Body of Work

by Pamela Slim

  When you respect your work, you want to create a beautiful, clean, sacred container for it. Regardless of the size, cost, or fanciness of your physical space, treat it with reverence. Pay attention to what you bring into it. Take time to clean the floor and wash the windows. Surround yourself with images of beauty and inspiration. Give gratitude to the tools that you use to do your work and to all the masters who have come before you.

  7. Cultivate your voice

  While you can become fluent in another language, you will never feel more anchored and at home than when you are speaking your native tongue. Explore your voice. Listen to your intuition. Write down your thoughts. Develop your ideas. Don’t get distracted by your love for someone else’s voice, which will only lead to cheap knockoffs.

  8. Swallow your pride

  True mastery is based on a love affair with your work. You want to take a great photograph, or write a great paragraph, or lead a transformational coaching call because you want to make the profession proud. You want to please the past masters and the art itself. If your work is criticized, or isn’t up to your own standards, don’t take it personally. If you receive lots of accolades and exposure, don’t let it get to your head. Keep your focus on honoring your profession.

  9. Punch through the bag

  My mixed martial arts teacher, Kelly Fiori, always tells me to “punch through the bag” when I am practicing jabs and crosses. If you just focus on hitting the target itself, your punch will be weak. Set your target a foot behind the bag, and aim to hit that. The same applies to your work. How does today’s goal relate to tomorrow’s goal, and next year’s goal? How will your choices today affect your relatives in seven generations? Always think ahead.

  10. When imitated, don’t retaliate, innovate

  When you are great at what you do, people are bound to imitate you. Sometimes they will try to steal your intellectual property, or students, or employees, or business model, or artistic genre. It is natural to get upset when this happens. But instead of fighting with the imitator, move on to innovate the next stage of your work. If you are doing your job well, your work is constantly improving and growing. Imitate that.

  Once you begin to cultivate a mastery mind-set, life slows down and you appreciate the delicious nuances in every moment. And when you sink into that way of living, you may begin to realize that mastery is not even the end goal.

  11. Think like a scientist

  There’s one more critical step in developing a mastery mind-set: learning how to not take failure, or success, personally. You must learn to get comfortable with putting your work in the world and evaluating all feedback from an objective perspective.

  In my work as a business coach, I am frequently asked to explain the key ingredient to becoming a successful entrepreneur. Is it a great idea? Financial backing? A charismatic founder? A bulletproof business plan? Great selling skills?

  These can certainly help. But what will make or break your entrepreneurial journey is: the ability to think like a scientist.

  What I mean specifically is a willingness to create a working hypothesis, test it, observe with curiosity, ask why, tweak, retest, observe, et cetera, until you are satisfied.

  When you view building your body of work as a series of experiments, it is interesting, intellectually stimulating, and similar to solving a puzzle.

  In contrast, when you view your creative process or journey as an epic Hollywood drama of sweeping success or crushing failure, chances are you will not last very long and will be an emotional wreck by the end.

  Few people are as enthusiastic, and relentless, about testing as my friend Ramit Sethi. In a blog post, he lays out numerous examples of the power of testing your assumptions. My favorite is the best man who spent seven months perfecting a wedding toast.

  Now, that is a friend you want to have.

  Brian Clark of Copyblogger shares the same enthusiasm for testing when examining Web page conversion.

  Who would have known that given a choice, more people would click a button that says IT’S FREE rather than SIGN UP FREE or FREE SIGN-UP. Or that changing a sign-up button color from green to red would boost conversion by 21 percent? Brian has built a thriving business, sharing tips on tiny twists and tweaks that add up to successful online commerce.

  So if you find yourself thinking, “I knew I should never have approached that store with an offer to sell my spicy almonds, they rejected me!” put on your scientist hat and think instead, “How fascinating! I thought the store would be excited about selling my spicy almonds, but they were not. I wonder why.”

  Part three: Scope, test, scope, test

  When you set big goals, it is easy to get overwhelmed with the enormity of the task at hand. A critical part of the creative process is continually breaking down the work into manageable chunks.

  Use these steps when testing your projects.

  1. Look for models

  The first place I send clients who are trying to do something totally new is in search of business models that are already working.

  If you are a world-class tuba teacher and have always delivered your lessons in person but want to deliver all your lessons over Skype, look for evidence of someone who has used a similar tool for educational purposes. If you find a tutorial that contains technical information but not much about the business model, you may want to dig further and find music teachers who sell virtual music lessons successfully. Or you might find someone in a related subject area, like an art teacher, who sells e-books and video training programs to supplement live art lessons.

  The key is to find someone who is doing business in an innovative and effective way, and to pull back the curtain so that you understand the key parts of their business model. (If you want to get lots of ideas for business models, you will love the Business Model Generation handbook).

  2. Define the phases

  You may not know every last thing about building a business, but with some input from experienced colleagues or business mentors and your business model research, you should be able to define the overall phases you need to go through to reach your goal.

  One time, a LaidOffCamp participant I spoke to at an event wanted to create a mixture of live classes and high-quality information products for her art business. I recommended that she:

  define the target market.

  identify the key desires, problems, or challenges in her area of expertise.

  create an initial offering of a product or service that solves the target market’s problem.

  test the offering with a set number of ideal participants (at this stage, she can choose not to charge for it).

  debrief the test and determine how it could be replicated.

  identify partners with access to the ideal target market.

  develop more offerings, perhaps with partners, and test again.

  flesh out the business plan with lessons learned, identifying a ripe offering that can grow.

  accelerate the marketing machine, which includes building a mailing list, utilizing social media and PR effectively, and participating in live events.

  develop an online product to sell to the market when the list grows.

  test, debrief, and continue building products and services.

  These steps may change based on your specific goals and objectives, but at least you can get clear as to what to build, in what order.

  3. Choose a specific small test related to the big goal, and define the desired outcome

  Once you have a sense of the major phases involved in reaching your big goal, you want to quickly look for a small test that will bring you into the real world, with real customers.

  Time and time again, I see new entrepreneurs get stuck in the planning stage and think things have to be perfect in order to bring them to market. This will kill both your momentum and your spirit. To
nip this momentum killer in the bud, choose one small activity that will get you moving in the real world. It should be:

  Short—Never do your first test for a six-week program. Start with an hour-long class.

  Relatively easy—If you need subjects to test your program, tap into people who already know, like, and trust you. There is a reason chefs test their recipes on their own family first!

  Testing will give you two kinds of data.

  Enjoyment factor—How does it feel to do the “thing” that you have been aching to do? If you have always wanted to be a coach, how does it actually feel to coach? If you have never done it before, it is normal to have a bit of anxiety, but it should still feel like you are moving in the right direction. (Martha Beck uses a quick assessment—does it feel “shackles on” or “shackles off” when you think about or do something?) Terror is often involved when doing new things, but it can still taste and feel like freedom.

  Reality factor—How easy or difficult was it to execute this small test? Did things turn out as planned? What did you learn from the experience that you will apply to future tests?

  Once you define the test, then define specific elements to measure, such as:

  How many calls or e-mails did it take to fill the event?

  Which marketing strategies worked? (Facebook, flier in coffee shops, Twitter, e-mail, et cetera.)

  How much time was involved in preparation?

  How much did materials cost?

  How did the test participants react? (Always get feedback after a test! If you are live with people, you could get a video testimonial on your phone, pass out written evaluation forms, or follow up with an e-mail survey.)

  How did it feel? Why was it so fantastic, or so terrible?

  4. Execute your small test

  When you get one very specific task to test, give it your full attention. Don’t worry about the bigger goals at this point, since they will just distract you.

  You will move quickly when you choose a specific date to execute the test. So choose your date, identify your test subjects, and go do the thing. It may not be ideal. It won’t be perfect. But it’s one step forward.

  5. Review results

  I mentioned before how important it is to be a scientist in your entrepreneurial journey. Since you have defined your metrics from the outset, it will not be hard to measure your results versus your plan.

  Once you review the results, ask yourself:

  What would I do differently next time?

  How could I streamline the steps involved in this activity?

  Is this scalable?

  If so, who are other people or where are other markets who might be interested in this?

  Do I want to continue doing it?

  When you get in the practice of executing small tests of the pieces of your body of work, real progress happens.

  A test coaching session can lead to a three-month coaching service, which leads to a busy blog and a robust mix of digital courses, live retreats, two books, and speaking engagements. I should know, that’s how I started.

  Testing recipes at a law office (while still a lawyer) can lead to custom cake orders, seven retail stores, three cookbooks, and an appearance on Oprah. Just ask Warren Brown, founder of CakeLove.

  Experimenting with graphic design services may lead to software application development, which leads to a family of applications, a bestselling book, a killer blog, and juicy speaking engagements. Just ask the founders of 37signals.

  And creating a music video for an unknown rapper led Kanye West to hire the Mikes to tour the world with him for two years.

  The process of scoping and testing continues throughout the development of your project. If you are paying attention to the results, you may end up with a different final project than you originally intended. This is fine. What really matters is that you create something you are proud of that becomes a powerful addition to your body of work.

  Part four: Flex your creative muscles

  Technique, speed, power

  In my mixed martial arts class, my instructor, Kelly, told us exactly how we should train our kickboxing combinations.

  “First, focus on technique. Do the movements very slowly so that you get a good feel for the correct movements.

  “Then, when you feel confident in the technique, add speed. Do the movements quicker.

  “Finally, add power. Pay attention to the force that comes through your body, and direct it to your target.

  “The technique, speed, and power together is what will make you a great fighter.”

  This is where we get stuck in the creative process.

  When doing an activity for the first time, like writing a sales page, we have the expectation that we will get power (conversion) and speed (lots of buyers) from the initial technique.

  In reality, the very first time you do it is a big accomplishment in itself. It’s a victory just to get a mediocre sales page live on the Web.

  As you go through time, you improve your page by focusing on power activities—practicing persuasive writing, making clearer offers, working on fresh design, and creating compelling testimonials.

  And the more you work on this, the more your speed picks up. More people buy and spread the word about your great product, which attracts more people to the page and feeds the speed of sale.

  When a student in my power teaching class taught her first class, she said, “It was exhausting! I wrote a ten-page script for the first class to make sure I covered everything. When you teach a class, you make it seem so easy!”

  I replied, “That is because I have taught more than one hundred classes.”

  I have repeatedly worked on the technique of designing a class, have honed my power by zeroing in on specific teaching and speaking methodologies, and I have taught thousands of people. But if I had not started with my first awkward and painful class, I would never have gotten to a place of ease and comfort.

  We abandon our efforts too early

  There is so much focus on quick, easy marketing techniques that we forget that true, deep, authentic, meaningful, and lasting business competence comes from technique, speed, and power training.

  In my recent survey to blog readers and clients, the majority of the five hundred respondents said their business goals for 2013 were to improve their marketing and sales competency. This will work only if they stop trying individual marketing techniques once, then abandoning them for the next shiny marketing-technique du jour.

  Your challenge

  Choose an important creative activity you completed in the last thirty days.

  Step 1: Identify how well you executed the technique the first time.

  Step 2: Identify the power activities that will increase your competency and improve your results the next time.

  Step 3: Invest in your power activities. Get expert input. Rewrite clunky areas. Get feedback from your target audience. Read books. Watch videos. Look at case studies of successful examples.

  Step 4: Do the creative activity again.

  Repeat steps 2, 3 and 4.

  Do the creative activity again.

  Repeat steps 2, 3 and 4.

  Repeat the entire process for the next year.

  Send me a big check, because I know you will be smashing your professional results at the end of the year.

  The 20X Rule

  Much of my time spent coaching is egging my clients on so they finish their websites, pitch new clients, and test and try new products in the market.

  The enemy of a new entrepreneur is endless planning and perfection.

  After celebrating that they finally took a serious first step, I often get a slightly dejected e-mail or deflated check-in on the next coaching call.

  “I sent that e-mail to two potential clients, but n
either of them has gotten back to me yet.”

  “I designed and launched the teleclass we talked about, but only one person signed up. And it was my sister.”

  It is at this moment that I have to explain the 20X Rule.

  In business, as well as in other areas of life, you have to sow twenty times more seeds than you think is realistic or necessary to make things happen.

  You will set yourself up for heartbreak and mediocrity if you don’t radically adjust your expectations for the amount of outreach and connections it takes to do creative work.

  What do you think would happen over the course of one year if:

  Instead of reaching out to one new journalist a month, you reached out to twenty?

  Instead of reaching two prospective clients a month, you reached forty?

  Instead of testing three new product ideas a year, you tested sixty?

  Chances are you would see some radically different results.

  When I first started my newsletter eight years ago, it took me two months to write one article.

  Now I crack out twenty times the content in one month and don’t even break a sweat.

  If you get results sooner, great.

  Maybe you will have fantastic luck and with some strategic thinking will reach out to three qualified clients and book your business.

  I would rather you expect to reach out to sixty and be happy it took fewer contacts than be crushed that you don’t sign up your first client the first time you reach out to them.

  Building your body of work is a marathon. Train for it.

  Creating will save us

  The night before the Grammys in 2012, host LL Cool J was interviewed by Piers Morgan on CNN.

  The interview covered a lot of ground, including how LL Cool J (born James Todd Smith) came out of a very tough childhood and created a solid family base and lots of commercial and financial success. He credits his grandmother for orienting him toward the future by repeatedly quoting, “If a task is once begun, never leave it till it’s done. Be thy labor great or small, do it well or not at all.”