A summary of things you should know about Selfish Scared and Stupid according to Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory: Introduction In this episode Kieran Flanagan and Don Gregory take aRead More
The post A Preview of Selfish Scared and Stupid with Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>In this episode Kieran Flanagan and Don Gregory take a deep dive into their book, Selfish Scared and Stupid, where they demystify the behaviors behind the failure and success of business ideas.
In their book, Flanagan and Gregory will help you design your business effectively with strategies to understand why the public fails to engage with your brand and why your product is falling short. The goal of the book is to teach you product survival tactics, how to offer customer strategic reward programs, how to turn fear into action, and how to make products hard to resist.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are struggling to get their product or service engaged with the public and need a proven system to increase their customer reach and sales.
We have been told that it was funny which our intent wasn’t to be necessarily funny but human beings are funny by nature. It’s real and it’s not speaking to ideas but instead its dealing with what is true and real for human beings.
This book is a fairly easy read and written in the order that you would approach an engagement program. It probably works best read in order but I have had people say to me that they dip in and out as well.
We need to design for success rather than just hoping for the best and relying on short term strategies. It’s also about swimming with the current of human nature because if we don’t we get exhausted, we go nowhere and we often give up.
We start the book off explaining why we really need to be thinking selfish, scared and stupid. We make the distinction between acting selfish, scared and stupid which is human beings default position. It is why we survived, thrived and evolved as a species and ended up in this dominant position on the planet and it’s just that they don’t sounds like particularly good things. We tend to deny those things in our decision making but our primitive brains still drive a lot of our decision making. The survival thinking drives the fundamental thinking beneath our decision making.
From there we move on to how to do it. We section the book into think selfish, think scared, think stupid and dive into each of those points. Thinking selfish is fundamentally about coming from a place of what’s in it for them, and we need to move from what’s in it for me to what’s in it for them. So often in business we see that people are so caught up in what’s in it me. This section is about how to understand the extraordinary power of flipping your mindset to how you can filter the world constantly into what’s in it for someone else. And by doing that you can engage your staff with not only your goals but there’s as well.
In think scared the reality is that fear drives us a lot of the time. We look at how to flip that fear that has a stay in inaction to how to create a fear of not taking action. It’s about minimizing the fear of action and maximizing the fear of in action. So what we look to do is how to make change seem less fearful and part of the way we do it is by linking it to the known. Thinking scared isn’t about making people afraid, it’s about understanding how fear drives us and making sure that fear is on the appropriate side of the ledger in terms of stimulating action.
Then we look at thinking stupid and for a lot of people this is the most challenging one. Again it’s not about being stupid, it’s about thinking stupid and what that means is looking for the most easy way to achieve an outcome. It’s about making sure that our tasks are really easy and how to reduce resistance to those tasks. We spend a lot of time on why failure happens and how to make failure difficult. Instead of relying on these ideas, relying on short term strategies, the fundamental idea of the book is how we design for success.
“We are all selfish, scared and stupid.” – Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory
“Make failure difficult.” – Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory
We have a long history in advertising and spent a long part of our lives getting a better understanding of what drives human behavior. Most of our careers have been in entrepreneurial startups and our interests are in what drives human behavior. We have a business called The Impossible Institute which is a research, innovation, and think tank where we look at the gap in what people say they do and what they actually do. In that gap we find interesting stuff about how to motivate, how to get results, and how to help entrepreneurs.
We saw so much inspiration around what was driving human behavior and so much of it was based on ideas. What we wanted to do was step back and take a look at what was really driving human beings and generating results.
Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
Purple Cow by Seth Godin
Buy Selfish Scared and Stupid by Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory on Amazon today
Visit TheImpossibleInstitute.com to learn more about the book
Follow Kieran Flanagan on Twitter and Facebook
Follow Dan Gregory on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Lean Customer Development by Cindy Alvarez | Traction: A Startup Guide To Getting Customers by Justin Mares | Hooked: How To Build Habit Forming Products by Nir Eyal
Relevant advice and tips: 5 Simple Ways Entrepreneurs Can Attract Customers | 5 Reasons Why Your Marketing Sucks
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
The post A Preview of Selfish Scared and Stupid with Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>A summary of things you should know about The Greatness Zone according to Jay Forte: Introduction In this episode Jay Forte takes a deep dive into his book, The GreatnessRead More
The post A Preview of The Greatness Zone with Jay Forte appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>In this episode Jay Forte takes a deep dive into his book, The Greatness Zone where he helps you know what you are good at, what you love and what is going on in your world.
In his book, Forte introduces this life-changing thinking in his compelling and heartwarming story of two kids in college. By following the stories of Mary and Mike, you will get to see the greatness formula in action which will guide you through the process of knowing yourself and finding your best fit in life.
This book is perfect for an entrepreneur who is bored with life, often listens to what others have to say, and does not know how to change things.
An entrepreneur is somebody who is always watching for opportunities. I realized that the shift in the economy created a serendipitous moment for someone to guide other people in learning how to discover your core abilities and then connect them to the world. In The Greatness Zone we created it in story form so that not only would you learn how to do it but you’d see somebody in the book do it.
My recommendation is to start at the beginning and read through to the end.
The most significant concept is in order to succeed in today’s world the biggest thing we can do is learn to see things differently. And the way to see things differently is to realize that you have a unique advantage point. The moment you start to give it language about what it is and how you see things then you enter into a world that opens up to a huge amount of opportunity because you rule things in instead of rule them out. The clarity about you creates the ability for you to make great choices, to show up very confident and then to live courageously in the way you build ideas.
The story starts between two kids who meet in college who are in a freshman philosophy course. One kid has it totally together because her parents have given her the five rules for a really great life which turns in to the backbone of the book. She then explains this concept in a Venn diagram to a kid who sits next to her who has no idea why he is in college or what it is that he is supposed to study. These 5 rules show up on a Venn diagram that shows you that in order to know yourself you should know your abilities, your passions and your values. Mary has learned these rules because her family was determined that for them to be successful they should be totally present to who they are in their world. If you could know them and know their world they could always be able to connect the two and find a way to fit.
Mary introduces to Mike to the way that her parents showed her to figure out what she’s good at, what she loves and how to look at the world in a very different way. The idea is that if you know you and the world you will always be aware and capable of looking through the world for the things connect best to your unique vantage point.
As Mary shows Mike how to do it, Mike starts to do it himself. So as the reader sees Mike do it, the reader then starts to do it. You start to realize the things you are good at and what you’re passionate about and the things that matter to you. As you see that the real you develops and from that place you start to see and respect the fact that your view of the world is different than others.
Know yourself, find your fit and transform the world.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 04:36
“To stand out you must be exceptional and not at everything because no one is exceptional at everything but everyone is exceptional at some things so identify those things.” – Jay Forte
“Most people play small because they don’t know they have the capacity to play great. What they miss is the self-awareness to know what their particular greatness is.” – Jay Forte
I am a certified life and workplace CEO coach, an author and a speaker. Prior to that I was a CPA and CFO for years and then realized that most of my career I was in the wrong place. I’m a big idea person that just needed an environment to keep inventing. Now I work around the workplace and around helping people discover what the big ideas in life are for them.
The Greatness Zone happened as a direct effect of the first book that I had written called Fire up your employees and smoke your competition. It came out of my time as an education director just at the time the economy was shifting out of an industrial agent to an intellectual age. It came out as a process book to say regardless of your age you should know what you are good at, what you love and what is going on in your world. So that you can know you, know your world and put the two together.
Purple Cow by Seth Godin
Buy The Greatness Zone by Jay Forte on Amazon today
Visit TheGreatnessZone.com to learn more about the book
Visit FireUpYourEmployees.com to learn more about Jay’s program
Follow Jay Forte on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Powerhouse by Mike Clayton
The Happiness of Pursuit by Chris Guillebeau
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck
Relevant advice and tips:
10 Bad Habits That Successful People Avoid
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
The post A Preview of The Greatness Zone with Jay Forte appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>