Content You Can Use #5
In this series, I’ll share stories, examples, analogies, and quotes I’ve collected over the past several years in the hopes that you can use them to make your next message compelling and sticky.
1/ Three quotes
“If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning.” ― Vincent van Gogh
“Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.” - Colin Powell
“If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.” "- Napoleon Hill
2/ Steve Jobs Insult Response
What I’m taking away from this clip:
“One of the hardest things when you’re trying to affect change …is that …people like this gentleman …are right! …in some areas.”
“The hardest thing is, how does that fit into a cohesive, larger vision that’s going to allow you to sell 8 billion dollars, 10 billion dollars of product a year.”
“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. […] It started with, what incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer? Not starting with ‘let’s sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and then how are we going to market that?’”
3/ Freakonomics Podcast Story
Michael Roberto (business professor at Bryant University) likes to start one of his lectures by giving his students this fictional Shark Tank pitch:
I’d like to open a new kind of grocery store. We’re not going to have any branded items. It’s all going to be private label. We’re going to have no television advertising and no social media whatsoever. We’re never going to have anything on sale. We’re not going to accept coupons. We’ll have no loyalty card. We won’t have a circular that appears in the Sunday newspaper. We’ll have no self-checkout. We won’t have wide aisles or big parking lots. Would you invest in my company?
Hell no!
…but you should. It’s Trader Joe’s.
And at the time of that podcast, Trader Joe’s had the best sales per square foot of any grocery store.
How might you apply the Trader Joe’s approach in your life or work?
Listen to the episode HERE
4/ Work smarter, not harder
5/ How do you go from where you are to where you want to be? Enthusiasm
If you’ve never seen this speech, watch it when you have 11 minutes to spare.
If you enjoyed this post, please hit the ❤️ button and share it with someone who might enjoy it, too.
If you’re interested in working together or bringing communication training to your team, let’s talk.
Thanks for reading!
Jenny