Where I’ve been (Pt 4) - What This Year Taught Me

First, back to the last part of my previous post.

How to sell to people who don't care

How do you get people to want a thing they have never seen, that you don't even fully understand?

You have to realise the core truth first. Nobody cares. Nobody really cares what you're building. About what idea you have, about what thing you have discovered. In fact, you finding something incredible can actually make them feel worse about you.

The truth is this: people care about themselves, their needs and their problems. And that's fine. It's not shade. But if you're in business you have to understand it. History is littered with people who built something genuinely amazing, really good and really helpful, but could never sell it in a way that people understand, that connects to their pain or their desire, their ambition, their vision or their identity. Those people never succeeded.

But if you recognise and pull at those levels, you can begin to sell. That was a very important mental switch for me this year, because for months I built this thing, and till today I am always refining, adding, improving it: a tool, a platform that I have not been able to really, fully sell. Sure, people like it, people recognise it. Have they given money for it though? Not really.

It makes sense to me. I believe in it. But it's hard to sell, because even though it is something everybody knows and experiences in some way, almost no one has the language to truly realise it and act on it. At least, not yet.

Sell people through the door they will walk through.

You have to lead them through the actual pain they recognise. I had this client who really could do with a proper brand and website. It is something they would find very hard to justify investing in, so I stopped selling them that. I sold them something else, for the issue they did feel: a way to win more pitches. That was the pain they felt.

That means being empathetic, understanding what your clients and customers are going through, their fears, their pains. You have to be customer obsessed if you really want to sell to them and really solve their problem. You have to get into their heads, and that takes getting out of yours, out of what you do, and figuring out what's important to them, how they see themselves and how they process things. You have to reframe all of it and put yourself in their shoes. That's the only way you'll really sell, if you need to sell.

I tried many times in the course of the year to share and express myself. To pontificate about the things I was discovering, the new ways of working, of creating value, of learning. But it always felt like talking to walls, to people who just didn't get it. So I kept quiet and let the work talk. I let the speed and quality of my output talk for me. I made apps, I made tools. I went above and beyond the call of duty, beyond the invoice, the ask, the agreement. I cared. About their actual success. About how whatever I did helped them be whatever they needed to be. Slowly the needle started to move. Slowly they started to understand, they started to speak up, they started to gesture at the things I had already been building for months and months.

Move fast without losing yourself

Like I said in the previous posts in this series, I have been building, making and thinking. In rising to the challenge and pushing, I have learned a lot of things.

Like how to move fast without losing yourself. The first, and most powerful, thing I learned.

For a while, I had felt stagnant. In the same place. Same circles. Same flows. Same habits. Nothing really moving or happening. With the pressures of life upon me, I had to wake up. I realised the truth. You can always move faster than you think you can.

I realised how much I actually just faffed around. Always busy, doing nothing.

The truth is, if you really need to, you can move fast. But to do it means leaning in and committing all the way. You can't have time for your own bullshit. And we all have bullshit: our excuses, worries, insecurities and fears.

But even with all of that, even with all your bullshit, you can still move. You can still act. That is the gift of outside forces and pressures, of environment. They keep you focused on what needs to get done, long after the innate interest or motivation wanes.

Don't let what is wrong with you stop you

I read something in a book at the start of the year: we don't grow by knowledge, we grow by experience. You don't even have to know or believe. If you act long enough, the experience of doing things will rewire your brain. So I've had to move fast and do a lot of things very quickly.

You can't let your bullshit or your lack of whatever, especially money, stop you from doing things. Money is just money. There's usually a way to figure it out, to borrow it, find it, make it.

There's always a way. And when money stops being the thing that stops you, your brain goes into a very active, creative mode. You start asking how to actually do it. You think beyond the money, and instead of shutting your brain down, it frees you to be creative about solving what you need to do.

That's a better outlook on life. And if you still need to make the money, then figure out how. What makes sense? What exchange of value makes sense? You may not know today, you may not know next month, but if you stay the course long enough, you'll figure it out.

Ideas can be infrastructure

As I built this year, I've learned that when you encode software with a set of rules, ideas and frameworks, it becomes the infrastructure that makes things possible. It's already happening, we just don't call it that.

All software is a digital set of instructions to get something done.

Operating systems are the digital working environments that let you do things on your computer: save files, create files, communicate, whatever you're doing.

With AI the possibilities expand. Instead of a static book, or a course, what if you had an interactive piece of software that does far more than tell you? What if it could show you how, remind you to do it? What if it could empower you to do things?

In all my building, it finally dawned on me: I had encoded my methodology into software.

You don't always need to know what you're building to build it

You don't need to know what you're doing to start. You just have to have faith and start. A lot of what I built this year came from instinct and intuition.

I guess the intuition is there because I have over a decade of doing this kind of work and thinking about these kinds of problems, so maybe I can feel my way to the solution.

But so many times this year I only realised in hindsight what I was actually building. In the moment it felt like I was wasting time, like I was just making a random thing, but soon enough I would realise that those ideas weren't random. They were linked, I just didn't know it. Everything I thought was a detour was actually just another piece of the overall thing I was building.

That's been the very interesting one. If you take nothing else from these last 4 posts, take this one last idea.

You don't always have to know what you're doing to know what you're doing.

I have often said, to friends, to colleagues, that I don't know what I'm doing, but I know what I'm doing. That intuition, that base-level vibe, is so important. Trusting it has taken me places I could not imagine.

And lastly: don't be so busy living that you forget to build a life.

That means a lot of things. Don't be so busy with what you're doing that you forget what's important. Don't be so busy working that you forget to connect with your loved ones. Don't be so busy optimising for the best that you forget to just build with what you have. Sometimes we try so hard to make it perfect that we forget to enjoy good enough.

But really, all we need, most of all, is just to be, and to do. Fully. Wholeheartedly. Fearlessly.