Please Make it Stop. I’m over the tweetable ‘Stop Sucking’ memes. Don’t want to read another ‘Be Epic’ blog post. Tired of the ‘Go Awesome or Go Home’ schtick.
It’s more empty ‘aim for the stars’ quiptoids, bad business advice you should ignore. To often without a single piece of real advice as to HOW, or clue how awesome will get you ahead. (This isn’t that post, just saying.)
This is NOT an Ode to Mediocrity
I love brands that get it right most of the time and hate suckage probably more than most. It’s just that awesome really is bullshit. Never mind that:
- Someone else is now and will always be the judge of that. You may think UnCool Brand X sucks; and they can think you suck as they laugh all the way to the bank.
- We’re not eating at Chez Name Drop every night and ‘make do’ with NoAd Brand everyday; people neither want nor need nor will pay for Awesome all the time.
Throw adjectives like EPIC and AWESOME around enough, they lose that meaning on their way to being oh so very average. I started ranting this (see below) so many times, then the remarkable Mark W. Schaefer and the awesome Mack Collier beat me to it. As always.
“I don’t see anything in this world that makes following a dream easy for anybody.” – Mark W. Schaefer
“If you want to see other bloggers be awesome, then stop telling them to be awesome and show them how to be awesome. We need fewer talkers, and more teachers.” – Mack Collier
Word. It’s the ‘Just’ part of ‘Doing It’ – if it was ‘just’ that easy to be epic or awesome, fantabulous or remarkable, we’d all be The Incredibles with dream jobs and a guest turn on House Hunters International.
News flash: We have limits. And that’s a good thing.
- We can’t live every dream.
- We can’t read every book or blog, catch watch every cool TV show.
- We won’t go everywhere on our Pinterest ‘someday’ boards.
- We can’t like nor be liked or popular with everyone.
- We won’t always be amazing at everything we do. No expectations of Gerber Baby perfection.
- I won’t try all the yummy wines – no matter how hard I may try.
In lieu of a lottery win, I won’t get to go everywhere on my dream list. Which means that when someday I do make it to some of those places – it’ll be all the more epic, special and amazing to me.
Limits cut through, clarify, crystalize. Limits on time, on budget forces you manage resources that much smarter, to earn better results. Knowing what you do well – and what you don’t – drives focus. You won’t be all things to all people; you’ll be the best choice for the right people. It’s my job to communicate that – how your small business is and can be awesome – for your customer, for your stakeholder.
Talk to me about limits. Do they drive you to push harder or refine your business to do it better? Do they not shape how you’re going to get there?
Photo Credit: Think this Despair will make my DIY calendar next year. 🙂
Dammit, I intend to climb every mountain no matter what. 😉
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Well I do make decent effort on that wine thing. 🙂
Good stuff; well said. I have to agree. Sean McGinnis wrote one of his “epic” and lengthy blog posts this week and I had to bookmark it. I wonder if he has a Send to Kindle plug in yet; that would be smarter.
His first tip to get more out of SEO is to “write EPIC sh*t.” I swear he used the crap word; I just didn’t want to this early.
I don’t know what that means, and I’m not ever looking on some Google thingy to find the key words to stuff my headlines with. Maybe I lose when I don’t follow those rule, but you know what? Writing EPIC content requires an elevated sense of creativity and inspiration.
I don’t write for consumers; I’m not selling product to them. I’m a professional blogger writing about a niche in which there are hopefully hungry prospects who love my EPIC content.
Who the heck knows? Now that I’ve changed it up and I have to be concerned about that email subscriber to my newsletter, all this optimization and digital marketing stuff makes me weary.
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That’s the problem, something I was debating w/ Marcus Sheridan the other day. Having a steady stream of content matters, but there’s so much more. Are we to ALL be always, EPIC and AWESOME? At everything? The SEO, the linking, the plugins and email automation? Knowing which tracks work, how to keyword images for better inbound juju? And so on and so on. And all in ‘just 2 hours a day!’ as if that’s even possible?!
It’s not. I GET engagement, I GET companies acting like people – but end of the day, most consumers (and readers, audiences and social communities) don’t care from the relationship. And as I get tired of typing, we as consumers could care less. We want 1) the thing we need/want 2) at the lowest price we can find and/or are willing to pay 3) w/ least amount of work involved. Epic or Awesome is just a bonus. FWIW.