“Squeezing your business (or career, or relationship, or lifestyle) into someone else’s plan hurts, and it denies your own self-leadership.” — Tara Gentile, Quiet Power Strategy
There are a lot of plans and products out there that sell you a process or a formula. It seems so sexy, doesn’t it? A prescription-ready answer for building your business, life, or idea?
There’s a reason that the word “how” is one of the top-performing headlines in the copywriting world.
How … to build a business
How … to start your own startup
How … to write headlines that get results.
How … to get clear skin, fast.
How … a certain entrepreneur built their multi-million dollar business from the ground up.
Take a look at what you click on today. How many headlines start with the word “how”?
Why the word “how”? Because we want desperately to have a result that we see others getting. So we want to know how they did it.
Be careful.
You’re charting your own path. You are a unique set of skills, circumstances, relationships, and desires that aren’t the same as someone else’s. Copying someone else’s process or language might sound silly on you.
Knowing how is so tantalizing.
But is it you?
Hey Sarah,
It’s been a while since we last talked. We’d met in WDS 2012. Loooong time. (Belated) congrats on the wedding btw!
Once I got completely disoriented trying to listen to the experts and ended up with something that was completely not me. That’s when I realized that, e.g., because there might be a demand for car mechanics, that doesn’t mean I should become one!
There’s a line between learning from the experience of others vs. getting side-tracked because you’re way too influenced by their stories.
So-great point!
Thanks, Maria! Good to reconnect with you after WDS. :) That event was awesome.
Experts can definitely be disorienting. Love that perspective.
Hi Sarah, Great point and I get what you’re trying to say. I tell the athletes that I coach that a professional triathlete’s training program won’t be THE program for everybody.
But I still fall for all the How articles because I’m trying to learn new things. I guess my hiccup is if we don’t try out what the How to articles suggest, then how do we find our own way of doing things?