The PT Challenge

Pain is not bad. It’s an indication that something has happened that is different from what you expected, and pain is the call to find out if everything is all right. Sometimes pain means something bad and can be the result of one of our unreasonable actions having gone wrong. If there’s really something wrong, go fix it. Otherwise, take the unreasonable approach and say, “This is different, but it’s OK.” Make sure everything really is OK, and move on.

Reasonable people shy away from unreasonable things because they intuitively understand the pain these things will cause. They prefer the tried, true, safe, and comfortable because they don’t want to upset anyone  or ruffle any feathers. They are polite, reserved, and measured because they know that this is how they’re expected to behave. No one likes to be asked for commitments and promises, and most people would like their little worlds left intact. Being unreasonable challenges everything that is expected by your team, your peers, your customers, your vendors, your bankers, even your press—everyone expects you to play within the bounds of normal experience, and people get offended, and, yes, even pained if you transgress.

So it’s particularly good news to know that the pain of being unreasonable, while inevitable, can be short-lived. Just train the people around you to get used to it. They also have to learn that the suffering is optional.

It is said that on the other side of pain is joy. Unreasonable strategies and tactics, properly applied, have the potential to reward your company with unheralded success, and the credit for that success should be shared.

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In general, being unreasonable can cause a fair amount of pain, and unreasonable requests definitely cause pain. They cause opportunity loss, which is painful. They cause sacrifice, which is painful. For many people, staying focused is painful, and giving up some of their playful distractions is painful. For others, the very idea of making a commitment or a decision is painful, and certainly stepping outside of a comfort zone—the very core of unreasonableness—is painful.

But organizations that are committed to getting extraordinary results get used to it. Pain is just what happens when your system experiences something different from what it has gotten used to, and as a result, the nervous system thinks that something is wrong. Pain is a given.

When you step outside your comfort zone and all your training and experience is screaming, “I don’t belong here, outside the norms,” that’s when you feel pain. Or when you’re making a commitment to something about which you’re not sure, you’re experiencing discomfort and dislocation, and your brain calls that pain. Talk to people who have gone through a merger; they’ll all tell you it’s painful. Has anyone been physically traumatized? No, they just feel dislocated. Pain. Many people even say that being promoted was painful. Why? Same reason.

Each time you or your organization (perhaps we should say your organism) feels the pain of being unreasonable, examine whether or not something is actually wrong. Once you are sure that while things are new or different, they are not wrong, the pain will subside. But pain is different from suffering. Suffering happens when people choose to continue feeling pain.

Suffering is the pain of feeling pain. Once we’ve decided that something is, in fact, wrong, we tend to make it worse. Our typical response includes wallowing, moaning about how bad things are, looking for fellow sufferers to commiserate with, crying “Why me?” and engaging in all sorts of other self-indulgent behavior
intended to announce our pain to the world. That’s suffering.

It’s tough to choose not to have pain, especially if you’re out in the world attempting something bold. But you can choose not to suffer; it’s just another act of the will. Whenever you feel the pain, rather than defaulting to wallow mode, pay attention to what is really happening. Sometimes just paying attention to the pain and asking what is causing it is enough to make the pain subside. More often, you’ll have to shift your attention somewhere else, perhaps willing yourself to focus on the intended outcomes. That will usually work, and it works on many levels: the physical, mental, spiritual, and even the corporate level.

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In earlier times, people saw the world in terms of opposites: black or white, good or evil, weak or strong, success or failure, profit or loss, win or lose, in or out, right or wrong, friend or foe, ally or competitor, with us or against us.

In the last 50 years, however, it has become fashionable to see the world in terms of shades of gray. Instead of making definite judgments about people and things, the world has moved to points on a continuum, and most evaluations have become relative. Shades of gray is now the reasonable way to look at things.

This is not necessarily bad. Many things in our world defy categorization, and many situations are not wholly one way or another. Putting things in terms of black and white requires you to make firm distinctions where there may not be any. But some issues are cut and dried: profit is good; loss is bad. Friends are good; enemies are bad. High quality and low product returns are good; low quality and unsatisfied customers are bad. And so on.

The difficult part of this is that calling things black or white creates polarization; some people are included in your worldview, and others are excluded. Some things fit your model, and others do not. It is unreasonable to express unequivocal values and ask people to take a stand. It is unreasonable to draw a line in the sand and ask people to cross it.

Why make such harsh distinctions? Why risk alienating half your potential supporters, half your team, half your marketplace? Why, indeed? Because in the marketplace and in the workplace, people seek bold leadership. They want to take a stand. They want to embrace a vision. They want life to mean something, and they want to be passionate about something. And wishy-washy relativism kills off passion and meaning, and people are tired of it. So what if you polarize your constituents? The ones who join with you and follow
you are the ones you want anyway. Sure, you’ll lose the rest, but you would probably never have won them in the first place.

Make no mistake, this is very strong medicine, and it is one of the most dynamic tactics in this book. Choosing to act along black-and-white lines will alter the fortunes of your business. Unreasonably so.

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Corporations do this when they sell divisions. IBM recently sold its entire laptop division to Chinese computer giant Lenovo. The laptop division was profitable, and ThinkPad remains one of the most respected brands in the business, but the product line was no longer consistent with IBM’s future direction, and management resources were needed to run other parts of the company. The company sacrificed ThinkPad and gave up a profitable revenue stream for greater gain elsewhere.

Unreasonable requests are not satisfied out of thin air. There is no magic that creates 26-hour days or 9-day weeks. The magic of unreasonable requests derives from grabbing people’s attention and focusing it on your objectives and programs while turning it away from whatever else they were doing. That “whatever else” may have also been valuable, and thus something is going to get sacrificed. It’s important to understand sacrifice, especially when you get pushback. There is always going to be an opportunity cost. The question you have to ask is, does that matter to you? It may not. The lost opportunity may be trivial—more time spent checking e-mail doesn’t count for much. Or the lost opportunity may be someone else’s opportunity, and that loss goes on her expense statement, not yours.

Many consider sacrifice to be a dirty word, and that concern stops many reasonable people from making hard decisions. Not wanting to let go of something good stands in the way of your company’s ability to focus. Your unreasonable request coupled with a strong will to carry things through can change all that. Once you get the hang of choosing one thing over another, one of the first things you can sacrifice is relativism.

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In my role as advisor to CEOs, people often ask me, “How should I prioritize my time?” My first answer typically begs the question: “Do what is going to have the biggest impact.” Relative to what? To everything you are striving for.

What is going to have the biggest impact on realizing your vision, on achieving your mission and your strategic goals, on reaching your monthly profit targets? Figure out what is most important about your business, and then figure out what is going to have the biggest impact on achieving that.

Normal people quite reasonably spend their energy on what they think other people expect them to focus on. Unreasonable people laser in on the things that are going to rock their world. Customers call, and you are supposed to jump. After all, it makes sense to keep the customers happy. But what if you are in the last crucial stages of launching a campaign that will double your business overnight? Should you take that call?

Sacrifice means giving up something of value for something of even greater value. It doesn’t mean dumping the insignificant things; sacrifice asks which among the meaningful things is most meaningful, and lets go of the rest. Perhaps temporarily, perhaps forever. Sacrifice is the tool of the unreasonably committed. Knowing that you are going to achieve your outcomes no matter what, you decide what will get you there faster and what will hold you back.

People talk about opportunity cost; it’s a question of sacrifice. If your company chooses to develop product A, it may mean that there are no resources available to pursue product B. And that may cost you. If you decide to woo customer X, then customers Y and Z may suffer. See? Trade-offs. Sacrifices.

Beecher said it brilliantly: it’s what we give up that makes us rich. Companies that target well—their products, their markets, their customers—often have to give up other lucrative opportunities. It works the same way in your personal life. It’s hard to be both a lawyer and a doctor—especially at the same time. Want to be an astronaut? You may have to forgo that career as a singer. Sacrifices have to be made. Airlines do this all the time when they drop marginal routes to focus on more profitable ones. It’s not that the routes are worthless; they may even be profitable, but there aren’t enough planes to cover them all.

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Promotion is the most important things in marketing. The purpose of the promotion is to promote the products or service that we sell to the public so that the public will be interested to our products or services and want to buy them. There are many different ways that we can do in promotion one of them is to make advertisement in both media, printed and electronic.

In a trade show, it is almost impossible to make promotion both in the printed and electronic media, but we can do promotion by focusing on the layout and display of our products. If we have quite interesting layout and display, people will also interest to go to our booth. After that, all we need to do is just persuade the customer to buy our products.

There are many companies that sell trade show exhibits and such things. One of them is Camel Back Displays. From its website camelbackdisplays.com, you can find various kind of display that you can use in your trade show, so your booth will completely different from the others. The examples of products that are sold online in this website are table covers and table top displays. These things will make your booth looks completely different.

Normal people seem unable to do this. They allow themselves to get distracted by whatever seems interesting or demanding at the moment, whether it’s an e-mail ding, a ringing phone, or a colleague come to discuss last night’s game or the recent heat wave. After all, it’s reasonable to pay attention to people when they’re right in front of you, isn’t it? Or to answer the phone when it rings—that’s what we’ve all been taught. It may be reasonable, but it isn’t going to help much.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the trend in office design was to eliminate the traditional four walls in favor of movable partitions and open floor space. Besides being cheaper to implement and providing more flexibility, there was a popular notion that it was more egalitarian, that it flattened the organization, and that it helped executives be closer to the pulse of things. But according to a survey of 1,500 employees by the English recruiting firm Office Angels, more than three-quarters of Britons complain that open-plan working environments not only stifle their creativity but also hamper their ability to get the job done. Among other things, 84 percent of them want closed-door offices, and 8 out of 10 find it generally difficult to focus in an open-plan environment. It seems that the willpower of the majority of office workers is not up to the task of putting interruptions in the background.

The art of being unreasonable depends to a large extent on a well-developed will, much like Henry Ward Beecher’s. Applied will is part of the puzzle; the other part is the discipline of regularity. Think again of our beginning weight lifter. It does no good to show up at the gym at 6:30 in the morning three days in a row and then not return for weeks. Muscle building can’t happen that way. Neither can weight loss. Try eating right for one week. Great, but then what happens? Nothing. In fact, worse than nothing. Disappointment sets in because the expected results don’t materialize.

It’s the same thing with any execution program. Most marketing programs fail because companies don’t have the discipline to execute them month after month. Sales programs fail because the salespeople don’t execute day in and day out. Staff meetings happen for a few weeks until everyone gets busy, and then they
get dropped. To succeed, each of these programs requires company will and discipline so that each is executed repeatedly for as long as it takes to produce the expected results. Will to do it in the first place; discipline to keep it going, over and over, until it’s no longer needed.

Once you’ve forged your collective company will, you will surely feel the need to make tough choices between one set of resources and another, between one set of tactics and another. All of the items on your menu may look appealing, and they may all seem like terrific options. And so they may be, but that doesn’t mean that you can have them all. Being able to choose and choose well is a hallmark of maturity.

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The will is like a muscle; the more you train it, the stronger it gets. Everyone in your company has some level of muscle tone, and everyone has some willpower. If you haven’t been to the gym in years and don’t engage in regular exercise, you are probably pretty weak. If you haven’t spent any time exercising your will, it is probably weak as well.

The way to build will is simple. You use it. The best way is to set tasks that are just outside your abilities, that require greater focus, attention, and persistence, and then get them done. The secret is doing things with forethought and by design. It doesn’t do much will building to accomplish things by accident. You must decide that you’re going to do something at a certain time and with certain conditions of satisfaction, and then do it. That builds the will. Then you decide to do something else that’s a bit beyond your grasp, and you do that. More will. Over time, your ability to intend results and produce them is transformed. Instead of being like diffuse sunlight, your will acts as a laser beam: focused and coordinated and capable of great power.

Start the way beginning bodybuilders build muscle tone. They begin with a weight that they can lift but that exerts a strain, perhaps 25 pounds. They repeat that until it is no longer difficult, and then they move up to 30 pounds. They continue with that until it becomes easy, and then they move up again. After a time they’re lifting hundreds of pounds. You can build your organizational will the same way.

Start with something small. It doesn’t really matter what it is—it could be making a commitment to call a client at exactly 3:15 p.m. or visiting your gym for that long-needed exercise today at 6:30 a.m. sharp. Perhaps it’s sending a new business letter you’ve been putting off, or having one-on-ones with your team this week, no matter what. For some people it’s as elementary as getting to the office at a fixed time or starting and stopping meetings exactly on schedule. Begin anywhere; tell whomever you need to tell, and do it.

Take it to the next level. What recurring item do you typically start, then stop? What’s something that you want to do every week, but never do for more than two weeks in a row? It could be those one-to-ones. That’s what ordinary people do—they start, then they stop. But those with willpower simply decide. Then they do.

Pick one of those stop-start-stop-start things, put it on your schedule, and do it. You don’t have to commit forever; you can commit for the next four weeks. When you’re done, commit again. Go to the gym every day at the same time, 6:30 a.m., for the next four weeks. Each and every day, each and every week. And do it. Each time you decide and do, you are reinforcing and strengthening the power of your will. Make it through the next four weeks, and you can recommit and add something else. Over the course of time, you’ll build up a huge reservoir of power. Building your will is incremental, but the effect is cumulative, and ultimately you reach the tipping point where your will has an almost unbelievable effect on your business’s ability to produce results.

Get your team members involved as well. Talk to them about will and have them make small decisions. Then bigger ones. Then big ones.

There is one thing that will hamper the development of the will, and that is fooling around with the truth—anything from out-and-out lying to exaggerating or stretching the truth, even “puffery” and “loose interpretations.” Of course, this is just good business sense; stick to the facts, and everything will work out. But in developing your will, the truth works, and everything that’s not the truth works against you.

In The Most Famous Man in America, Debby Applegate reports that when Henry Ward Beecher was asked how he could accomplish so much more than others, he replied, “I don’t do more, but less than other people. They do all their work three times. Once in anticipation, once in actuality, and once in rumination. I do mine in actuality alone, so I end up doing things just once.” Beecher had the ability to concentrate his mind and focus his will on what he was doing at the moment, to the exclusion of all else. He applied his will to the problems before him; this gave him great productivity and power.

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One way to ensure client loyalty is to obsessively create value for them. While this should seem obvious, most business owners don’t act like it is. (Most unreasonable tactics seem so obvious as to be almost not worth mentioning, except that very few people are using them.) Many entrepreneurs realize that they need to create value for their clients, but they do it in measured amounts. They create value relative to what they are being paid, and they feel they should do just that much and no more.

Chris Knight is an Internet entrepreneur running one of the most popular sites on the Internet. The core of his site, EzineArticles.com, is providing articles that readers and other Web site publishers can use free of charge. In a record amount of time, he has assembled more free high-quality content than any competitor. Knight took over and relaunched EzineArticles.com a little over two years ago, and as of this writing, it is approximately the 700th most popular site on the Web. If you didn’t know better, you might say, “Seven hundredth? That’s not that popular,” but out of more than 10 million Web sites, that’s quite an accomplishment. How did he go from almost none to over 250,000 visitors each day?

“I have a belief that the amount of money you make is proportional to the amount of value you create,” says Knight, “My objective is to create massive amounts of value for a massive amount of people. It’s a about service to others; that’s how I accomplish my personal goals.”

The entire business is grounded in finding out how to provide that massive value and great service. Much of the value is in the size of the content base: EzinArticles.com offers more free articles than any other article distribution site, which makes it a wonderful resource for authors seeking distribution and for publishers seeking content. It is growing faster as well. Because available content management software didn’t provide an acceptable user experience, the company built its own—not a small undertaking. Version 1.0 wasn’t up to Knight’s concept of value, so the company began soliciting visitor feedback and applying it in a process of never-ending improvement. “Our users are like our board of directors,” Knight proclaims. He urges other infopreneurs to allow users to create the future of their own experience, building visitor returns. The value that EzineArticles.com provides is not derived from any one piece, but is made up of hundreds of tiny improvements to its end-to-end process, made each week as a result of user suggestions.

How else does this value obsession play out? The company measures everything: page load times, end-user response times, numbers of errors, uptime. It follows the “small planet theory”: with EzineArticles.com’s
extreme level of traffic, there aren’t many slipups that happen without someone complaining. Which means that the obsession with value is also an obsession with quality.

The company feels the same way about the content itself. From an editorial perspective, the articles are about tips and techniques. EzineArticles.com doesn’t see itself as an advocate of citizen journalism, and the business is not about free speech. What that means is that human editors remove all offensive content before it gets published, and editorial complaints are dealt with immediately. While Knight has great respect for his authors, there is no single writer on the site that the company thinks would be worth trading viewers for.

All of this would be unreasonable enough—this company goes above and beyond its competitors in every single dimension, which is how it has outstripped them and outmarketed them. But the company has a
philosophy that is at its core unreasonable. It can be summed up in two words: go deep. EzineArticles.com has succeeded by having the will to go deeper than anyone else will reasonably go. It has deeper technical
expertise, it has deeper analysis of its own operations, and it has deeper content. Knight says, “True mastery can’t be had until you have gone deeper than anyone else. Only then can you call yourself the master.”

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Because there is nothing more destructive than making boastful, outrageous claims in public that you can’t back up, be sure you carry them out. If you’ve made a really unreasonable claim—on that couldn’t possibly have been true at the time you made it— then you have a lot of work ahead of you. To turn your claims into reality is going to require something that is alien to most people: application of the will. Willpower means taking action regardless of whether you feel like it. Will is the ability to keep going no matter what, often because you know it’ll be good for you, and other times simply because you said you would.

So much of people’s time in organizations is just plain wasted—diffused and lacking power like scattered sunlight. Work time is squandered and unfocused, and the 8 to 10 hours a day that people are physically present results in much less than that amount of useful service. A few years ago, we conducted a survey
to determine how much of the workday was perceived as productive. Over and over, managers and executives said that they averaged 1 to 2 hours of really productive time. I share that figure when I speak with groups of executives, and they typically howl in response. I originally thought people were insulted; now I realize the number I’m quoting is too high!

Will, properly applied, can change all that. Will has the power to transform ordinary existence into something truly remarkable. Having a strong will goes hand in glove with making unreasonable claims—you can promise bold things when you’re convinced that you have the steel to follow through. Having a strong will is behind every unreasonable request. You ask with conviction, knowing that if the tables were reversed, you’d be able to say yes and mean it.

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