And just because I can, I'll say it again:

I'm pretty pissed off.

Not at you, probably. You're doing your best. Some of this shit just can't be helped.

I'm pissed off at the world.

It's 2012 and we're still wondering whether women should have access to birth control. (Hint: YES.) It's 2012 and Kennedy Space Center is available for rent. It's 2012 and there are more people in the United States who think that the world is going to end in December because they don't understand how the Mayan Long Count calendar works than will admit to thinking that it's a good idea that the United States invests in space travel or advanced medicine.*

"The status is NOT quo."

There are a handful of extraordinary people doing extraordinary things, and a vast sea of extraordinary people doing utterly mundane, unproductive, procrastinatory, "because someone said to", "closest to cash" things.

But the world could be full of extraordinary people doing extraordinary things, and it's not, and that's terrible.

I know "do epic shit" is kind of a catchphrase among certain circles of entrepreneurs, but the fact of the matter is that very few people actually are doing epic shit, probably simply because epic shit is hard to do and there are so many things that are closer to cash, so to speak. So I'm going to give you a different goal, in the form of three simple rules that will, I guarandamntee it, make your world - everybody's world - a better place. Here they are:

Do better today than you did yesterday.

Actively plan to do better tomorrow than you did today.

Lead by example.

Write them down. Print them out. Shout them from your doorway. Meditate on them for fifteen minutes every morning. Do whatever you have to do to engrave them into your mind.

And the world will get better.

* That paragraph tells you everything you need to know about whether you're in my target market.

So there I was, sitting at my computer, browsing online business websites, when a sales page caught my eye.

It was pretty and well-designed. The copy was decent and the testimonials pulled me in. No yellow highlighting, no time-limit pressure, just good writing and what seemed like a good product. Still, I wasn't sold - after all, I do have a budget to keep and I wasn't sure the product would be right for me.

Then I scrolled down a little and, out of nowhere, I saw the <ninjas> tag.

All the lights in the room went dark and I felt a sharp blade pressed against my throat.

"Keep scrolling and click the Buy Now button," said a voice in my right ear.

I scrolled to the Buy Now button.

My mouse cursor hovered over the button.

"Click it," said the voice, and the pressure on my throat increased. I could feel the blood trickling down my-

"Wait, stop."

Wait. You're saying this is all a fantasy?

There's no <ninjas> tag?

Nobody's going to spontaneously appear in my room and hold a knife to my throat?

No matter what you do, you - as a service provider or product creator - can't actually force someone to spend their money if they don't want to?

Well, how about that?

Let's say that you've created a 32-page ebook. From conception to completion, you conservatively estimate (excluding all the times you were staring off into space in front of a blank page or not really thinking about the book but your brain was churning in the background, for example) that it took you 40 hours to create the book. You did everything yourself - writing, layout, graphics, the sales page, etc. You truly believe that this book will help people.

Would you feel guilty selling it for $1?

How about $2?

Keep going.

How about $5?

How about $10?

What's the break point? At which point do you transition from "no, that seems like a reasonable price" to "wait, I'm uncomfortable with that"? Why is the break point there, and not $1 higher or lower?

Would the break point change if you'd contracted some of the work (the graphics or layout, say) out to someone who's exactly as competent as you are? Would you feel comfortable charging more for a product you'd paid someone else to help create?

Let's take you out of it

What if it were someone else's ebook? They've done all the work, and you're selling it as an affiliate, for a 50% cut of the profits in exchange for your work promoting the book.

Would you be comfortable advertising it for $1? (You'd get 50 cents per copy.)

How about $2?

How about $5 or $10?

What's the break point when it's not your product?

Do you, ultimately, believe that someone else selling an identical product is entitled to sell it for more than you are?

And if you do, why do you think that is?

Seeing as how today is Halloween, there's going to be an awful lot of "Trick or treat!" heard this evening. But these days, it just means "give me candy!", when in fact the original meaning was a bit more sinister.

When the tradition began, the "trick" in question was a prank done in the dead of night by marauding bands of children under the auspices of All Souls' Eve. There was rarely serious damage done, but homeowners could stave off the kids by offering hospitality - a treat. "Trick or treat", therefore, was the childhood version of a protection racket - "give me a goodie or I'll prank you."*

A prank, though, through the eyes of a neutral observer, is just an interesting, unexpected event initiated by one party that affects another party. (And indeed, there's a long tradition of beneficial pranks - one modern incarnation is flash mobs.) So a trick could just as easily be something that the target likes.

With that in mind, when you talk to your people, how often are you doing unexpected, interesting, beneficial things, and how often do you just ask them to give you candy?

Trick and treat. Stop asking for candy and do something amazing.

* My reference here is Death Makes A Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween.

You know, there's a word for tasks that you're eminently prepared for and fully qualified for and that you know, absolutely, that you can perform without error:

Boring.

I wonder, sometimes, if the people who do things “ironically” understand that it’s a form of mockery.

Listening to music you don’t like “ironically” is a personal publicity stunt, but it’s also making fun of the people who actually like that music.

Wearing a trucker hat “ironically” is mocking truckers.

Drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon “ironically” is mocking people who drink it voluntarily.

It’s a way for people to feel better than other people, and that sucks.

But I also wonder if the people doing this stuff realize just how goddamn stupid it looks.

“Hey, look, I’m doing something I don’t enjoy!”

Where’s the benefit? Where’s the cachet? How does doing things you don’t like “ironically” make anyone’s life better?

Wouldn’t it be better just to enjoy yourself?

Do things because they’re fun. Drink the beer you like. Wear hats because they’re awesome. Listen to Britney Spears because goddammit it’s got a beat and you can dance to it.

Don’t mock. Enjoy your life. Be interested in things because you find them interesting and you don’t have to justify that to anybody.

Fuck “irony”. Your time and your life are worth more than that.

This was going to be yet another post about headlines and how choosing the right one is important.

But that's boring.

So instead we're going to talk about dating.

(And headlines.)

50 Ways You Turn Him On

I saw a magazine in the grocery store yesterday with the headline "50 Ways You Turn Him On (Without Realizing It)". At first I thought, "Are they talking about the average guy, or is this an aggregate? Is there some guy out there who gets really turned on when you don't wash your dishes for days on end?" (This is the internet. There probably is. If you find one, I don't want to hear about it.) "Have they listed things like 32) Your hips. 33) Your ass. 34) The way you move when you walk.? Because that seems like cheating." But then I thought, "How would exactly the same article read with a different headline?"

Like:

50 Things You Can Do To Turn Him On

Or maybe:

50 Ways You Can Improve The Way He Thinks About You

And then I thought: what about something like:

50 Reasons He's Checking Other Girls Out

Same article. Vastly different contexts.

Headlines are a first date.

You put your best foot forward, dress appropriately, and hope it goes well. Or you put on your wildest outfit and hope to get noticed. Or you follow everyone's advice, "just be yourself", and hope that your date doesn't interpret it as not putting any effort in.

If you're incredibly lucky, at the end of the night, you go home with your date.

If you're like the rest of the world, you hope that you've made the right impression and that your date will come back for a second.

Either way, the whole relationship is colored by how you present yourself on that first date.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is

Stop wearing a pocket protector and polka dots to your first date, and make a damn impression already.

This is a guest post by the lovely and talented Rachael Acklin! Please leave her many comments. :)

We all know the sound of laughter as it peals and echoes on a perfect summer day. We have all smelled the hot perfection of just-baked bread. And we know the heart-stopping experience of a moment in time that holds just exactly what we most hoped for, wanted, and desired -- as if the universe had conspired for us with all its power and mystery.

And this is what we strive to bring to our work: Joy. Perfection for the moment. Ease. Clarity. The feeling of being loved truly and utterly. Delight.

But delight is not just the icing on the cake, or the butter on the bread, or the rays of sunshine warming your face.

Delight springs from the purposeful work, the long obedience toward a single beautiful goal, from we and the universe conspiring together for a wonderful ecstatic moment in time.

In other words, you cannot work without a plan and then expect to delight your customers, just as you cannot simply throw ingredients together and expect a loaf of crusty, healthy bread to emerge from the oven.

Delight means planning. It means love’s labor. It means days and nights and months and years of singular and meaningful momentum.
When you learn the nature of delight, you will have truly learned to direct your creativity and your business together for one common purpose.

Let your work become the embodiment of your dedication, love, and knowledge, and you will delight all those you come into contact with.

Rachael Acklin is designing, loving, and learning at Brand Harmony Studio. She lives in Michigan with her four kids, and wishes for many sunny days full of laughter.

You can't delight everyone.

It's tempting to try, but in the end, you end up out of your mind with stress and torn to pieces by all the directions that all the different people want you to go in. When you're giving your gifts to the wrong people, your work suffers, your relationships suffer, and you suffer.

Sometimes you can tell who's going to be right for you right away. They meet all of your needs and you meet all of theirs; you smile when you get an email from them, rather than putting off reading it until tomorrow; their projects make sense to you, and you can see effortlessly how they're supposed to work. Likewise, you can sometimes tell when someone is wrong; you dread their emails or phone calls and you'd rather do anything other than work on their stuff.

Be thankful for both of those. They're the easy ones, and no matter how finely you have your Right People sensors tuned they're still few and far between.

Most of the time, you can't tell right away.

Someone looks right on paper, but they don't quite gel in person. Someone has a lot of drive and energy and sweeps you up, but after they leave you wonder what the hell you've gotten yourself into. Someone has a lot of good ideas that just don't mesh with what you're trying to do. Someone's offering a lot of money to do something you're not comfortable with.

Someone feels right, but isn't, and you can't always tell how or why, and if you don't recognize that ahead of time - and sometimes you can't; sometimes the person who looks most right turns out to be catastrophically wrong - after a while you find yourself working with them out of inertia rather than any actual shared goals.

And then things fall apart.

Unspoken expectations go unmet. Unsolicited advice sounds like deep-cutting criticism. Any failure is THE failure - and any success is just a reminder of when you've let them down in the past. It's never intentional. It just is. Nobody's to blame; everybody does their best regardless of how round the hole the square peg is trying to fit into.

In the end, you have to walk away before the damage you've caused outweighs the good you've done. You have to be able to say, "This isn't right anymore." You have to acknowledge that a person you thought was right is no longer right, and let them go before things dissolve even further. You have to rip off the Band-Aid so that things can start to heal and you can get back to doing business the way that's right for you, instead of the way that's right for the person you now know is wrong.

Context

I'm getting a divorce.

You can, perhaps, imagine why - in a context where I talk about making other people happy - I didn't want to bring this up. But I need to accept it and talk about it now.

It's nobody's fault. There is no acrimony to go around. We simply weren't each other's right people anymore. We're still friends and we still love each other dearly, but it's time for us both to move on.

You can't delight everyone. And when you discover that the person you thought was your right person isn't anymore, it's best and healthiest and happiest for everyone if you let it go and start doing your right work with the people who are right.

When did we let "good enough" become good enough?

I mean: why is "good enough" the goal these days?

I know that perfect is the enemy of great. We all know that. I heard a radio commentator use the phrase, talking about the US debt-ceiling negotiations.

But at the moment it seems like what people are really thinking is "great is the enemy of good enough", since "good enough" is what gets you out the door fastest. Every day, the Pareto principle is used to excuse shortfalls and failures to reach potentials. Every day, the Peter principle is used to justify slacking off and phoning it in.

"Abraham Lincoln isn't working."

At the 1964 New York World's Fair, Walt Disney was unveiling not one but four technological marvels - It's A Small World, the Ford Magic Skyway (which would later become the Peoplemover), Progressland (later The Carousel of Progress), and Great Moments with Abraham Lincoln, a lifelike audio-animatronic replica of the President.

The Lincoln animatronic worked in California, but when it was shipped to New York, it developed problems and didn't work consistently. Despite the Imagineers' best efforts, it still didn't work properly on the morning it was to have been unveiled to the public. So when the crowd assembled, Walt Disney stepped out onto the stage and told them that the Lincoln animatronic wasn't working and that there would be no show.

The animatronic might have been "good enough". But it wasn't good enough for Disney.

I envy Disney his choice that day. He had the opportunity to present Great Moments with Abraham Lincoln as it was, but he chose to strive for something greater. If it didn't work to his satisfaction, it didn't work at all. "Good enough" was for other people; for Disney, excellence was the bare minimum.

As for Lincoln? He started working fine the next day, and Great Moments was hailed as the unrivaled highlight of the Fair.

You don't have to be the best in the world, although it's certainly not a bad idea to try. If the world were really about being The Best, seven people would have jobs. But if the world were really just about being Good Enough, we wouldn't have Disneyland or electric cars or the Olympics.

Be you. Be awesome. Let your behavior and attitude set the bar and the rest of the world will follow you.

Have an idea you think could be great if it weren't so crazy? No idea is "too crazy to work" around here. The Delightworks Guide to Your Stupid, Crazy, Awesome Idea will teach you to bring your idea from "what if" to "why not?".