Just.

The Real Steve Jobs: “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”

Steve Jobs’ landmark speech to a graduating class at Stanford in 2005 is something to go back and watch when I’m in need of inspiration.

Here’s what I take away from his speech…

Tell Emotional Stories

When you’re discussing your brand, your product, service, the thing you do-do, maybe just a story to your friends about conquering a section of the Appalachian Trail, make it emotional. Tap into the natural passion and emotion that comes from something you love–or is close to your heart–or caused you fear. If you find it hard to do this then you need to look short and hard at whether you believe in this thing. If you do it will be easy, if you don’t get out, move on, don’t force it. Find something you can tear your heart out for.

When You Love What You’re Doing Hardships Are Significantly Less Painful

Staying up all night to nail that inspired design? Haven’t eaten in 14 hours because you can’t tear yourself away from this awesome thing you’re so excited about finishing and sharing with the world/clients/friends/customers? It should feel like this. This is the secret that productive and successful people know, if it’s painful and feels like work, keep looking, it’s not your calling.

Typography Was One of Steve Job’s Original Intellectual and Artistic Inspirations

I giggled to myself when I saw this part of the talk again. We’re always talking about how good design is “good business”, it’s almost a cliche now to even say that. I’m guilty of throwing it into a presentation or proposal or two–But this is what defined the Mac’s inception. I love it. Jobs confidently describes the first Mac mission being to make the first computer with beautiful typography. All without the self loathing snarkiness of a seasoned designer who always knew this was huge.

You Can’t Connect the Dots Forwards Only Backwards

You must believe that the dots will connect down the road when you follow your heart. This is about intentionally directed naivete. This is about the secret to controlled coincidences, to riding a wave of connected successes. The business world frowns on idealism. You can’t optimize your life and professional process to the point where it’s perfect. Chaos is required for discovery. This is the tragedy of many growing organizations, they lose their idealism as their size (supposedly) demands structure and all is lost as they optimize free and tangential (read different) thinking out of the process. Hence the explosion of fantastically talented small agencies willing to take risks and are winning at it. God speed.

Don’t Love Objects or Things, Love the Process

There’s a lyric by Deep Purple in their song “Knocking at Your Door”, a high school favorite of mine, it goes:

“It’s not the kill, it’s the thrill of the chase…”

While I admit this song is about the reckless pursuit of the fiery carnal kind, it really sums it up. Love what you’re doing when you’re doing it, if you think the pain you’re experiencing now is a means to an end it will never end and this will haunt you, like a man on a treadmill snacking on cookies–because there is no end. You’re there right now. John Kabbat Zinn talks about this in his wonderful book “Wherever You Go, There You Are”. Focus on the “how” as much as the “what”. It’s important they both excite you.

Keep Looking, Don’t Settle Until You Find It

This is the easiest advice to hear and the hardest to follow. We as human beings are genius at our ability to rationalize ourselves out of any situation. We naturally want to tell ourselves our decisions and thinking is correct, so we do everything in our power to make it seem like we’re OK even when deep down inside we know something’s missing. Don’t settle, you’re too good.

Live Your Life Like Every Day is Your Last

This is advice I’ve heard before but love to ignore. When young the end is so far away. Have children and suddenly you’re thinking about this, but then we may dismiss it again. If today was going to be your last day, what would you do? Are you putting off something? I think about this now every night I put my daughter to sleep.

Don’t Be Trapped by Other People’s Dogma

You’re smart, your friends are smart. That doesn’t mean they’re right about you and the decisions you’re making or need to make. If it feels right to you, go for it. Why? Because the ideas that other people are telling you won’t succeed, are too weird, too difficult, too expensive, will freak out your investors, your boss, your lover–will likely be the ones that win. Zag, your ideas are the expressions of your original thinking and individuality. If you dumb down your ideas your dumbing yourself down, and for what? So that you can get some kind of pier consensus? We all know consensus thinking is generic. So don’t be generic, be different and don’t stress, in the end people want to be around the people daring and fearless enough to be themselves. If your friends and coworkers don’t support your crazy ideas because they don’t understand your thinking then hell yes, you’re probably onto something great. By the time they do get it, you’ll be succeeding at it while they realize they need to catch up.

Follow Your Heart And Intuition, Everything Else is Secondary

Your brain is very much like a computer. Your processor–your conscious mind, your hard drive–your subconscious mind. Your conscious mind often makes the decisions you should be letting your subconscious mind make. The giant relational database that is your subconscious mind will come to genius conclusions your conscious mind will fear, because the conscious mind is worried about the now, the how, the why, all the details that get in your way of just doing it. Listen to the fear, that which you fear is often the thing that you need to address most.

I’ll leave you with this quote from the end of the speech…

“Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there”.

This really struck a chord with me. Life is just a project timeline. You start and you finish. What’s the most important things to get done during this project? Start putting the things that are important to your brand, project, business, family on that timeline and you’ll start to see what’s important. Do those things and only those things.

Thanks Steve, glad to hear you’re going to be with us for a while longer.

Rough Outline For A Brand Discovery Discussion

I often send myself some notes through email to my phone to prepare for a first discussion with a client or potential client, and I thought I’d share this list I just sent myself today for a meeting. These are intended to give me a sense of both what makes any brand tick but also to what degree my client understands their own brand.

Please feel free to steal these and use for your own discussions. These are conversation starters so rephrase and reword these to fit your own discussion style.

Who are you? (Personality)
What do you do? (Cocktail conversation quicky)
What’s your vision? (define “wild” success)
What’s your mission? (how dare you getting to “wild success”)
What wave are you surfing? (social context?)
Who shares your brandscape? (competitive audit)
What makes you the “only”? (Positioning strategy?)
What should you subtract/Add? (Curate, curate)
Who loves you? (Tribe?)
Who’s your enemy? (Who is it fun to rally against?)
What do your customers call you? (In their words not yours)
How do you explain yourself? (What’s your value without “marketing speak” and acronyms)
How do you spread the word? (marketing strategy/execution?)
How do people engage with you? (integrated platform?)
What do/should they experience? (How do you want them to feel?)
How do you earn loyalty? (Building your tribe how?)
How do you extend success? (Where are you moving/how changing?)
How do you protect yourself? (Hoew do you defend your position? Innovate how?)

* Some of the wording here comes from Marty Neumeier’s outstanding books “Zag” and “The Brand Gap”. Get them read them.

Liftoff

I’ve been wanting to start this blog for a while. Part of this is because I’ve for a while now felt the need to get under the hood of WordPress to be able to understand it in a way that allows me to credibly discuss it as a tool for my clients. It’s hard to encourage a behavior I myself haven’t adopted.

More importantly though, because I now feel that after 15 years in the design and branding business I have some stories to tell and some knowledge to share that I think others can benefit from, or perhaps start conversations that let me see my experiences through others eyes and other’s perspectives.

I’ve also found, as I began writing notes to myself in my notebook a few years ago, that by working things out in written language, it does something to the topic in my mind that allows a sense of personal discovery that merely thinking about things doesn’t allow, at least for me. This makes the blog a great discovery tool for me, and in the process will allow me to see myself more clearly, and gaining clear authentic insight is at the core of what I hope to do for clients in my professional engagements, so who better to experiment on than myself?

It took me a while to narrow the focus of the conversation I’d like to have here, as I realized after sharing some initial posts with friends and professional peers that the best thing I can do is share a piece of me in my writing, and do my best to give a sense of what inspires me as well as some professional lessons I’ve learned over time, as well as sharing discoveries as I move through projects on an ongoing basis.

The name “Just” comes from where I’ve landed in my understanding of the work I want to. The work that makes me feel fulfilled, intellectually, artistically, and socially, is the work that gets to the deeper truths, the authentic and honest inner core of what makes a business or person for that matter totally unique and wildy special. This is what good branding and design do.

The way I see it, good branding will help identify this uniqueness on a strategic level, and good design will then help express that. And most importantly, great brand strategy is for naught without great design, and visa-versa. Great strategy matched with poor design is the equivalent of a great recipe that wasn’t cooked right. And great design without good strategy is like a cake that looks beautiful, but tastes awful. So here I’m going to try and serve up some insight into how I think the world of branding and design are working together to reveal these special inner truths and make the world a more honest enjoyable place for businesses and individuals to profit from sharing their expertise and helpful products and services.

In addition I’m going to focus on some of the people and work out there that inspires me, and hopefully you’ll find their pursuits equally moving. I’m also going to do my best to follow my own rules for discussion, which is to stay away from over-insular marketing speak and acronyms. Anyone should be able to benefit from these discussions, and I’ve always felt that by trying too hard to make what we say sound overly intellectual or industry specific we often lose focus on what we’re saying and spend more time on how we’re saying it.

This is a symptom of a problem in the marketing, advertising, branding and design space. We often lose touch with the what and everything becomes the how, and Just was created to get beyond that. I hope you benefit from and enjoy what’s published here.