Seducing Larry The Lizard Brain

Failure and Miserable Failure
I’m failing. It looks like I will be the biggest sponsor for Martin’s Ride, my bicycle ride across the USA to raise awareness about cancer research. My friend Seth Godin has something to say about failure, good helpful things as usual:

Successful people are successful for one simple reason they think about failure differently.

Successful people learn from failure, but the lesson they learn is a different one. They don’t learn that they shouldn’t have tried in the first place, and they don’t learn that they are always right and the world is wrong and they don’t learn that they are losers. They learn that the tactics they used didn’t work or that the person they used them on didn’t respond.

You become a winner because you are good at losing.
Linchpin by Seth Godin page 115

Such simple sentences to write such hard truths to live (lol). Failure happens. Abject, miserable failure like what I’m experiencing now in attempts to gain sponsorship for Martin’s Ride point to tactical problems. I’ve been writing Presidents and CEO’s in an attempt to cut months out of the sales cycle. I used a similar tactic working with dairies when I worked for NutraSweet.

I’ve made at least two mistakes. First a past tactic is no guarantee of a current success and because I’ve shorted my ride cycle is not a good reason for large consumer products goods companies (or other companies) to shorten theirs. I know about long sales cycles at large companies, so my attempt to jump the shark is meeting its predictable end – failure.

The hardest thing any business person does is pick themselves up off the floor. Knee jerk is blame external things. The recession always works for external blame. The recession is faceless, looming and dark providing a great out. After thirty years selling soap, candy, sweetener and funky gifts I know failure is never about something as amorphous as “recession” no matter how good it sounds.

My second knee jerk is to move inside the arc. I blame myself. Seth calls this my “lizard brain" talking. Larry the Lizard Brain (my name not Seth's) says, “you aren’t any good” and “you don’t deserve it”. Seth wrote an entire chapter on getting Larry the Lizard Brain to shut up in Linchpin, his excellent current book. Linchpin explains how Larry The Lizard Brain stops our ability to create art and be a “genius”. Larry The Lizard Brain, Seth points out, is usually NOT comfortable with the genius tag. Larry is about lowering expectations limiting risks. Live Larry’s life and you look back on a life of avoidance and apparent “safety” and wonder where did you life go.

Yes I am failing and failing in spectacular fashion, but I’m doing what I love. Does loving what you are doing make failure twice as hard? Nope. Failing at something you love, in this case creating a foundation to help others, can fill you with renewed vigor and energy. Always easier to get up in the morning when you love what you’re doing. Failure goes through stages such as:

• Knee Jerk = blame outside events or others.
• Knee Jerk = Larry The Lizard blames YOU
• Analysis = define failure “zones”
• Refine = develop a revised thing (letter, email, web site, whatever)
• Publish = get it out there (Seth says artist SHIP and I agree)
  
• Fail Again
• Rinse and Repeat

Pema Chodron helped me get through chemotherapy. She taught me to go easier on ME. Chodron, a Buddhist nun whose books such as The Places That Scare You I can’t recommend highly enough, explains how we speak and act to ourselves is how we speak and act to everyone. One example I love is how she taught herself to be kind during meditation. During meditation the mind wanders. Instead of being hard on herself she learned to simply label any non-meditative thought as “thinking” and return to meditation. See the difference? I would approach it differently. My internal voice might say, “GET BACK TO MEDITATION”. Pema’s teaches harshness IN equals harshness OUT.

I matched that idea with an idea from Eckhart Tolle. Tolle, another great Zen teacher, explains all external dialogues are really internal dialogues. If you say x, y and z about Sally Mae you are really saying x, y and z about yourself. Does this idea of the external really being internal ring true? It does for me. I try to be careful and LISTEN to even random daily external chatter. Inside there somewhere Larry The Lizard is talking to me through my friends, coworkers and family.

Killing The Lizard Brain
Seth is right, we can’t kill Larry the Lizard Brain. Larry is going to be around. Seth makes a genius suggestion. Seth says we should seduce Larry the Lizard Brain:

The challenge, then, is to create an environment where the lizard snoozes. You can’t beat it, so you must seduce it. One part of your brain worries about survival, anger and lust. The rest of it creates civilization.
Linchpin, page 109

One way Seth suggests we can seduce Larry the Lizard Brain is to redefine failure. We should see failure as a necessary part of progress. Seth says he couldn't have written Linchpin without any of the 100 books he wrote. I've memorized about 5 books by SG, so there are a few books out there that went directly to DVD (or the book equivalent). Am I God’s gift to cancer fund raising right at the moment? Nope. Can I get better? You bet I can once I get past knee jerks and Larry the Lizard Brain (lol).

I will post one of my CEO letters here soon so readers can make suggestions and provide feedback. Any comment is appreciated and valued even from Larry the Lizard Brain ☺.

Marty

Cash Cab Cashes In

When I wrote Process Is Product in November 2009 I didn’t know The Discover Channel would provide such a brilliant example. The Cash Cab is like watching a game show being deconstructed live on tape. Ben Bailey, the shows affable host, must be the most ambidextrous driver in New York City. Ben drives and asks questions of “contestants” from the random people who hail his cab.

Eliminating headaches related to contestant searches is the first game show rule Cash Cab rewrites. While a New York City Yellow Cab may be expensive it pales in comparison to a television set. Elimination of the all too familiar and usually too plastic game show set is Cash Cab’s second deconstruction. Average winnings in the Cash Cab are from $300 to $1,000 so elimination of large prizes is another game show rule destroyed.

Cash Cab understands the Merv Griffin rule of success. Griffin, creator of Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, said getting people to yell at the screen was key to game show success. Cash Cab’s Trivial Pursuit is fun and sure to get you yelling at slow answering contestants. Griffin would have approved of the game’s guerrilla spirit, low cost and high profits.

Small unobtrusive cameras, the Internet and other technology make business model deconstruction by those with imagination such as the Cash Cab's creators possible. The missing component now is more likely to be lack of imagination than almost anything else. Functionality is so fungible and flexible any business model can be quickly reduced to rubble. No business is immune from being blown to bits. If Ben can host a game show in his cab then you can destroy travel agents, booksellers and record companies with web sites and a little imagination. Yes I realize each of those businesses have been irreparably changed by our digital present, by Moore’s Law.

Moore’s Law says integrated circuit power will significantly increase even as costs fall. This law is the dynamite blowing up our lives and businesses. Businesses have always blown up. There is nothing sacrosanct about any business model, never has been. Moore’s Law is speeding up creative destruction. Creative destruction sped up seems chaotic. We seem to destroy for nothing more than the love of seeing things go boom.

Global connection is one of Moore’s Law’s results. Shrink the pond and ripples get to the other side faster. Someone burps in Japan we hear it in New York, someone creates a web site in homage to Japanese burps and latter day Merv Griffins develop a game show asking if you can out burp Japan. When anyone can do anything you and your company really own process and that’s it, and, process is product. Next time you are in New York City hail the van with the magic lights to take a ride in the Cash Cab.

.

Space And Time In Web Design

Einstein collapsed space and time in to a single sewn together concept he called space/time. He was wrestling with the curvature of space around gravitational events such as planets. Web sites bend space and time too. Understanding how your web site manages space and time is critical to any e-commerce site. This post discusses how online space and time can be used to create successful commerce web sites.

A Brief History of Time Online
Google is the Switzerland of time online. Google sets standards all sites must try to live by. Google understand one important thing about Internet Time – speed is its beginning and end. Google changes the old cliché, “You can never be too rich or too thin, and “to” You can never be too rich, too thin or too fast.” There is no such thing as too fast. No matter where your site is benchmarking now it can be faster. And, faster may be the biggest improvement you can make to your site’s bottom line. Tweak design all you want, but unless your pages come back lightening fast, Google-fast, you will lose sales, customers and market share.

The problem is most sites get slower not faster. Mission creep piles new bells and whistles on sites. Video and it voracious bandwidth appetites, cool large photos and enough JavaScript to choke a horse typically bloat once svelte sites toward obesity and slowness. Google’s Zen discipline to keep their interface clean and simple is shared by few because simple is the hardest thing to do. If it was easy anyone could do it and, because it is not easy, few do. If you were to do the Return On Investment (ROI) math on new bells and whistles vs. speed any new bell or whistle would lose. I used to be a Director of E-commerce and I wish I could say my team was better, that we rejected new widgets in favor of speed. Somehow speed becomes the forgotten man at the party sitting in a corner drinking silently and easily forgotten. Google’s ability to pull back millions of documents in tenths of seconds means speed, until your commercial site can approach such power, will always be the most important time dimension on your site. Sacrifice speed is like flushing money.

Page return speed is one dimension of time online and another is how easy is it to understand your site’s road map – what you want your customers to do and it what order. Customers know they are not in a spontaneous environment online. A designer or a team of designers is behind the flat virtual world that returns after a call to a server. Time conventions form around common, sometimes called “best”, practices such as horizontal or left navigation framing pictures that speak to a site’s benefits (if designers know what they are doing) and graphical assists because people like clicking on pictures. When in doubt click on a picture.

Time, then, has a second dimension – how long it takes to understand the path through the forest. Conventions are important but boring. Smart designers incorporate conventions enough to provide clues but don’t remove 100% of the mystery, the joy of discovery. If I can figure your site out too fast there may not be enough “there” there. Even Google’s Spartan presentation has buttons into new worlds such as Maps and advertising. Google understand the power of self-selection and makes it easy for customers to speed on their way to many different parts of the Google universe. Few sites navigate disparate customer groups faster or better than Google plain white wrapper. Ask yourself if your customers can get to the 3 places you really want them to find in ten seconds. You may have 7 to 10 places they can go, but anything more than 3 is crazy greed and unlikely to be supported by actually customer attention. If you prioritize so can they and vice versa. Vice Versa means watch your web analytics. If your customers are finding 3 different things don’t fight the tide. Always LISTEN to what your customers tell you through your numbers.

Time’s third dimension online is the time it takes AFTER a decision is made. What happens when your customers click on something? Your entire site can be judge slow if that first click doesn’t fly. Any e-commerce site should get FASTER as the conversion funnel shrinks. The conversion funnel is a tornado looking thing that e-commerce directors worry about. We wee many people go into the top of the tornado and few, usually 3 – 5 per 100, come out the bottom. The conversion funnel is at its widest on the home page. Once a customer starts making choices the funnel shrinks and time should get FASTER not, as it does on most e-commerce sites, slower. Faster is important the closer I get to a shopping cart. The tricky part is shopping carts require the most horsepower, so they are often the slowest thing on a site. Crazy right? Because it is hard doesn’t mean it isn’t important. Carts are hard and they are the MOST important pages on a site to make the fastest. I am not aware of a single e-commerce site where this is the case.

Time has three dimensions online: page return time, figuring out site hierarchy time and what happens next time. Each dimension must be fast to support the idea of a fast site. That last sentence contains an important distinction. A site’s speed is more than numerical benchmarks. The psychology of speed includes all three dimensions. If your site is slow in any time dimension it runs the risk of being perceived as slow across all time dimensions.

Space In Web Design
Space online is related to time. A page builds in some sequence, so space can be thought of and built in a sequence. What do you want your customers to see and mentally process first? Think of a play. The curtain is kept shut until the play begins. Once the curtain parts space in the auditorium changes. Set designers are now, at least partially, controlling the audience’s mental space. A play’s set is an important member of the cast. It sets mood, emotion and hierarchy. The audience may not know what is going to happen next, but I bet they know where too look.

Do your customers know where to look on your web site? Space online is controlled by each constituent part of a web site: graphics and images, navigation and copy. Each of these components makes up the space of a site. If your site has 3,000 words on it I hope you DO NOT want to sell something. Thousands of words may be great for search engines, but no one I know likes to read online (this may change with Apple’s iPad but let’s believe it when we see it). Space online is visual. Text, when used in a site’s visual pattern, becomes a block of text first not the individual words. Your customers may get to the individual words if they are compelling and your graphics support reading them. People read captions under images. People read what other people think (testimonials) and people read what trusted sources say. Resist the temptations to use space points to talk to you about yourself online. Presumably you’ve already sold all the widgets you make to yourself, so always look at your text as visual blocks. If they fit keep ‘em. If they don’t kill them. Use a skill an old graphic designer taught me. Blur your eyes and see what jumps off the page. If it is your text then you aren’t doing the other spatial components well enough.

Space online is determined by a site’s visual elements including graphics and images, navigation and text (as blocks first and then paragraphs, then sentences and finally words). Best advice is do whatever you can to speed up your site. My team was use to thinking about Occam's razor, the idea that even when you think you are as clean as you can be there is still room to cut again, and the biggest winner online, Google, understands how to use this razor better than anyone in Einstein's universe. Until all designers understand Google's lessons there will be room to cut, and cut again.

Marty

.

Leadership Lessons From Dancing Guy

This very viral video "Leadership Lessons From The Dancing Guy" is full of funny truths, truths I'm experiencing daily as I attempt to beg, borrow and steal for my ride to cure cancer (see MartinsRide.com for more). Right now I feel a little like the lone dancer looking for a follower and then a "second follower". Movements are heralded by the second followers. I will keep dancing on the side of the hill. Can you be MartinsRide.com's second follower?

Martin's Ride Facebook Group

Martin's Ride is Martin "Marty" Smith's trans-USA ride to cure cancer. Please use the links below to find out more and fan our Facebook group:

Martin's Trans-USA Ride Facebook Group

Martin's Ride Information on ScentTrail

MartinsRide.com (coming soon)

Thanks,

Marty