Can You Change Everything?
Courtesy of Seth Godin:
You might not be as permanently stuck in a rut as you think. The rut you’re in isn’t permanent, nor is it perfect. There are certainly less perfect ruts, but there may be better ones as well. The certain thing is that you can change everything…
1. Buy a competitor
2. Sell to a competitor
3. Publish your best work for free online
4. Close your worst-performing locations
5. Open a new branch in a high-traffic location
6. Hire the best salesperson away from the competition
7. Join the competition
8. Host a conference for your competitors
9. Connect your best customers and organize a tribe
10. Fire the 80% of your customers that account for 20% of your sales
11. Start a blog
12. Start a digital bootstrap business on the weekends
13. While looking for a job, spend 40 hours a week volunteering and freelancing for good causes
14. Go on tour and visit your best customers in person
15. Answer the customer service line for a day
16. Let the most junior person in the organization run things for a day
17. Delete your website and start over with the simplest possible site
18. Call former employees and ask for advice
19. Move to Thailand
20. Listen to ebooks in your car instead of the radio
21. Sell your cash cow division to the competition and invest everything in the new thing
22. Find more products for your existing customers to buy
23. Become a gadfly and tell the truth about your industry
24. Quit your job
25. Move your operations to another city
26. Become a vegan
27. Have all meetings in a room with no chairs, and everyone wears a bathrobe over their clothes
28. Open your offices only four hours a day
29. Open your offices 24 hours a day for a week
30. Find every project that is near the danger zone (in terms of p&l or deadlines) and cancel it, no appeals
31. Go for a walk during lunch
32. Get an RSS reader and read a lot more blogs
33. Go offline for longer than you thought possible
34. Write five thank you notes every day
35. Stop sending spam
36. Do your work somewhere else. Set up your chiropractic table at the mall
37. Have everyone at work switch offices
38. Give your most valuable possessions to a stranger
39. Go see live music
40. Start a company scrapbook and take daily notes
41. Hire a firm to make a documentary about your organization
42. Buy some art
43. Make some art.
44. Do the work.
