Standing out in a Crowd

Noah Lukeman’s book, How to Write a Great Query Letter, is for writers looking to land an agent, but it’s really about how to get yourself noticed in a crowd. Too aggressive, and it’s as if you’re a terrorist. Too gimmicky, and you’re a clown. None of the above, and you’re part of the crowd.

The book fulfilled its promise in another way: it was compelling reading like a good query letter should be. I was tired and sleepy but it made me sit up and take notice.  No how-to book has done that before.

In my business, I must reach out to potential clients who don’t know me. The book made me take another look at techniques I have tried in the past and I finally understood why they didn’t work. It made me take another look at techniques I am using now and how to make them work better.

No wonder it’s a 5-star book on Amazon.

But there’s more to it than that.  To quote,

Be the cat

The ox

Much to do,
Lists, lists of lists,
Time management,
Multi-tasking,
Sorry, I missed it — the devil was in the details.

The cat

Sleep,
Mouse vigils,
Learning their ways,
Pounce!
Guess what — God was in the details.

New Year Resolutions

From Barron’s Round Table this week, quoting Marc Faber,

With a few exceptions, the U.S. doesn’t produce anything. It is a consumption-led economy. When the economy expands, the U.S. imports from other countries, such as China, which increase industrial production and capital spending.

There are only 2 industries where the US is still a leader.  Yeah, software is another, but it is no longer US dominated. 

1. Life sciences, which includes Biotech, Pharma, Medical Devices.
2. Defense.

The two couldn’t be more different in their character.  We will be targeting both of them, Early Stage IT for Life Sciences and Quantitecture for Defense.

So where’s the Resolution?  Focus!  Early Stage IT marketing will be focused on the Life Sciences only.  Quantitecture marketing will be focused on DoD only.

Other ideas (I get new ones every day) will be put on the back burner for a few months.

Don’t Pause

We were editing a piece of music the other day using a popular program. Nothing fancy, just wanted to cut a 15-second part of the audio from the middle and splice the ends together. It wouldn’t cut.

WTF? How can you have an editing program that wouldn’t cut? Nevertheless, we dutifully read the instructions. No help there. We must have fiddled with that program for an hour before we realized that if you pause the song, the program wouldn’t cut — you actually had to stop it.

It’s obvious why, once you think about it. Pausing implies that you intend to resume. If you cut a piece of the song out, the program could potentially lose its resume-point. A really sophisticated program would have tried to keep track of the cutting and adjust the resume-point. The designers of our program solved the problem by just disallowing cutting when paused. Simplicity wins!

So too in life.

It’s a popular metaphor: “our challenge is to change tires while going 80 miles an hour”. No! Productivity is not the challenge. Getting things done without dropping the ball is not the challenge.

The challenge is discovering a new song, and that requires giving oneself the silence to hear faint stirrings. Opportunities like this come only a few times in a lifetime.

The Pause button stands in the way of a new song!