I’m Golfing 100 Holes in One Day
This is my SIXTH year taking part in the Orange Effect Foundation’s 100-hole golf marathon. Through this little one-day event, Orange Effect has been able to provide speech therapy and speech technology grants to hundreds of children in the US. Without this event, those children would have gone without the speech therapy they (and their families) desperately needed.
My goal is to raise $2,500 for this incredible cause. I need your help. Please donate here.
Whatever you can do to help means the world to me.
February Blues
This is my last newsletter written from the cold confines of Cleveland, Ohio (at least for a while). I’ll be spending the next month in Key West, Florida.
Some of you may already know this, but I learned a decade ago (after going through it for 40 years) that I hit an emotional low each February. Much of this, apparently, has to do with it being frickin’ cold degrees in Cleveland and very little sunshine.
To adjust to this, my wife and I began planning a warm, sun-filled trip during a week in February. It worked…to a point. This year, we are trying out the entire month.
So my next newsletter will be written from Key West.
Long term, this is practice for us. We’ve discussed the possibility of (in the future) living in London for six months, but let’s see if we can do 30 days first. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.
Quick Note: I just got word that Aleasha Bahr’s new book, Black Sheep Sales, is now available for purchase. If part of your job includes selling, consider this formula a game changer. I saw Aleasha present on this topic last year and…color me impressed.
AI-Enhanced
AI is the talk of the marketing and creator space, but my concern is that most of us are still asleep at the wheel.
At a recent Wall Street Journal event, Anthropic (aka Claude) CEO Dario Amodei stated that in the next two, maybe three years, AI systems will be better than humans at almost everything.
Outside the ramifications of that statement, and without quickly rushing to judgement on how wrong or right the statement is, I ask you to think. Think about what you currently do daily and how much of what you do is based on knowledge.
Most of us are in the business of knowing something. I know for me and marketing, creating plans and strategies and the like, most of what I know can already be duplicated easily by a computer. Now, I may put a personal touch on it, and I bring the orange to any speaking event, but what I know is not unique to me outside my personal experiences.
The point is whatever you are doing right now will most likely be able to be done better in the next few years by a computer. Strike that. It will. Almost every job in the world will be displaced at some point. It’s such an amazing and terrible time to be alive.
I talked with Mike Stelzner, host of the AI Explored podcast about this. Mike believes that the stand outs in marketing and content will be AI-enhanced.
AI-enhanced means you must spend time learning the tools, whether it’s ChatGPT, Claude or other AI tools and really diving in. For the very near future, those who get ahead will be human + synthetic and understand when and how to use these tools. In other words, AI-enhanced.
The good news for all of us is that change generally happens at a snail’s pace. I remember when I thought content marketing was going to take over the world in 2007, while it really didn’t catch on to the general marketer until 2013 (and advertising is still king).
My recommendation is this…30 minutes a day. You should spend about that amount of time learning something related to AI in your field.
So those who believe this is true and set aside time each day to learn these tools, becoming AI-enhanced, will have so much more opportunity than those that don’t. I’ve seen it in content marketing and saw it again with social media. This is ten times that. I feel bad for those who fall behind. Don’t be one of them.
NOTE: I’m currently testing both ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5. Mike uses Flux AI for images. Also, Robert Rose and I bicker about this during the last 20 minutes of this particular This Old Marketing podcast.
Non-Player Character Mode
My wife and I are both over fifty. At this point in life, we are assisting a number of older people (we, of course, are NOT old yet). I have seen, more often than not, that their default is inside.
Here’s what I mean.
When given a choice between staying inside or going outside, they stay inside. Outside, it seems, is too much. There is too much uncertainty, too much fear, too many things that could go wrong.
I hate to say it, but when your default position is inside over outside, everything gets smaller. Smaller experiences, less curiosity and more time to watch people live (television and social media) than experiencing life personally.
There is an interesting book by Matt Haig called “The Life Impossible.” The main character, an older woman, describes herself like this:
“She sat and watched daytime TV and read the occasional book and did crosswords and Wordle to keep her brain in gear. She watched the birds in the garden, or stared at the small empty greenhouse, as the clock on the mantelpiece kept ticking…She hardly knew anyone. Her friends had either died, or moved away, or retreated.”
You know the story. I refer to this as becoming a non-player character (NPC). For those of you who have played video games in the past, the NPC is that character who oversees the shop in any role-playing game. They are always at the shop, willing to sell you things, but they never leave the shop. They never go anywhere else; thus they are not pertinent to the story. They just don’t do anything of importance, and don’t have an impact on your life or anyone else’s. Some people may never even notice the character unless specifically pointed out.
Inside mode foments the non-player character. It saddens me to see how many people slowly, over time, turn into an NPC.
The NPC is such an easy default position to take. “I’d rather stay in. It’s safe. I feel secure. I feel comfortable.” Those all seem like good things, but these things generally lead to the end of things, not the beginning. Inside mode means we are close to the end of our story.
One of my biggest fears is that I fall into NPC mode. So much so that it’s on my mind for nearly any circumstance. If I’m asked to do something, I force myself to default to outside mode. “Yes. Let’s do it,” I say. That’s saying yes to living and to continuing to find and develop my own story.
And it’s a fight, because the mind and body are generally looking for comfort and safety. It’s a battle.
This is another reason why I’m a huge proponent of physical events. When you go to an event the people attending open themselves up to new experiences and magic is possible. Some of my best work friends in my career I met at industry events.
It reminds me of the movie “Unbreakable” with Bruce Willis. To truly use his superpowers, he has to go out and be among the people (approximately the two minute mark). The same goes for all of us…we find ourselves, our story, outside with other people around us.
And the saddest part is, NPC mode can happen to anyone at any time. I’ve seen it from ages 22 to 96, and when it happens, my heart aches.
The More You Own
I’m currently watching a very long podcast between Chris Sacca and Tim Ferris.
One thing that stood out to me was Chris’s comment on ownership.
He says [paraphrasing]: The more stuff you own, the more it takes up space in your mind.
Basically, if you own a thing, say, a house, a car, a post-card collection, a piece of art, whatever…that thing takes up physical space AND mental space.
This resonates with me. Personally, I’m on a mission to simplify my life so that my mind has the space and ability to be more creative. I truly believe this is possible. I believe that if I can remove “things” from my life, that is one less thing (consciously or subconsciously) that I need to concern myself with. Then, with the brain being less taxed by the things I own, it will begin to work in new and different ways.
Part of me thinks this is on the verge of crazy. The other part thinks it’s brilliant.
Now, if I can only convince my wife to sell our house 😉.
What say you?
Other Places to Find Me
I’ve been doing some guest podcasts lately. Here are a few:
· I was on the Agents of Change podcast with Rich Brooks talking about building your marketing (or business) around a book.
· The Content Tilt method explained on Living the Red Life podcast.
· I talk about my entrepreneurial journey on the Lay of the Land podcast with Jeffrey Stern.