Category Archives: Lists

43 Lessons From My 43 Years

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Last night before I fell asleep, I started writing down a list of lessons I’ve learned over the past 43 years of my life. Most of these I’ve learned by experiencing them several times until it dawned on me. Some of them I’ve stolen from friends and mentors. I don’t know why I started writing them down. Maybe just to see what I would write. Making the list made me remember friends and family, highs and lows, and ended up being a better exercise than I intended it to be. So, I thought I would share it. If you have any to add to the list, then please leave them in the comments. I am blessed to have friends on the road with me.
  1. Answering the God questions are the most important pursuits in life.
  2. Faith is not the opposite of doubt, it is the opposite of fear.
  3. My wife is my life partner.
  4. Being a father is the most meaningful work that I will ever do.
  5. You measure love by the degree to which you are willing to be inconvenienced.
  6. Forgiveness helps you more than the person you are forgiving.
  7. Saying “I’m sorry” is the best weapon in any relationship – especially your marriage.
  8. The Bible is an awesome book of books.
  9. Dreams happen in your head, life happens out here with everybody.
  10. If something is worth doing, then it is worth doing right.
  11. Writing equals thinking. Writing well equals clear thinking. It is the hardest work you will do, and the pursuit of writing well is lifelong.
  12. Some things you just have to experience to learn.
  13. God loves more and better than I do.
  14. Marrying well is a blessing that words cannot describe.
  15. My emotions can (and will) betray me.
  16. Being deceived means you don’t realize you are wrong – if you know you are wrong, then that’s just being stupid (or euphemisms like willful or stubborn).
  17. Having only one word for love hurts us English speakers.
  18. If I don’t love myself, then I won’t love anyone else very well. It is “love your neighbor the way you love yourself,” which I now think is a warning and not a command. You will love others the same way you love yourself.
  19. There’s a little arrow on most gas gauges to tell you which side the pump is on.
  20. Most people don’t care what you think, but they sure will watch what you do.
  21. Money is a great tool, but a terrible master.
  22. Financial debt shackles your future to its service.
  23. Make decisions today based on what you want to be true 10, 20 or 40 years from now.
  24. What I do every day is more important than what I do every now and then.
  25. My calendar and my checkbook tell the world what I value.
  26. Verbs transform sentences. Use them. Adverbs definitely clog sentences. Delete them.
  27. There are two products that are for everyone – air and water. One is tasteless, the other one is invisible. Don’t make your products for everyone.
  28. Simple trumps complex.
  29. When everyone is going the same way as you, it might be a sign to turn around.
  30. If three people tell you the same thing, pay attention.
  31. Crawl, walk, then run is the best approach to business partnerships.
  32. Always push back in a negotiation (even if you love the offer), otherwise people feel like they got a bad deal.
  33. If the CEO isn’t preaching the change, then it won’t happen no matter who is telling you it will.
  34. There is more to life than just what we see.
  35. Relationships are all we take out of this life.
  36. Success is taking the next step of obedience.
  37. Your sins will find you out.
  38. When you get caught, confess. Hiding makes me a coward (see #37).
  39. People love stories more than lectures. Learning to tell them well is worth the effort.
  40. Getting outside of yourself is the only way to engage an audience. The fearless inspire.
  41. Never let your career outpace your character.
  42. You are never to old for a significant change in your life.
  43. The older I get, the less I know.

That cleared my head. Ready for the lessons of year 44. Bring it on.

Now What?

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Been thinking about what to write next and have too many ideas, so I’ll just put them all out here, and see if anyone is reading and cares:

1. The Seven Brand Archetypes
2. How Ideas Take Shape
3. Communication Architecture (con’t)
4. The Top 10 Book & Thinkers on Ideas (IMHO)
5. Deconstruction (con’t)
6. The 3 Things Social Media Is
7. The 3 Things Social Media Isn’t
8. How to pick an agency
9. Top 10 on Pitching business
10. Creativity vs. Innovation
11. Experts vs. the Child-like
12. APE = Ask, Play & Engage

Anybody care to read any of these? Give me a top 3.
Or anyone want to talk about any thing else?

I’m all ears.

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What is an hour of your attention worth?

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Lost (TV series)

Image via Wikipedia

Read the very disappointing cover story on my new Fortune magazine that came in the mail today. I’ll post more about it with observations when I have more time. But Jeff Jarvis was interviewed for the story and he had an interesting comment about attention. It got me thinking about all of the media and entertainment products, how much of our attention they consume, and their monetary value.
So, here is a (really) rough calculation of all that I can find easily:
  1. Video Games (take Madden as an example). $60 per unit. I read a stat that for Madden players at 2.5 hours per week = 125 hours per year. Your attention hour value is $0.48 to EA.
  2. DVD’s. $20 per unit. 2 hours per movie. Your attention hour value is $10.
  3. Movies. Average ticket price $7.18 according to MPAA. Average movie 2 hours. Attention hour value $3.59.
  4. TV. Take a dramatic show like Lost. It’s about :45 minutes of content and :15 minutes of ads (give or take). A :30 spot averages $133,774 (per data I dug up). That’s about $4MM for an episode with 11.4MM total viewers. That’s $0.35 per attention hour. We watch 6 or so hours a day for your daily attention netting $2.11 (and that’s really generous).
  5. Books. A new hardback runs $25, and will take you 20 hours to read. That’s $1.25 per attention hour.
  6. Magazines. Take that Fortune magazine I read. The published rate is $124K (I know, I know). 106 pages in the magazine, I’ll be generous and say there was 50 ad pages (I’m not going to count them). That’s $6.2MM on a base of 830K. Say you read it cover to cover in 4 hours. That’s an hour attention value of $1.86.
  7. Newspapers. Ugh. Anyone want to take a stab here? Let’s take the NYT and say it really does have 1.45MM readers. Their total revenue for news is $2.3B for a total of $1,586.20 per reader. Let’s say they spend 10 hours per week and 500 hours per year with content. That’s an hour attention value of $3.17.

So, here it is again, in Hour Attention Value order:

  1. DVD. $10.00
  2. Movies. $3.59
  3. Newspaper. $3.17
  4. Magazines. $1.86
  5. Books. $1.25
  6. Video Games. $0.48
  7. TV. $0.35 (cable fees add another $0.27)

Best I can do with free data, but it starts to get at a new kind of metric. Namely, what is the value of an hour of my time to the various media and entertainment companies that I give my money, and more importantly, my attention to? I give money directly to the entertainment companies (DVD, Movie, Book, Video Games), so this is a cost to me. But the media companies are making this money off of me in exchange for my attention. Yes, I have to pay $50+ a month for cable fees to access the programming, but it’s an attention swap.

What Jarvis pointed out is that all content is a value exchange with our attention. I wanted to begin to dig into this idea and see exactly how much money an hour of my time is worth. Yes, the margins differ and there are economies of scale, but this is a first stab at building a metric that can be consistent across formats for properties that have scale.

Thoughts?

Posted via email from Sean Womack’s Stream

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My Top 5 tools of the trade

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Without a doubt, these are the five items I would not try and run my business without:

  1. uni-ball Gel Impact (not RT) 1.0mm tip pens. I’d by refills by the case load if I could. You can get them at Office Depot, which I love except their rewards program is horrible.
  2. Moo.com cards. I got turned on to these by Seth Godin. I ordered them immediately. You can order 50 cards and have 50 different images on the back. Incredible quality and service. And they are in the US now, so shipping costs less. I took my 50 photos with my next tool:
  3. My iPhone. No, it’s not a very original answer, but I’m rocking an old school, day one iPhone that I stood in line for at my local AT&T store. I still remember the small crowds that would gather in the airport to look at it those first weeks. Favorite apps: WSJ, NYT, Kindle, Logos, TripIt, FlightTracker PRO, New LinkedIn (old was awful), Fandango, Kayak, Banking, ActionMethod, Mint.com, RedLaser (more the idea than the app, it’s not great on a Gen 1 phone), Shazam, Tweetie and WordPress (and Tumblr is a cool interface), and CameraBag (I took all my site photos with it); Some games: Bloom, SlightControl, Fieldrunners, geoDefense and Spider.
  4. My MacBook. The black 13″ one. I love their titanium products, but there’s something about this black that I like better. I live in Google via Firefox (I’ve tried Chrome, but not found enough compatibility with some sites & services yet). I also have it integrated with my next favorite…
  5. Action Method products and digital tools. My new friend Scott Belsky’s (founder of Behance) incredibly crafted products (now available at B&N) and his intuitive project-based to-do methods fits creative types better that the context-based GTD system – especially if you work and your home are the same location.
  6. Okay, so I have to list a few others: Moleskine Journals (I met the US team leader last year, I felt like I was meeting a rock star and learned that I’ve been using the journals since they were first available in the US. When I die, they will be my inheritance to my children), binder clips (near addiction), index cards (5 x 8), my LiveScribe pen (although it doesn’t get that much use), and my Label Maker (thanks David Allen).

Now that I’ve started this, I realize that there are a lot more. I’ll post others like Time Machine and iDisk for back-ups in the cloud, my AT&T U-Verse internet, Google Voice, etc.