How will next year be different for you?

3 min reading time

nyu I could have sworn we talked about BHAGs in college (NYU, College of Business Administration and Public Policy, 1988).

Or at least in business school (Wharton, 1992).

But I guess not. Built to Last, the Jim Collins and Jerry Porras book where “big, hairy, audacious goals” was coined was published in 1994.

(Now that I’m thinking about it, it was probably Lynn from Grey Advertising who used it in a Kraft Foods meeting. I wish I could remember her last name. Her husband’s proposal inspired the way I proposed to Beth.)

Okay, that was quite a tangent.

One material change
So this Journey is short. Take the extra time to reflect.

What is one material change you’ll make to achieve better business results in 2018?

Spend at least 10-20 minutes in silence and just think.

Then put it in writing. Email it to me so it’s “more real” for you.

That’s it. That’s the point of this year-end Journey: Inviting you to sit, think, write, reply.

Let’s start 2018 on the right foot for you and your business.

Fast Round

I sprinkled in a few extra fast round items this week to make up for the brevity.

Native fonts. If you visit Medical Marcom, you’ll see I changed the font. I’m using a “native font.” That means the font you’ll see is a function of the browser you’re using. It looks nice because it’s familiar to you. It loads faster because the browser doesn’t download font files.

headline generator

Headline generator. I got a 71 using headline analyzer for this email. I talked about a different headline generator in Journey #10. Use these next year to boost your email open rates, okay?

Instagram. Do you Instagram for your business? (I don’t, maybe I should.) But if you do, check out Derek Halpern, starting with this clip, “How to stop comparing yourself to other people.”

On growth: Where real business growth comes from.

On storytelling: How to tell a story on social media, a 14-minute read from Gary Vee.

The Journey. If you missed any of the 14 Journeys before this one, visit the archive and catch up over the long weekend. Share it with a friend whose business could use some new ideas.

Doing Nothing

I skimmed part, read part of this 17-minute read on Medium about stillness and doing nothing. These images and quotes resonated with me.

In a situation where every waking moment has become pertinent to our making a living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing.” It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive.

Maybe you’ll give yourself the gift of “doing nothing” at some point over the light holiday week ahead.

Periods of and spaces for “doing nothing” are even more important, because those are times and places that we think, reflect, heal, and sustain ourselves. It’s a kind of nothing that’s necessary for, at the end of the day, doing something. In this time of extreme over-stimulation, I suggest that we reimagine #FOMO (fear of missing out) as #NOMO, the necessity of missing out, or if that bothers you, #NOSMO, the necessity of sometimes missing out.