What's in your toolbox?
You can't build a house with just a hammer (but you can't get far without one).
There is no one-size-fits-all solution.
My first business coach, Christine Kane, called these “magic pills”, those perfect cure-alls that are the solution we’ve been longing for. You know the promise: minimal effort with LOTS of results.
And it’s easy to be lured by them on our social feeds.
“Your First Six Figures Launch with This Method”
“10x Your Business Using This Model”
“Unlock Your Destiny with This Magical System”
(insert some outrageous and very attractive promise here)
We’re curious and we click.
Now, I’m not saying wildly outrageous success isn’t possible.
But your business (and life) can’t rely on these one-size-fits-all solutions, whether they promise to be the last marketing technique you’ll ever need or the perfect operating system (or the does-everything-your-business-needs software).
A hammer is brilliant — when you need a hammer.
My team and I work with some really amazing entrepreneurs and business owners, but five or six years ago, I started to sense that something was off with the websites we were building. I couldn’t figure out what it was.
Then I read Don Miller’s book, Building a Storybrand, and it was the answer I was looking for: Everyone’s website was so focused on their own hero journey that they missed fully stepping into their role as guide.
Too often, our natural instinct is to share our own hero’s journey as our primary marketing method. But when you want to connect with potential clients, you need to help them visualize what’s possible for them and take the first step into their own hero’s journey, with you by their side as their guide.
I loved Storybrand so much that two months after reading the book, I became a certified Storybrand Guide. It was one of the best things I had ever done to dive deeper into marketing and develop the language I needed but didn’t have.
Storybrand is an amazing marketing framework for small businesses trying to figure out how to connect with their clients. But it’s also limiting, and I don’t recommend its usual approaches in every situation.
Sometimes, you need a screwdriver instead of a hammer. And you need to fill your toolbox with tools you can use to build and create.
Know the foundations — then break free.
This is how I work best: I learn and practice the frameworks so I can understand their limitations and see beyond them.
Innovation isn’t pure rule-breaking. You can’t break the rules until you really understand them, after all.
Innovation is a balance of immersing yourself in the foundations of a subject or field and thinking beyond.
Take, for example, the work of playwright David Mamet. I first encountered Mamet’s plays in college, where I studied theatre. His work was so unlike other plays we had read and performed: characters spoke overlapping each other, in language that sounded like it came out of a bar, a business office, or an apartment building. It wasn’t the traditional sort of orderly or elegant, but there was a realness to the rhythm of it all. His style stands out because it’s so unlike the foundations of what play scripts “should” be.
You find this in every field: science, business, medicine, art. We know the names of the greats like Einstein, Curie, Picasso, and Cleopatra, not because they did what they were told but because they pushed to a new level of insight, understanding, creation, or operation in the world.
We don’t break free for the sake of being contrary alone.
We break free to achieve new truths, to discover new insights about the world or ourselves or the divine.
Five Recommendations for Thinking Beyond
I want to share this with you today: four ways to break out and see things differently. We need that now more than ever — in every field and area of life.
Learn the way things are done, but don’t blindly subscribe to any one way of doing or knowing.
Experiment and ask yourself if it feels true to you (or if it works for you). Even if it does, it doesn’t mean it’s the only truth for you.
Push past simple solutions as your final answers. Truth is complex and sometimes contradictory. It can be “both and” even when it appears you’re dealing with opposites.
Read. Books, online articles, blog posts, magazines. Read different genres and authors. Open yourself to different perspectives, to divine inspiration. You don’t need to change your mind, but you do need to challenge it.
Have great conversations with people you trust and go deep with. I think differently when I’m talking to friends. New insights emerge and synthesize. I swear these moments are absolute magic.
How do you think beyond and innovate?
A special thank you to those people who help me innovate: Karna Nau, Tanya Dalton, Gina Gomez, Nat Olson, Brian Taylor, my friends, my clients, my team, and so many more.
Thanks for always believing in me! I'm stepping alright. Phew!
Thanks for inspiring me today to be me and trust my vision and be creative and not comparing myself so much to others!