I was just reading a newsletter from Chris Guillibeau of The Art of Non Conformity, and he got me thinking. He was talking about going against conventional wisdom. For example, Henry Ford said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said “faster horses.”” Yet ‘conventional wisdom’ says ask your customers what they want. The article made me think about all the conflicting ‘success’ advice there is out there, and how I am often paralysed by the advice that tells me to do something I just don’t wanna.
For example, apparently I “should” blog every hour, have ‘conversations’ on Twitter (even though I HATE how that clogs up a tweet stream with half a conversation), get a bazillion people on my list (whether they’re interested in what I do or not), have a positive title for my blog posts, have a negative title for my blog posts, post on Facebook approximately once every 4 seconds…yadda, yadda, yadda. Ok, maybe I misheard or misunderstood or wasn’t listening properly to the advice, but the point remains, there’s a lot of contradictory stuff out there.
And here’s the funny thing (for me): lots of successful people DIDN’T follow the advice and they got on ok. I met Sarah Tremellen, the founder of Bravissimo, and she said that she did everything wrong (according to conventional wisdom)! Of course, she’s only turning over £42 billion or something like that, so clearly she got it wrong. 😀 And I was just thinking, if I had taken advice on how to do it when I learned to walk, I would NEVER have learned to walk! There would have been just too much contradictory, conflicting and confusing stuff.
So here’s an idea: By all means watch what the others are doing and copy it if it feels good for you…but otherwise, paddle your own canoe. Set your own course. And one day you can say to others “this is how to do it” when you of course mean “this is how I did it”.
Love
Donna.x