Author Archives: Jason

First Piano Lesson by Sam

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Today I started piano lessons with my 13 year old daughter.

That is, SHE is teaching me.

Considering she’s been playing since she was 3 (see a cool song she self-taught herself below), I figured she’d be an excellent teacher.  Plus, I’d like to see if she likes it and would teach other young kids and make a buck here or there.

It went well, although my fingers and hands don’t really want to do what they must.  Piano isn’t as much about learning what sound each key makes as it is figuring out how to control the movements of my body, and retrain my movements.

The sound I’m plucking right now are very simple, but if I can get the form down I’ll be able to move into other, complex, more beautiful music.

Just like earlier this morning when I took her to the raquetball court.  She wants to hit with her wrist, and she wants to hit overhead, and she wants to have her body point in the wrong direction on a hit, and she wants to—— use bad form.  Because it’s more natural.

But she’s learning good form, and as she masters the good form, and her muscles strengthen, and she gets more control, she’ll be able to play at a higher level.

Just like her mom, who started to write songs many, many years ago, but a few months ago she started to go to local songwriter meetings to learn how to write songs – what is a bridge, what is a hook, how to use twists, how to relate to the audience, etc.

She has dozens of songs started, but some of them are probably pretty sophomoric, because she didn’t have the training.  But she’s getting the training, and she’s practicing – in the mornings she pulls out a notebook while her mind is fresh and she writes for ten minutes.  She is reading books on lyrics.  I’m sure she’s already improved, and over time her songwriting will only mature.

Just like blogging – when I started blogging I thought I was freaking awesome, but I’m coming up on my five year anniversary and I know my blog posts have gotten better.  I didn’t go to blogging school, but I have been at it, writing almost 2,000 posts in the last five years.  I’m experimented, played, tried and just plain written, and I can only hope that my posts are more meaningful, more impactful, and just plain better.

So, could the formula for getting proficient at something be:

proper instruction + plenty of practice = profiency

?

About Sam – she’s really good.  She self-taught herself to play this song (we need to get a recording up on youtube):

Favorite Blog Posts From March (you might not have seen these)

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Hey there, I write on a number of different blogs … you might not have seen these so I wanted to share them with you here:

From my JibberJobber blog: Seth Godin: Pick Yourself

From the Career Resumes blog: Job Search: You Have To Pick Up The Phone

From my LinkedIn blog: Optimizing Slideshare On Your LinkedIn Profile

From this Jason Alba blog: pill vs. vitamin

Enjoy!

Entrepreneur: Bloody Noses, Hiccups, Sneezing and Coughing Fits, Fatigue, Yawns… what else?

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I remember a radio interview I was doing in with a supposedly enormous audience and I hoped I sounded good.

Why?

Because the tissues stuck up my nose to stop the bloody nose made me think I sounded stuffy!

But do the people on the other end know I had a bloody nose? I don’t think so – I think I hid it fine.

SHOULD THEY HAVE KNOWN?

Absolutely not.

There is no reason for you, listening to the radio, to know that I’m… um, human.

Why not?

Because it would only distract from the few seconds that I get to be in front of you, or have your attention.  And for those few seconds, I’d rather be “the expert.”

I get this idea from the story in Jeffrey Fox’s Rainmaker book, about the sales guy who lost a sale/opportunity because he spilled a bit of coffee on his shirt right before (or during) a sale.

It was too distracting.

Yes, I’m human, I can’t hide that, and I’m not ashamed of it. But if you are going to give me some brain time for a few seconds, minutes or hours, I want to make sure we’re on-topic the entire time.

Even if I have tissue stuck up my nose.

Even if I stub my toe right in the middle of our call (but you never know).

Even if I can’t stop yawning, or have extreme fatigue, or can’t stop coughing, or hiccuping (thank goodness for a mute button!).

Even if I have pnemonia or whatever else.  You might care about me as a human, but many times I can work through it to get the job done.  I’d rather not wait until a better time.

Why?

Because that better time might not ever, ever happen.

Now.

Even through the bloody nose.

Blackout Dates Suck

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I just booked a roundtrip flight through Southwest from SLC to BWI and was expecting to be able to use my recent “award,” aka free ticket.

This is an overly-whiny post, and I debated on even not writing it, but I decided to write it to remind me to NOT COUNT ON awards to save some money.

What I thought would have been NO COST turned out to be $600.  Ugh.

The first frustration was when I was trying to book – on the checkout page there is no place to apply any awards, even if you are logged in.  Extremely frustrating, as I would expect one of the payment options to be “use award.”

The second frustration was when I called the SWA 800 number to get someone to help me.  Usually I wait for all of 60 seconds, but this time I had to wait “20 – 40 minutes.” I got cut off twice during the automated “dial this for that or that for this” message… extremely frustrating, and not what I typically expect from southwest.

Finally I opted to just have them call me, which took about 40 minutes.  The person on the other end walked me through the process of using an award (you have to find flights a completely different way… not the normal way, so I basically had to start over).

She offered to do it for me, and I took her up on the offer… until she had to break the news to me that I wanted to fly in and out on blackout dates… which meant I really can’t use my tickets for this trip. I need to be in Baltimore/Boston on the dates below… if I used my tickets I’d be gone almost 2 full weeks (I could fly out on the 9th and fly home on the 22nd), which means time away from family (not going to do that), and hotel expenses.

Free just became a $600 spend.  Thanks a lot southwest.  I really hate blackout dates.  And now I feel my award is useless.

Sure, I’ll use it, but I was hoping to save the money from this trip.  Ugh.

Lesson?  Don’t count on using your awards/mileage when you want it.

Pill vs. Vitamin

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A few months ago I was talking with someone about business and marketing and they introduced a concept new to me, but I got the impression that everyone else had already heard of it.

When you are selling/marketing something to someone, do they percieve it as a PILL or a VITAMIN?

The purpose of a PILL is to alleviate a pain (for example, a very bad headache).  The effects should be somewhat immediate. The value of the PILL, at the moment of pain, is really, really high.  I have a PROBLEM and a PILL is an immediate SOLUTION.  You know the perceived value can skyrocket, especially as the problem, or pain, is higher and immediate.

A VITAMIN, on the other hand, is more of a preventative measure.  You don’t take a VITAMIN to get results within 30 minutes…. VITAMINS are a subtle solution to a long-term, non-immediate problem.  The pain is not there, and you might wonder if it will ever come.  It’s easy to feel like it’s a non-essential solution to a problem you might not (or, likely won’t) have.

When I heard this I was perplexed, and I asked, are my offerings (products+services) perceived as PILLs (high value, immediate need) or VITAMINS (nominal value, not sure if really needed)???

Figuring this out, and perhaps even repackaging and repositioning, can help you sell more, make more, and become more valuable.

Or, you can keep trying to sell a solution for a non-problem.

OF COURSE, if you look at Covey’s four quadrants, you know you should spend time in the Important/NotUrgent box… which seems to me to be the VITAMIN mindset… but how many of us (or, our customers) are in the Urgent/____ box?  That’s where the PILL comes in.

How are you positioning YOUR offering?

CRM in the news

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Many of you know JibberJobber is a relationship management tool, designed off of traditional CRM, but stripped down to focus on RELATIONSHIPS instead of sales processes and jargon.

In the last almost-5-years I haven’t seen much news on the CRM front as far as aquisitions or anything.  Salesforce is the 8 billion pound guerrilla in the space, but I continue to hear they are way to complex and way too expensive (I’m sure they have their sweet spot in big companies, doing huge, huge deals).

Today I just read about two deals, though, which are pretty exciting.

The first is for GIST. I was actually on the phone with a GIST person a few months ago… I had tried to get in touch with them through their Contact Us methods but none of that worked. The phone call was okay.  The announcement of their acquisition by RIM (the company that puts out the Blackberry device) just came out yesterday.  No disclosure of how much the acquisition was for but according to TechCrunch they have taken in over $10M of funding… it’s said investors want a 10x return, which means they would have had to sold for $100M, but I’m guessing this deal was between $30M – $60M.  I have NOTHING to base that on, just a guess 🙂  No news on TechCrunch on this yet 🙂

The second is for Bantam, acquired by Constant Contact for $15M in cash. This is on TechCrunch here.  This is very interesting to me because it is a low purchase point, imo (even though, if they really did raise less than 2M, investors got about a 10x return (less what other owners got)), and because it was by Constant Contact.  My thoughts about CC doing this?  IT IS ABOUT TIME!  CRM is a great add-on for them.  iContact should follow suit and acquire their own CRM package, because this is so, so, so critical to their clientele.

As for me, I’m still plugging along, doing cool stuff with my CRM 🙂

Four Letters: DO (vs.) BE

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Last week I was doing the dishes thinking about hanging out, doing nothing.

I wasn’t wishing I was doing nothing, I was just thinking about what it means to do nothing.

Hang out.

Chill.

Read, or watch a movie, or watch mindless television.  Sit on the couch and just do nothing.

I’m not a busy-body, but I’m not a do nothing person, either.  My wife and I cut our honey moon short because we were so anxious to move into our first new (to us) apartment and start to doing stuff in our new (to me) town.

We have a hard time being, because we are driven to do.

Is this good or bad?

I think there needs to be a healthy balance, and I’m not convinced I’ve figured that out yet.

Unmarketing, ebooks, ebook readers, book reports, WOW!

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I just read a really cool post by author/speaker extraordinaire Scott Stratten THE AWESOMENESS OF BEING A 2.0 AUTHOR. The title didn’t grab me and at first I wasn’t going to read the post but I’m glad I took a few minutes to get hooked.

WOW! Read the post.

Lots of great stuff there, but here’s one thing I didn’t know about… the ability to track what Kindle users highlight (see Scott’s point #3).

I checked out the top books highlighted and here’s what I found… check out each of these links if you want to see what other people highlighted from various top/popular books:

Here are Scott Stratten’s highlights: UnMarketing.

Is this cool or what?  See the front page of this feature here.

Return Fraud – a telling tale of today’s thinking

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I was listening to the news a few nights ago and was disgusted at a story about return fraud. I had never heard of it but was shocked at how easy it is to do.

More shocking was the amount of money retailers say is lost because of return fraud: $14billion.

That is a LOT of money.

In this post it says it is between $9.6 billion and $16 billion.

Of course, we are paying for that in higher prices on what we buy, the cost of more security, audits, consultants, etc.

But how sad is it that there is this underground industry to steal from stores (and from people who shop there)?

Sad… of course, and not uncommon.

But $14B?

That is about 700,000 $20 shirts.  Or 350,000 $40 pairs of jeans.

What a disgusting story that tells.  This type of thinking is exactly what will lead to the demise of any society.

The Miracle Van – Goodbye

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Almost five years ago I got laid off.  My wife was pregnant with our fourth child and we had to change from our car (Toyota Avalon, which is like harnessing heaven on four wheels!) to a minivan.

It was hard to give up the Avalon but the story of how we got our van is a very cool story, and why we call it The Miracle Van.  Even with it’s bumps and bruises, we really appreciated the van because we got it in a time of desperation, and it represented the goodness of humanity (many people where involved in helping us get it, since there was no money to pay for it at the time).

Two weeks ago I had just started a two week trip with about a dozen speaking engagements.  I was in California at the time when I got the dreaded call from my FIL:

“First, everyone is okay….”

When he said that I thought ... “okay, I think that’s not the statement I want to hear when I first answer the phone… is he going to tell me something bad happened?”

My wife was in an accident that could have been very, very bad, but fortunately she, and our two youngest kids, where okay.

An accident is not good for anyone… but events leading up to this accident where, as we recognized, tender mercies.

For example:

  • I had lost my car keys a couple of years earlier, so we only had one set (has a chip in it and we never got around to getting a spare). Days earlier, my wife found the lost key in a coat she hadn’t worn for a long time.
  • Her dad was in town on a really strange errand, right when it happened, and was able to be at the accident and help until she got home and was okay.

In memoriam, here’s a picture of the van, post-accident… note the numbers (explanations below):

  1. There used to be something here.  Now there is nothing but a void.
  2. This tire used to face a completely different direction.
  3. This is about where my wife’s legs were at the time of the accident.  Fortunately nothing happened to her body, except from bruises and bumps.  Sooooo close to something more dangerous :s
  4. This is one of two mirrors, and the only mirror that was intact.  Our other mirror had a few bouts with the side of the garage door, and was proudly bandaged up in shiny duct tape.  Never got around to fixing that.
  5. This is where our 18 month old baby was.  Thank goodness the impact was just a few feet in front of him, instead of where he was.

Shopping for a new vehicle isn’t fun, in general, but we’ve had some great experiences, which I hope to blog about on the JibberJobber blog.