October 6th, 2008
I want to tell you what’s been going on for me with the Post-It note hack, because I believe the results I’ve experienced from these very simple steps we’ve taken illustrate a critical fundamental principle of personal marketing:
YOUR AD MUST ILLUSTRATE THE RESULT THAT YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE!! It cannot be about you WANTING it; it must be about you HAVING it. (As a corollary, it’s also very good if it makes you feel something.)
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June 6th, 2008
I watched lot of softball this week on the NCAA Women’s College World Series. It turns out that Katie Burkhart, the pitcher of the winning Arizona Sun Devils - is a very successful personal marketing practitioner. According to the announcers, she’s spent a lot of time working on her mental game in the past year, and one of the tactics she now uses is to write messages to herself on the back of her glove, to remind her of thoughts that help her focus out on the pitching mound during the game. How cool is that?
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November 1st, 2007
A few days ago I climbed Angels Landing in Zion National Park. This 1500 foot climb is billed as one of the most challenging and spectacular hikes in the world, and it did not disappoint. The view from the top is amazing. It was a wonderful, difficult, exhilarating, challenging, sometimes scary, beautiful day; one of the high points of the road trip. Definitely the current ad on my cell phone was a factor in convincing me to try it.
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October 10th, 2007
My early ads in the RV ad campaign were mostly just pictures that I downloaded from manufacturer’s websites. They worked well to keep the idea in my consciousness, and prompted me to take many actions that I’m sure I would not have otherwise. However, as the campaign went on I discovered a few other techniques that were so effective they produced huge shifts in my mental journey from impossible to inevitable.
Three of the four methods below use a variant on visualizing your desired future reality with you (or your home) already in it. I’ve written about that pretty extensively in the Put yourself in the picture series. Basically you use technology like your digital camera and/or Photoshop to help you make a picture of that future.
The fourth method uses large high-resolution color images that change very frequently. Think TV. Although this method was not at all technically sophisticated, I was surprised by how much it engaged my attention and emotions.
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October 4th, 2007
I just met a HUGE goal, largely due to a relentless advertising campaign I’ve been waging on myself for the last couple of years. Two years ago purchasing a motorhome seemed impossible. By last month it felt inevitable. Today I have a new RV sitting in my driveway. I’m completely convinced advertising is what made the difference.
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September 25th, 2007
Normally we buy souvenirs after we do something we’ve been dreaming about: t-shirts, mugs, postcards, whatever. TBYB suggests front-loading your souvenir shopping instead. That is, buy the t-shirt first to jump-start the process.
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August 26th, 2007
In the blizzard of sensory input I encountered while driving through the neighborhood yesterday morning why did this particular sign catch my attention? There was nothing particularly attention-grabbing about it, other than being relevant to one of my goals.
I submit it’s exactly that relevance, reinforced by my collage and slideshow ads, that made the sign stand out. I think we notice opportunities that are related to whatever has been introduced to our attention as significant. By running ads about improving the soil in my back yard I had put my brain on notice that this is an important project, and when I saw the sign I recognized its message as a potential match between that intention and opportunity.
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July 27th, 2007
One of the most successful ad campaigns I ever ran was designed to get myself to ride my bike to work. Instead of basing it on standard motivators for exercising like health and fitness, I observed how commercial advertising works hard to associate positive feelings with a product and modeled my campaign after that.
I order to add an emotional dimension I thought about WHY I wanted to ride to work. Of course, the usual reasons about exercise and health applied, but they had not been enough to get me to do it so far. Instead, I reached back to the memory of the time when I was riding my bike all the time, and tried to identify the things about it that were pleasurable.
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June 25th, 2007
A few months ago I met a woman named Fran at a party. When the inevitable “What do you do?’s” were exchanged, her answer boiled down to: “I’m looking for a job and worrying about it.” I told Fran about personal advertising, and suggested that the primary thing I it could do to help her was move her from a place where she primarily identified as someone who was unsuccessfully looking for work to thinking of herself as someone who has a job. We designed an ad campaign for Fran that yielded several requests from high-level executives at the organization she wanted to work for, asking her to help with projects requiring advanced skills and a lot of responsibility.
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June 10th, 2007
Soon after I started making ads that put myself in the picture I discovered what the challenge was going to be: who would hold the camera and take the picture? About the time I was getting really frustrated, Cool Tools came to the rescue with a review of the Joby Gorillapod tripod. I love my Gorilla tripod. It’s light, portable, inexpensive, and functions exactly like the all the glowing reviews say it does. The Gorillapod has freed me up to take timed photos of myself - both alone and with friends - just about anywhere I want to. It’s a great tool!
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January 12th, 2007
Last week I wrote about making a virtual model of improvements I want to make to my front yard, and about how spending time “there” has helped me experience a future in which those changes have already happened. I also saved a picture of the model as my computer’s desktop background, and since then I have seen that picture many times each day.
A few days later I had an experience that demonstrates my unconscious mind is already busy transforming my exterior reality to resemble that model…I find these results to be exciting because they demonstrate to me that my behavior seems to be influenced by my ad campaigns, even when I am not consciously aware of it.
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November 30th, 2006
It turned out that for Jenny, the most important part of the whole scenario was taking the pictures. She wanted to take them with a very particular high-end camera, and did not have the money to buy it. The more we talked about it, it sounded like buying that camera felt like the obstacle between where she is now and where she’d like to be.
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November 16th, 2006
It seems that people choose to remind themselves of connections to others and fun times they have had in the past. And of course there is nothing wrong with that. But let me propose a slight tweak: in addition to reminding yourself of fun times from the past, what would happen if you showed yourself a picture of something fun you’d like to do in the future?
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November 14th, 2006
Over the course of the last 6 months I have deployed about two dozen ad campaigns, ranging from reminding myself about things I want, to behavior changes, to really large long-term goals. Nine of them have definitely worked. A few were duds and others are still in process, but there have been some really impressive successes. Let me give you an example of a success.
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