There Is No Escaping the Deadline

Three “old friends” who anxiously await her return. Not pictured: Dad with a party hat.

The deadline for an 18-year project arrived today.

At times, the work felt impossible. It felt like it might never end. I sensed on too many occasions I was wildly out of my league and unskilled to do this work. And often I believed that I alone might be fully responsible for ruining the project – did I overwork it? Underwork it? Neglect critical parts?

But as the deadline neared, all I craved was more time. Time to pour just a little more into it. Time in hopes that the impact would be undeniable.

Sound familiar?

Deadlines exist for a reason. At some point we have no choice but to ship our work.

But this isn’t any ordinary project.
And this so-called project isn’t a project at all.

This is about my only daughter, and all the love and nurturing and parenting and choosing your battles wisely in hopes of getting her right here, at the edge of the nest, and wondering if a nudge will be necessary or if she will spread her wings to fly on her own and bring this chapter to a close.  

I tell you, the college drop-off itself isn’t hard. It’s rather beautiful in its awkward messiness and exciting preparation for new life experiences.

But leaving campus without that little girl in the backseat? That’s the part that guts you.

This is our life’s work: the relational, the pouring into, the molding, the listening, guiding, coaching, and even getting out of the way – in hopes the job isn’t over, not for a long shot.

And we’re all on deadline whether we choose to accept it or not.

Yes, deadlines (often) matter. Yes, it’s our job to meet them. So we must give our full effort, ship our work, and hope for the best — and that rings true of our kids, whether going to 1st grade or off to college.

Sometimes we get a front-row seat to success we didn’t expect. A lot of the time we just become perpetual learners ourselves.

We could all do better about prioritizing our relational work. We don’t always have the knowledge of, or get clear reminders about the relational deadlines.

Thankfully, I have another 18-year project that I still get to work on. Which is why I need to remind myself: Keep leaning in and showing up. After all, this is your life’s most meaningful work... and the deadline is coming.  

Everyone wants creativity & innovation; few have the required patience

Photo credit: Duane Mendes via unsplash

I read a sponsored headline on LinkedIn recently that said – The Opposite of Inconvenience Is Innovation.

(Not quite true and it resonates as an AI headline, but I’ll withhold judgment).

Then you had to “unlock” their gated, six-carousel slide deck to understand their point.

To that I’d say: unlocking gated material on LinkedIn is the opposite of convenient.

Fellow creative and copywriter Mike Roe recently shared an article on the death of creativity. I was drawn to a particular claim about the near-uselessness of three-fourths of the brands paraded in front of us, and how we wouldn’t miss them if they disappeared.

Think about that: the vast majority of companies/brands are easily forgotten, including yours.

The premise here is that we’ve killed creativity — meaning we aren’t creating anything memorable — in lieu of being efficient with time and speed at the lowest possible cost.

That, friends, is how we end up with headlines and campaigns promoting products like the one above. And it is also how they falter because they fail to entice, and in turn expect something from us long before earning our trust.

What might’ve enticed me to open this sponsored campaign and discover their offering? Simple:

1.       Don’t lock your content on LinkedIn (be generous, be a thought sharer)

2.       Entice us with stories/snippets that will resonate, something like…

Opportunities are created more than they are granted.

Your team keeps looking for opportunities, but when was the last time you granted them time to create something that turned heads? Got people talking? Shook the industry?

Here’s the rub: creating takes time. This can feel wildly inconvenient. It is far from instantaneous. But it is worth it. Just ask the computer maker not named Dell, or Gateway, or Compaq, who put a jukebox in the palm of your hand, and gave you a phone that still functioned like a phone, but became your essential life assistant.

Innovation isn’t doing what you know how to do a little differently. That’s called chasing the market leader. And, whoa, talk about inconvenient.

Remember — you have a choice: to either keep looking for opportunities — or start creating them.

To be fair, maybe this was the same kind of sponsored content the company gated, offering me to dive deeper into their offering, their own unique solution.

But I’ll never know – because I wasn’t compelled to look.

Think of it this way:

How many times has your audience been dismissive or not compelled to look because the creative was rushed, roadblocks to engagement we intentionally set for the sake of data, and meeting the artificial deadline prevailed over doing the best possible work with a better chance of resonating? Have any of us ever been guilty of such a thing?

When we rush creativity (the very thing that leads to innovative ideas) we take away the power of its potential.

We’ve been conditioned to “box it up” and promise what it will do in terms of metrics, sales, and how it measures up on spreadsheet – literally putting it in a box. When we do this, we have succumbed to the antithesis of creativity. Everything begins to look the same. No wonder three-fourths of brands are forgettable.

We neuter creativity before it has a chance do its intended thing – which is to wow people, stop them in their tracks, and get them talking.

And yet that is precisely what every company says it’s pursuing, but typically with poor copy that falls on deaf ears.

Before I Forget — Things I've Learned from My Mother's Dementia

Pay attention to the list (photo credit: Glenn Carstens-Peters)

I am not particularly good at making lists. I know what needs to get done and when, and only when the world feels like too much to handle do I feel compelled to write things down in checklist form. It’s a bit strange considering I write just about everything else down that comes to mind as a writer and creative.

But I’m going to strongly advocate for this list.

It’s one of the few that I have penned. I’m sure there are similar lists out there, but this one is mine. It’s well-worn and lived in.

And I’m sharing it because I think you can benefit from it – even if a loved one isn’t ill or disappearing in front of your eyes. It’s a different kind of list, one that doesn’t bring the kind of joy and satisfaction from checking the box. Each time I am reminded to turn to it, I think of the Avett Brothers Murder in the City where brothers Scott and Seth sing these final lines:  

If I get murdered in the city
Go read the letter in my desk
Don't bother with all my belongings
But pay attention to the list

Make sure my sister knows I loved her
Make sure my mother knows the same
Always remember there was nothing worth sharing
Like the love that let us share our name
Always remember there was nothing worth sharing
Like the love that let us share our name

And with that, pay attention to the list.

1.      Life moves slowly, often predictably; then it changes all at once. Recognize this as the rule rather than the exception. You’re not being singled out.

2.      Being right doesn’t matter. Showing love does. 

3.      Show up.

4.      After you’ve taken it personally, don’t take it personally.

5.      Listen. There’s a story to decode underneath the misidentified people and places. There’s a memory trying to rise to the surface.

6.      Ask for stories. Write them down. History is fading before your eyes. 

7.      Grief is not an event. It is a series of high and low tides that never cease.

8.      Costume jewelry can save a lot of heartache.

9.      Watch the film Alive Inside and see how playing music awakens the brain, reaches that far off part that remains uncorrupted. Tap the well that appears to be empty.

10.  Hide-n-seek is not only a kid’s game. Approach what’s missing with a kid-like curiosity and desire to find.

11.  Give compliments. Tell her she looks beautiful, how she reminds you of a special time.  

12.  Enjoy the silence. Sometimes presence is enough.

13.  Take walks. Slow is still active.

14.  Pull photographs before the funeral home asks. They are memory triggers for conversation, not just a five-minute carousel of a life lived.    

15.  She’s your parent, but his spouse. Same person, different interpretations. Remember and respect it as they would want you to do.

16.  Let her eat what she wants to eat. We’re no longer staving off anything.   

17.  Ask often: what really matters at this moment?

18.  Denial: don’t let it be the disease you suffer from.

19.  Making up for lost time, lost ground, lost arguments is unachievable. Making the most of the moment is achievable.

20.  Become an advocate for their health and well-being. This is as important with family members as it is with physicians.

21.  You are of little good to others if you are not taking care of yourself.

22.  This isn’t forever.

23. Find community. Grieve together. Lift each other up. Keep walking forward.

24.  This is a list for dementia, for Alzheimer’s. But don’t let that stop you from using the list. 

Short attention spans, content deficits, and disconnects

You have 1.3 seconds.

One. point. three.

That’s the length of Gen Z’s attention span according to a new global study.

The good news is you’ll get a few seconds more with older generations.

To clarify, this is about active attention spans regarding advertising.

But advertising is a form of messaging. A sliver of storytelling.

And it either grabs one’s attention or it doesn’t. It’s memorable or it’s not.

This is an age-old challenge for advertisers and marketers: How to grab that fast-fleeting attention for a few seconds. And then a few more. The stakes have been raised and there is pressure-cooked dilemma of attention deficit driven by social media scrolling.

But don’t worry. Your marketing team will creatively crack the code.

You’ve got bigger fish to fry. Like answering this question:

What will we say once we have their attention?

More than two decades of asking company leaders what they do, why they do it, why people should choose their product/service – and then asking their people the same question – and it’s pretty clear most orgs don’t have clear-cut answers.

Vague ones? Yes.

Succinct and consistent? Rarely.

1.3 seconds of cool may be just that — cool.

What it cannot do is convey your complex message, even when distilled to something simple.

However, creativity can point to your story that connects emotionally to an audience.

Of course you know your story, right?

The one your team knows inside and out?

That conveys your unique value and what you bring to the market?

That underscores why people – employees and customers alike – are all in on what you do?

Yes? Vaguely?

This takes more than 1.3 seconds.

So breathe.

And let your creative team be creative when it comes to grabbing attention.

Don’t let an audience attention deficit lead your business into a content deficit.

You still need to nail your story. Know your why. Clarify what makes you worth their time.

Remember that old-school metric about how an audience needs to see/hear your message nine times for before truly acknowledging it for the first time?

The same is true in a generation of scrollers.

Except today it’s going to take a lot more than nine times.

But once you grab their attention, it’s game on.

To keep their attention you need to make a meaningful connection.

And in case you need reminded, that is why your company exists in the first place.

Bigger. Better. Faster. More. Focus on the one that matters.

Every growth-minded organization’s aspirational and unsustainable spreadsheet dream.

Most people can sniff out the BBFM thread of language for what it really is:

• False or misleading marketing claims.

• Running to the beat of the corporate drum (which is typically the opposite of disruption and, in turn, true innovation).

• Unchecked hubris born of previous success.

• An undisciplined and insatiable desire for more.  

 (Those last two are part of the five stages of decline that Jim Collins outlined in his lesser-quoted book HOW THE MIGHTY FAIL)

Yet it doesn’t prevent businesses from believing in the false promises of this mantra. In time, and always sooner than desired, this will happen:

• Bigger becomes bloated.

• Faster needs to increase its speed.

• Yesterday’s version of more is not enough.

• Better is subjective and becomes a point of contention.

If we can sniff this out as consumers, then why is it that we, as businesspeople and leaders, apply this same misguided thinking and bake it into our systems and processes?

We know that bigger isn’t intuitively or explicitly better.

Faster doesn’t guarantee greater efficiency or effectiveness.

And more gets you more of everything – the bad along with any good.

Better is the only meaningful pursuit on this list.

Better, when articulated what it entails and how you’ll achieve it, will present nuanced versions of more that you, as a leader, get to decide if the pursuit is worthy of the effort.

And while better might remain subjective to the end customer, you get to define the terms of what better means to your organization.

It will be discovered in the metrics, the anecdotal, the company culture, as well as the hard to quantify.

It will be in the ability to recruit and the ability to retain your best people.

It will be proven over the long term. Not last quarter or next quarter.

It will reveal itself in a loyal base of customers, suppliers, and partners.

Better has a purpose. It has a definitive feel.

The pursuit of better is ongoing, just like business itself.

It will be written (literally) in your company’s DNA.

And you will know when you are going astray.

Because all of us want – and are looking for – better.

We’ll all take the upticks of bigger and more as they come (and inevitably go).

Which is why our aspiration should be to laser-focused on better.

Better is achievable, measurable, sustainable, and profitable…

as long as we aren’t derailed by short-term, fleeting promises of bigger, faster, and more.