I just logged into Paypal, which gleefully proclaimed they’re the “most loved” way to send money. Loved? Really? Someone in their marketing department needs serious therapy. I don’t love Paypal. In fact, I find the interface ugly, and the workflow tedious. And did I mention annoying? I often want to pay a Paypal-only vendor from my credit card, to make bookkeeping easier. But they force me to pay from my Paypal balance if I have a positive balance. Love? Nowhere in the equation.

I’ll bet if you were asked to describe your feelings towards Paypal, “love” wouldn’t be what jumps to mind. And here’s the thing about emotions: the best way not to evoke an emotion is to name it. When you name an emotion, if you’re right, you establish rapport with your reader. But most of us have very different emotions about many things. When you name an emotion and it doesn’t match what your reader is feeling, you lose credibility, big-time.

If you want to be “the most loved” brand of anything, create experiences that evoke love, not experiences that talk about love. My bank, Eastern Bank, is constantly telling me how great its service is. Yet their online system won’t let me download copies of my recent (or non-recent) statements, and that’s virtually the only banking activity I find useful to do online. Rather than telling me the service is great, they should find out what service I want or need and provide that.

Intuit did that in the early days of Quicken. We followed people home, watched how they used the product, and created a product that was so easy to use and so much fun to use that customers did, indeed, love the product. We didn’t tell them how much they loved the product; we made the product so lovable that the customers did the rest.

Apple didn’t say, “Stever, you love your iPhone.” Apple made the experience of using the iPhone so pleasing (at least to me) that I can hardly put the darned thing down. I love the product because the product is lovable.

The lesson for you:
- If you want to be loved, be lovable.
- If you want to be trusted, be trustworthy.
- If you want to be admired, be admirable.

Don’t tell us what you want us to feel, just give us the experience. And if you do it well, you’ll end up getting everything you want.

Last week and this I have been holding myself to impossibly high standards for a client engagement, 2 shows, a TEDx talk, and an audition for a summer musical theater program. I worked my butt off for the client engagement and believe it went well (awaiting evaluations still). But for the others, I have no standard for “good enough,” so I’m holding myself to impossibly high standards. The resulting stress is wasting mental resources that could be going into preparing as best I can for everything.

The problem isn’t the perfectionism. The problem is the stress caused when I don’t reach my standards. The stress doesn’t come from the activities themselves–I’ve done well in shows before, and I’ve given great speeches before—but from the beliefs that are surfacing around them: “I have to do it perfectly.” “Everyone’s counting on me.” “I should be able to do better than this.” and “This is the most important presentation ever.”

These are just thoughts, however. They may or may not be true. When I don’t think them, in lower-stakes situations, I’m fine. I step up, perform to the best of my ability, and learn to do even better next time. When I get wrapped up in the thinking, though, it becomes a stress-fest. Even if the thoughts are true, the stress does nothing but get in the way of doing my best.

My solution is to stop working on my performance for the next half hour and instead work on reducing the intensity of my beliefs. When my mental landscape is calm and clear, I can apply myself fully to doing the best possible job at my current skill level.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

(And any of your ideas on how to deal with perfectionism and perfectionist-thinking would be greatly appreciated!)

In doing spring cleaning on my web site, cleaning up broken links, and fixing media players, I found a couple of prior articles discuss a CEO’s job description. One is in the form of a podcast, while the other is a full article. Read them & let me know your thoughts.

Podcast: http://www.steverrobbins.com/blog/2007/02/what-does-a-ceo-do
Article: http://www.SteverRobbins.com/articles/ceojob

Please comment! Do you agree? Disagree? Have I missed a critical piece of a CEO’s job, or included something that doesn’t belong?

Do great things!

Stever

I’d really like to put together an open Q&A/brainstorming teleseminar on the topic. It would be part lecture, part Q&A and real-time coaching. Would there be any interest?

Listen or read the episode on how to manage work life balance here: http://getitdone.quickanddirtytips.com/manage-work-life-balance.aspx.

I recently reviewed my business and realized that the fancy e-commerce platform I’m using costs more than I’ve made on the products I sell using that platform. So, as a good businessman, I will be switching to a new, less expensive platform.

However…

It will take time and money to move my existing products over to the new platform. Plus, I’m changing the direction of my business and the old products won’t be a good fit. (I’ll write more about this soon.) So I’ve decided to stop selling my existing suite of products.

Effective March 31, 2012, the current products in my online store will no longer be available for purchase.

The Time Control programs will be going away forever; moving their automated parts to a new platfom is too much work. My other products may not be gone for good, but I currently have no intention of bringing them back.

If you want to check out what’s available, visit my online product page for products including:
⁃ Time Control – personal productivity accountability programs
⁃ You Are Not Your Inbox – mastering email overload
⁃ It Takes a Lot More than Attitude to Lead a Stellar Organization leadership essays
⁃ Social Survival Skills for Geniuses how to master the non-logical part of business

Remember: these products will only be available until March 31st, 2012, after which time they will no longer be offered. This is your last chance! Click here to buy!

Thank you for your support so far, and I hope we have a long future together. But it will be in a somewhat different direction

Stever

One of the attendees was dissatisfied, however. She wrote saying she would rather have spent the time together going deeper into people’s answers and doing the “real” work in the phone calls.

She suggested I ask everyone to fill out the worksheet packet in advance. Then we’ll spend the day debriefing answers & going deeper. The design makes sense to me at a high level, but I don’t quite know how to pull it off in practice.

In particular, there are a couple of big questions in my mind:

1. Will people fill out 24 pages of worksheets thoughtfully, in advance?
2. Is it possible to go deeper with 20 people live on a teleconference?
   … how?

What do you think?

My point, however, has nothing to do with entrepreneurs. It has to do with conventional wisdom. We intuitively (or culturally) want to believe that entrepreneurs are a special breed of person. That way, we have an excuse to be an entrepreneur if we deem ourselves “that breed.” Or we have an excuse *not* to be an entrepreneur if we aren’t “that breed.” Either way, we get to shift the responsibility for the decision to our personality type, rather than our decisions and efforts. That makes the very notion of an “entrepreneurial mindset” attractive, as a flexible rationale we can use for all kinds of stuff.

A lot of conventional wisdom is similar. The American myth that CEOs are somehow to credit for the entire performance of their companies, for example, is unsupported by any data whatsoever. W. Edwards Deming, the statistician who created the Total Quality movement, said that no more than 10% of a company’s performance could be attributed statistically to the CEO, and then only in highly unusual cases.

The problem is that our minds aren’t very good at understanding complex things. For 100,000 years, our minds weren’t able to do much beyond farm. Then we invented the scientific method, which was the first time we had a rigorous way to separate our intuitive-but-wrong ideas from the nonintuitive-but-accurate ways the world really works.

There is a lot of poorly-done science in the works. There is also a lot of excellent science, which is why we live 2x as long as our ancestors, in comfort, with electric lights and polar fleece.

Especially in the human potential fields–self-help, business leadership, etc.–there is a substantial body of research about how people and human systems actually work. Much of that research has even been popularized and published in books accessible to everyday people.

Before jumping on the pleasant, inspirational stories propagated in our cultural myths, take the time to read some of the research-based books on the topics. You can even go further and read the studies the books are based on. Some of the science (or the way it is being interpreted) may be ‘iffy,’ but some may be solid. And you may learn how the world *really* works, which will only make it easier for you to create the life you want.

(*) this is what I did for the Get-It-Done Guy episodes on visualizing for results. “The Secret” doesn’t work. They’ve done controlled experiments to find out. But some slight tweaks in the visualization technique *has* been shown to boost results. Not because of a deep spiritual principle, but because the right visualization gets people motivated and moving to make their dreams come true.

It’s no surprise we believe in meritocracy. We spend our entire first 18-25 conscious years in school. School is a true meritocracy. The more you work at mastering the material, the more you earn good grades. I don’t know about you, but school was the last meritocracy I had the privilege to enjoy.

At my very first job out of college, I was told, “You do the best job of anyone here, but you’re too young to be making any more money.” Sadly, I persisted in thinking that doing a good job was the way to get what I wanted out of life. I still think that way in my gut, even though I continue to see little evidence of it.

Many very successful people talk a lot about meritocracy and how they just worked hard to succeed. That’s all fine and good, but they’re looking at only their own story. They’re not looking at the vast majority of people in the world who work very, very hard, and don’t get rewarded nearly as well. I’ve also noticed that the people who are highly successful/rewarded/prestigious have a tremendously powerful psychological vested interest in believing in and trumpeting the idea of meritocracy. Otherwise they would have to confront the idea that maybe they don’t deserve all that money/power/fame, and it simply came to them because they were born to the right parents, or were in the right place at the right time.

In capitalism, we give the bulk of the value created by an enterprise to the owners. It’s far better to own 50% of the equity in a successful company that you left 6 months after founding it than to work your ass off for 12 years making that same company a success, but working on salary. What matters as far as material reward isn’t the work/merit, but the capital and ownership structure. (That’s a true story, by the way. The company founder never worked again. The employees, while doing reasonably well, are still working at the same or other companies to earn their daily bread.)

If you want to do a good job, by all means, do it. Personally, I like to be proud of my work, and I strive to do the very best. But don’t confuse that with getting what you want. When you’re designing your life, remember that producing good work may be something you do for the psychic and self-esteem rewards. When you’re going after other rewards, say, money, be as clear-headed as you can about what will help you reach that result. Hard work and skill may not have anything to do with living the kind of life you want.

If you can’t view the embedded video above (the FOX video player seems to have problems with some browsers), here’s a link: