The 5% day

In The Trench or on The Bench? Robert Babb Apr 25 What’s your choice? A filled with a fear eight-year-old kid was playing baseball, his father begging the kid to swing the bat. Other kids would mock him and call him “Statue of Liberty” because the kid was too fearful of swinging at a pitch. One day the kid’s unsympathetic coach came over to at the plate and said, “This may be your lucky day, if you get hit by a pitch, you will get a chance to see what it’s like to be on first base.” While the kid’s teammates jumped at the opportunity to get to the plate and swing for the fences, all this kid wanted to do was sit on the bench. With his deer in the headlight look, fear paralyzed his body at the plate. Lately, we have seen something similar around us at work, home, and through the press. We are in a time or fight or flight, of getting into battle or taking a seat. Fear creates a time for us to stay (or jump) in the trenches, or a moment

An addict’s head gets filled with negative dark thoughts, often not knowing how to permit replacement of the dark with some positives.  The bottom falls out, they need help.  Maybe it’s the same for most others. It’s not hard to see the news feeds of today are filled with bad news.  The bottom fell out of the good news industry about the time a Wuhan doctor sounded alerts. Today, the networks 2019 abundance of optimistic stories are replaced by competing channels filled with doomsday documentaries, one of higher shock value than the next. Today, it may make you wonder how any story of hope can ever make its way through the news editors crowded desktop filled with shock of society demise. What are we doing in our attempts to find the good news once again?  Maybe it’s up to you to find the good again; the positive news on your crowded desktop of bad.  Some say small wins. By the average eye, small wins come and go, without recognition or celebration, missing learning mo

We are all in denial. The business we had yesterday is gone, replaced by a ground zero formula that only you and I can start to define. Where do you start a formula to connect and market to customers that need your services once again? Let's look at the 5 stages of technology adoption. https://ondigitalmarketing.com/learn/odm/foundations/5-customer-segments-technology-adoption/ From a simple marketing perspective, if 84% of our promotions are aimed to go to the mass that takes sometimes 7 times to hear our message (Marketing rule of 7), then lets work with the 16% of the customers that know us already, talk about us often, and are sometimes closer to us then our own family. Go to early adopters and innovators, the business family that heard about you once and committed, remain loyal and talk proudly about you. Who is your business family? The 3x+ repeat customers The first responders to a new marketing message  The referral sources you have their personal pho

You may have thought it was the perfect year.  Starting in February, on that day, just after 2:02 a.m on 02/02/2020, the month and year a rare palindrome.  The last time this occurred was 909 years ago, on 11/11/1111.  It ’s also likely the only year you are alive where the first two digits match the last two, like 1919, or in 101 years for 2121. Heck, it was an entry into a new decade, something most of us only get to experience 5 to 10 times in our lives, if we are lucky.  Let's not forget it’s a leap year, coming around every 4 years, some say it’s a lucky year because we get an extra day. Leaplings born on this day may disagree. In business, if the month ends at the end of a week, it seems ideal, at least for accountants and bookkeepers, and for leaders keeping score.  If a holiday falls on a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or even Monday, it is less disruption.  The Perfect year was looking like this.  ·        Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day ·        F

The Genie in the bottle is out.   She broke the bottle and released a flood of ideas (and problems, disruptions) to the market.  These cells of disruption had been cooped up and percolating in a bottle of perceived limitations. We don’t have to look further than our “What if” thoughts of the past to see where they came from. Humanly speaking, we have a large appetite for curiousness.  It makes sense then that we spend a lifetime to explore, think, write down, and sometimes (or not) take action on “what if” ideas.  Ideas morph daily for most of us, some ideas are repeated, some ideas are just fleeting thoughts that escape our memory grasp simply by never writing them down. Like your brand, a bottle of “what if” ideas are precious and unique, like the millions of cells in our body.  If written and stored, they are forever preserved for the moment to release them, at which point (like most cells) will multiply and divide.   Ready or not, that moment just happened.

Allen Klien states that humor can be one of our best survival tools to   manage pain, release endorphins, and even change brain neuron connections. Humor can plant a seed of hope, leading to smiles, giggles, and laughs (SGL) that become a pod of goodwill feelings.  Day in and day out, this pod accumulates “SGL wealth” much like a bank account accumulates financial wealth.   Although it’s a time when we need it most, the smile, giggle, and laughter pods are most pierced in times we work hardest to survive, making withdraw from our SGL accounts until we have no SGL left.   Like now, it seems easy to forget to smile and laugh during this space we live in. Just watch any newscast, you will likely find any sense of SGL surplus is removed before the first commercial. A google search tells us we laugh less as we get older, we stop smiling, some say we fall off a “humor cliff”.  We laugh more on weekends, and like with age, when we live in stress, it becomes harder to smile