Next Weeks Post: Hoping to start sharing posts on the book How to Win and Influence People in the Digital Age by the Dale Carnegie group. Thought that’d be a perfect piece to show ways to transfer making and keeping friends in real life to the digital world.
Twitter Summary: Creative people need to feel they are in control!
Last week I wrote a post called How Money Does More Harm Than Good, my take on a principle from Dan Pink’s book Drive. The gist of that post is that financial incentives most often ruin the intrinsic value of creative work. Today I want to tell you about one of the things Pink says drives creative work: autonomy. He says there are three things that drive creative work instead of financial rewards: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
Dan Pink writes that creative workers are most successful when they have autonomy over the 4 T’s: task, time, technique, and team.
Task: If people are allowed to decide what task is the highest priority for their effort, the results are amazing...
***This is my last post on Dan Pink’s book To Sell Is Human before it becomes available for purchase on 31 Dec 2012. If you are quick, you can still pre-order it and qualify for a number of awesome freebies. If you pick it up later, you lose the freebies! Thanks to Dan Pink and his team for sharing an early copy of the book with me and letting me be a part of his Launch Team.***
The last principle from Dan Pink’s To Sell Is Human that I want to highlight is what he calls Clarity. Pink writes that those working in sales, or who try to persuade people, need to focus on bringing clarity to people’s needs instead of simply trying to push a product or agenda. It’s not about moving units off a shelf, cars off a lot, or making sure to up sell the lobster before it goes bad...
Staying afloat amidst a sea of rejection requires buoyancy.
Dan Pink writes in To Sell Is Human, “Draw a map of the world of selling and the most prominent topographical feature is that deep and menacing ocean [of rejection]. Anyone who sells – whether they’re trying to convince customers to make a purchase or colleagues to make a change – must contend with wave after wave of rebuffs, refusals, and repudiations. How to stay afloat amid that ocean of rejection is the second essential quality in moving others. I call this quality ‘buoyancy’.”
One of the most important principles to successful sales, according to Dan Pink, and one with which I agree, is to be able to stay afloat. You have to stay buoyant. But I would add that the heart of buoyancy is, just don’t give up.
The problem...
I hung up on Ken (name changed for privacy) for the last time. At 3 am I finally decided that we weren’t going to get paid for the show my band just played. Ken was a promoter for a good venue in Haleiwa on the North Shore of Oahu. He had caught our set a few weeks prior and made us a good offer to play a future show. He said he’d pay us prior to our performance and guaranteed us a decent amount – that’s uncommon. Before the night was over, Ken had disappeared from the venue where he was not only a promoter but a regular waiter. During my first phone call with Ken, when I started to wonder where he had gone, he said he had to go and get extra money from his house because he came up short with what he had promised...
Peddling our wares on the streets of Santa Monica, California
I realize now that I have worked in “sales” during many different parts of my life. I write it with quotes because I haven’t been a traditional salesman in the sense of, “I have a product and I want to sell it to you for this much.” But like Dan Pink says in his book To Sell Is Human, I have been in the business of moving others to action. I’ve been a full-time missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Argentina; I’ve been a door-to-door salesman for Dish Network; and for the majority of my life I’ve tried to “sell” my music and myself as an entertainer. So, I’m familiar with trying to get someone to believe in you and buy what you’re selling...
A week has passed since the shootings at Sandy Hook, Connecticut and life has gotten back to normal for some of us. I’ve finally had a chance to pull myself away from the news, focus and finish reading Dan Pink’s new book, To Sell Is Human. I need to focus some positive energy on something like this, so I’m looking forward to sharing a bit about it.
There is a lot to like about this book and I found myself underlining big chunks of it and coming up with lots of new ideas, the kind I get all excited about and try to explain to my wife, but she just grins and rolls her eyes at me because I get so worked up. There’s a lot to digest so my goal isn’t to give a general run down of everything or to try to offer my review of Pink’s writing...
My advanced copy of To Sell Is Human
Author Daniel Pink is releasing another great book, To Sell Is Human. I’ve convinced his team that I’m worthy of an advanced copy and they’ve allowed me to support their marketing blitz. My goal is to read the 9 chapters as fast as I can and share some key points along with some of my cheeky comments before the book drops on 31 Dec, kind of like I did with Good To Great in my previous posts.
Pink has written a number of other great books and has some really interesting ideas. His website gives you a good overview of his other books Drive and A Whole New Mind. I was initially drawn to his writings when I saw this animated youtube video where he talks about what really motivates people. You’d be surprised – money is not the greatest motivator...