last summer on the difference between thinking and thought leadership…
When I first rebooted e1evation, llc 3 years ago and shifted the focus from lead management to lead generation using inbound marketing tools, my tagline was ‘marketing, sales and technology for small business, non-profits and academic institutions’. I laugh now because that focus is so broad that not even Mashable! with their massive staff can cover it comprehensively. As time has gone on, I’ve continued to sharpen my focus so that I can increase my expertise in this emerging area. This is who I am and what e1evation, llc and this blog is about; content management and marketing for thought leadership.
When Michelangelo was asked how he created his classic work ‘David’, he said “”Ho iniziato con un blocco di marmo e scheggiato via tutto ciò che non aveva l’aspetto di David” [loosely translated: “I started with a block of marble and chipped away anything that did not look like David”]. I was inspired last week by Chris Brogan‘s comment “My blog is a piece of crap. Time to work harder.” If his blog is crap, what is mine? Why am I settling for less than sharp focus and clarified outcomes? In the month of February, my goal is to chip away from this blog everything that does not look like ‘content management and marketing for thought leadership‘.
Henceforth, this blog will be about the following topics:
Social Media [including blogging, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter]
and the strategies, tools and tactics that make them available for every thinker who aspires to thought leadership
…and I will parse out my thinking in the following categories…
Thoughts
Tactics
Tools and technologies
Trends
I’m going to continue to perfect the ‘e1evation workflow’ — my ‘lather, rinse, repeat’ cycle for ‘thought leadership’ marketing — while applying the zenlike simplicity of ‘getting things done’ principles to content management and marketing for thought leadership.
If that’s what you’re looking for, stick around. Watch me. Interact with me. Let me know how I’m doing now that I’ve found my niche. If you want If you’re looking for something else let me recommend http://google.com…
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. – Leonardo da Vinci
The problem with many books and guides on simplifying your clutter, your work life, your desk, your life, is that they are usually too darn complicated.
We need a simple method of simplifying.
It’s been nearly a decade since I first started trying to simplify my life, and in those years I’ve struggled with clutter, I’ve had surges and ebbs of complications and simplicity, I’ve tried dozens of methods of simplifying from as many sources. It’s been an interesting journey, although not one that I can recommend to everyone. If you’re looking to simplify a certain aspect of your life, you don’t want to go through that kind of confusion.
So I’ve boiled it down to a simple method of Four Laws of Simplicity (apologies to John Maeda) that you can use on any area of your life, and in fact on your life as a whole:
1. Collect everything in one place.
2. Choose the essential.
3. Eliminate the rest.
4. Organize the remaining stuff neatly and nicely.
Leaving for Germany as I am tomorrow morning, I’m moving way too fast to do this justice, but if you’re a social media maven or online community manager [or both!], tumblr is a tool that you may have overlooked for it’s sheer simplicity. If that’s the case, look again. Here are at leas 5 reasons why I’m adding tumblr to my social media utility belt..
Simple yet powerful…
It can auto-publish to both Facebook profiles and fan pages making it a great community manager tool
It has a great iPhone interface making it the perfect onsite reporting tool
It works with Shareaholic or it’s own bookmarklet making it a perfect page sharing tool
Marc LaFountain, the Community Ambassador. He’s a god amongst men in the social media space…
This is just a partial list of all the cool things that tumblr can do — you’ll want to go here to get a more complete inventory. As I head to Germany to cover the Agritechnica show for AGCO, I’ll be liveblogging the trip as well as the event. Track me on my Dashboard and see how well it works as I run it through my FriendFeed…
Leo Babauta of Zenhabits is generously providing a free version of his new book ‘Focus’ online…
The free version is simple: it’s 27 chapters that you can download for free, without having to give an email address or do anything else. It’s uncopyrighted, and you can share it with as many people as you like.
Admit it: You might love Twitter as a social network, but you probably don’t love it as a service. Twitter is the Yugo of social tools — it can take you wherever to need to go, but there aren’t a whole lot of bells and whistles. Of course, Yugos probably broke down less often.
Twitter’s simplicity is probably a big part of why it has attracted so many new users over the last four years, but once you master the basics, it isn’t long before you find yourself wishing there was an easy way to unfollow inactive users or send private messages to several people at the same time. The good news is that Twitter makes it easy for developers to create tools that can take your Twitter experience from Yugo to Lexus without too much fuss.
Here are eight Web applications that you can use to kick your account into a higher gear. Note: For simplicity’s sake, I won’t get into full Twitter clients, mobile apps or analytics tools today — those weighty topics will have to wait for their own posts.
What’s the + for? HootSuite. If you follow the ‘via’ link, you can read the author’s perspective. For me, however, HootSuite is the one tool that rules them all. Why? As a web based app with great mobile apps for iPhone or Android, it’s always available to be my social media dashboard — not only for Twitter, but for Facebook pages and other social media sites as well. HootSuite — don’t tweet home without it!
A couple of weeks ago, the brilliant guys at Posterous started an even more brilliant marketing campaign to tout the efficacy of their Posterous platform against other blogging tools. They culminated their campaign with a post on the ‘Top 5 reasons to switch from WordPress to Posterous’ by saying…
“We’d be crazy to declare war on WordPress. It’s the most popular blog platform in the world — gazillions of bloggers have custom WP installations with plugin functionality that Posterous won’t touch anytime soon.
I encourage you to follow the link and read the 5 reasons. They conclude by saying…
“We’ve made it easy for you to make up your own mind by making the move from WordPress to Posterous hassle-free. We’ll copy over your blog content, URL slugs, comments and tags. Just go to posterous.com/switch/wordpress and enter in the url of your blog and email address.
Here’s where I’ll add my two cents — which I think is actually worth quite a bit more! While I have used Posterous alone to take down website competition with much bigger staffs and budgets, the point I’d like to make here is that the answer in business is rarely either/or — many times it’s both/and. IMHO, WordPress still reigns supreme when it comes to the ability to theme a site and leverage plugins — they said it themselves: “custom WP installations with plugin functionality that Posterous won’t touch anytime soon” but Posterous handles some of the more difficult WordPress tasks automagically. So, why not use BOTH?! Posterous can automatically post to over 25 different internet platforms so I post to my Posterous blog and then autopost to my WordPress site. That way, I can leverage the 5 reasons to switch while still using my powerful WordPress site with the theme, the plugins and the seo that I’ve come to love AND generate valuable seo links from my Posterous blog to my WordPress blog as well. As you can see below, it’s working like crazy…
My ‘e1evation workflow’ leverages the simplicity of Posterous and the publishing power of WordPress in one, easy to use approach. I used this workflow for the 2nd quarter of this year and my traffic increased 590%. What’s even better is that thanks to Posterous, it’s drop dead simple to teach. Comment, call or use the contact form to discuss how we can apply the ‘e1evation workflow’ to your business…
Next week I’ll start with the analysis phase in the flowchart. Questions? Feedback?
Leaving for Germany as I am tomorrow morning, I’m moving way too fast to do this justice, but if you’re a social media maven or online community manager [or both!], tumblr is a tool that you may have overlooked for it’s sheer simplicity. If that’s the case, look again. Here are at leas 5 reasons why I’m adding tumblr to my social media utility belt..![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://i0.wp.com/img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png)
Leo Babauta of Zenhabits is generously providing a free version of his new book ‘Focus’ online…
Bright, shiny objects! 
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