Why Risk Is Worth It

Many of the strategies employed in competitive and recreational sports are applicable in business and our personal lives. One lesson I learned from alpine ski racing was the "40-30-30 Rule." During training, early on, I tried to go fast, and I also focused on not falling. On a ride up the ski lift, my coach told me I was missing the point. He explained that success in ski racing, or most sports for that matter, was only 40% physical training. The other 60% was mental. And of that, the first 30% was technical skill and experience. The second 30% was the willingness to take risks.With ski racing, specifically, that meant taking the risk of leaning harder into turns, balancing at a steeper angle to the slope, and placing greater pressure on the outside ski edge – all of which increased the chance of falling. My coach explained, though, that if I wasn’t falling at least once a day in training, I wasn’t trying hard enough. Indeed, to improve at anything, we must at some point push ourselves outside our comfort zone. Body builders call it the “pain period.” Only by trying something new, struggling, learning, and then trying again do we improve our performance. It’s a simple matter of acclimating to unchartered territory.

To improve at anything, we must at some point push ourselves outside our comfort zone.

And when we come out the other side, we often can't help but wonder why we were so timid in the first place. Questioning this fear is not unfounded. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert has shown that we deal with failure better than we'd expect. In studies, “when people are asked to predict how they’ll feel if they lose a job… or fail a contest, they consistently overestimate how awful they’ll feel and how long they’ll feel awful.” In other words, “we overestimate the intensity and duration of our distress in the face of future adversity.”

While we tend to focus solely on building our skill sets or expanding our knowledge, the greatest advancement and learning most often comes from action, experience, and taking risk. And our regrets in life reflect this. According to Gilbert, studies show that “in the long run, people of every age and in every walk of life seem to regret not having done things much more than they regret things they did.”

Although playing it safe makes sense in some professions such as financial services and healthcare, for our own creative development, we need to focus on the last 30%. Our inhibitions have evolved to protect us, but, in many cases, they limit us. The challenge is to rebalance our nature. Ultimately, it’s the ones who barrel through the discomfort, are resilient in the face of failure, and master the last 30% of taking risk who reach the highest levels of performance.

Be Solutionary, Not Revolutionary

When we sit down with a blank canvas or clean sheet of paper, we have the tendency to think big. We ask ourselves, “What can I think of that is new, surprising, transformational?”However, some of the greatest advancements across industries were not huge, singular achievements but rather incremental improvements. Even bold ideas such as online music stores, departures in architecture, and new genres of music were the result of new ideas refined over time. The iPod was not the first MP3 player. Google was not the first search engine. And the list goes on…

While logic should encourage us to improve what is around us, we still tend to think of innovation as creating something entirely new. Creative minds have the tendency to lose interest after the first implementation of a new idea. Marginal improvements are, frankly, less interesting for the cutting-edge creative. Nonetheless, incremental improvements often make up the difference between success and failure.

Creative minds have the tendency to lose interest after the first implementation of a new idea.

Especially productive creative teams are able to find excitement in solving problems both big and small, and in varying stages. It’s these accrued solutions that make up the distance between a new idea being created, and actually being adopted.

Leaders that focus on incremental progress – being “solutionary” rather than revolutionary – are the ones that truly push ideas to full fruition. Such behavior takes a tremendous amount of discipline. But with conviction and clearly defined goals, creative energy can be channeled to refine a good idea enough to make a great impact.

The next time you’re in “dreamer mode,” trying to conjure up something brilliant, challenge yourself to search for the little tweak that can make a big difference.

Build a Business, Not Just a Client List

If you work for yourself, getting more clients is a no-brainer, right? Clients give you work. Work pays the bills. Do good work and you get a testimonial. Do this enough times and you get a great client list... which makes it easier to get more clients in future. It’s a virtuous circle.

Or is it?One problem with approaching your work purely in terms of "getting more clients," is that it means you will always have to get more clients. If you don’t work, you don’t have billable hours, so you don’t get paid. Time off will always feel like money down the drain. If you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself on a treadmill, unable to get off. Spend too long on the treadmill and you’ll riskburning yourself out.

Another problem is that you will expend all your energy and creative talent on other people’s projects. And what will you have to show for it? At best, a great portfolio, client list, and testimonials. But if you want to keep eating, you’ll need to keep working.

This is the classic dilemma described by Michael Gerber in The E-Myth – sole traders start out with dreams of independence, but find themselves trapped by their own business. They spend all their time working in the business (doing client work), instead of on it (building the business).

Sole traders start out with dreams of independence, but find themselves trapped by their own business.

The solution is to stop thinking like a "freelancer" and start thinking and acting like a creative entrepreneur. This does not mean you need to get VC funding and take on an army of staff. The opportunities created by the internet mean you can carry on as a one-person outfit or micro-business. What it means is that instead of just working for hire, you start creating business assets whose value will increase over time.

If that sounds a bit daunting, consider these four types of asset, that are within the reach of any solo operator:

1. A Brand - create and project a professional and consistent image.
Designer and developer Nick Cernis could operate under his own name, but instead he blogs as Modern Nerd and sells his iPhone apps under the nameSpiffing Apps. His websites’ design and copywriting are consistent, memorable, and unmistakeable. And because Spiffing Apps is separate from Nick Cernis, he has the option of selling the business in future, allowing the next owner to inherit the goodwill and reputation associated with the name.

2. Online Properties - build digital real estate that grows in value over time.
David Airey is an independent graphic designer. Since 2006, he has been writing a graphic design blog at DavidAirey.com, and more recently atLogoDesignLove.com. He ploughs thousands of hours a year into his blogs. Hours he could have spent working for clients or hustling for new business. But now he doesn’t have to hustle for business any more. Clients come to his Edinburgh studio from as far afield as Japan and Canada. His blogs have also secured him a book deal with respected imprint Peachpit Press.

3. Permission Assets - build lists of contacts who want to know about your ideas, products, and services.
According to Seth Godin, permission marketing is "the privilege (not the right) of sending anticipated, personal, and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them." A permission asset could be an email list, a blog subscription list, a Facebook group, or a following on Twitter. Every day, Hugh MacLeod sends a cartoon to the folks who subscribe to his email newsletter. They are free to print it themselves or buy a high-quality, limited-edition print from the artist. Enough of them do the latter to make it a very rewarding enterprise for Hugh.

4. Products - turn your knowledge and skills into physical or digital items for sale.
If you can deliver a professional service for clients, you can certainly create your own product range. Doing this successfully means you develop streams of income that increase over time – and it frees you from the treadmill of hourly or daily rates. Photographer and writer Susannah Conway makes a living from her innovative Unravelling e-courses combining photography, community, and personal development. Matthew Inman has freed himself from web design hellby creating the phenomenally popular Oatmeal website as a showcase for his comic strips, which he sells as posters, prints, and in a forthcoming book.

It’s not easy to find time to create these assets – in the short term, it’s easier to justify work on client projects that will put food on the table next month. But for the sake of your long-term health, wealth, and creative fulfilment, you owe it to yourself to make the investment. And it doesn’t have to be a black-and-white choice – think of the Google engineers who spend 20% of their time on personal projects, or David Airey writing his blogs while maintaining a steady flow of client work.
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How About You?
Supposing you spent one day a week building your own business assets… where would it take your business in a year? 5 years? 10 years?

What’s stopping you? What difference would it make if you found a way around those obstacles?

Bread design

New media can be anything I suppose.

Can we use food to reach consumers?

I will think about it in the future.

Passage Canal+ du Directeur Artistique de MS&L France from MS&L Channel on Vimeo.

The real difference between men and women.

I just got a brief where I have to establish (some how) the difference between men and woman to be able to start working on a campaign. I have to say I don't really know if there's a difference or not. Well, what I want to say is that I didn't know. Now I do know there’s one. By seeing this video from a seminar in Cannes (BBDO) I found out that the difference is not only anatomical. It's mental too.

Take a look and use it in your next campaign. Or at home if you want.

The real Differences Between men and women from luis pimenta on Vimeo.