This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
- Polonius' advice to his son Laertes in "Hamlet" by William Shakespeare
A personal story of market validation follows.
I have been kicking around the idea of writing a particular book for nearly a year and a half. I returned from a multi-day Grand Canyon backpacking trip over New Years Day 2003 admonishing myself for never cracking open my journal. There really was no time in between the extra night spent sleeping on the boulders on the trail ledge, another spent laughing uncontrollably at Deni's storytelling theatrics. Then there was the evening we tested out the backpacking oven by way of chocalate cakes. Or the solo dawn hike down to the very bottom standing at the edge of the Colorado River. Dark descends early in the box canyons. We often finished hikes in the shadows. I learned to recognize the subtle shape and feel of trampled grass and navigate the thin trail in the evening air. We'd sometimes stop to lay down with our backs pressed against the ground and the stars piercing the black sky enroute.
I was so sure I'd have journaling time for some deep reflection around the question: Ok, I moved to Silicon Valley and...? What should I do now? But it never happened.
What I hadn't expected was the ease that ideas just flooded over me over the next two weeks upon my return. That five-day trip into the belly of the canyon had purged a lot of clutter and chatter. One of ideas that poured forth was a book.
It was only this past spring - after a similarly inspired retreat - that I actually did anything with the post-Canyon scrawlings and jotted notes. I embarked on the book proposal process with a group led by Lisa Alpine.
The marketing section was pretty solid - good enough that everyone else wanted a copy. Unfortunately I couldn't say the same for the rest of the proposal. For a book purportedly about creativity and innovation, the writing was washed out. There was no spark of life to it. I knew it wasn't clicking as I wrote it...
I really got into researching the target market and books in the same genre, although it was hard to pinpoint any book similiar to it...(if there was, I'd be more than happy to not write mine.) I also knew this book would be a stretch for a business book title as it was - but that was the audience I wanted to reach.
During the course of writing a sample query letter (just an exercise for the group) to the Sagalyn Agency, I was jolted. I realize it's not normal to be staring at your laptop in a San Anselmo coffeeshop reading a literary agency's website while tears stream down your face.
In many ways we were drugged when we were young. We were brought up to need people. For what? For acceptance, approval, appreciation, applause... - Awareness, Anthony De Mello
I was writing a business book that fit the business book mold.
I hear through Todd at 800-CEO-READ that Origin of Brands is about evolution and that divergence is the key message. Divergence. Hmmm, not exactly the approval and acceptance that the whole world trains us to seek since we're infants.
In the process of fitting in, I had buried my authentic voice - the voice that resonated with a deeper chord with the readers I wanted - it had long dried up and scattered like a straggly tumbleweed across the salt flats maybe somewhere out near the Utah-Nevada border.
I had studied the market all right. I had studied how to fit into it. Fitting in is not market validation. You need to nestle snugly into the hearts and minds of the customers but not necessarily the existing status quo marketplace.
The Sagalyn Agency (forthcoming books list - wow, it's much longer now) didn't give me permission. But it was a solid reminder. I needed re-minding.
I cried because the Sagalyn Agency's website reminded me...
Daniel Pink
A WHOLE NEW MIND
The Right Brain Revolution
Riverhead
B. Joseph Pine and James Gilmore
Authors of The Experience Economy
AUTHENTICITY
Harvard Business School Press
Robert Wright
Visiting Scholar, University of Pennsylvania
THE EVOLUTION OF GOD
Little, Brown
...of how I'd been absolutely on target I'd been but I'd veered off because it looked like (scary, bold) uncharted territory.
Ultimately, I didn't want to stand out it seems. I wanted to be accepted. I wanted it to be easy for the bookstore clerk to know exactly and neatly where to categorize the book...
I sensed the direction that book should head, but hesitated. That evening, I read the query letter I hastily composed that afternoon sitting in the coffeeshop. It still needed a lot of work. One does recover one's voice instanteously - it needs to be coaxed, welcomed back.
As I read, I sense the glazed over eyes weren't only the result of a long workday. Not even the clever analogies to quantum mechanics could move the group. Only this one paragraph tucked toward the end to serve as a brief bio registered a pulse:
Timing is everything. One minute the CTO at a venture-backed start-up and the next unemployed and divorced, the author started what was intended to be a three-month ‘clarity quest’. Over 24 months later, the extraordinary unstructured sabbatical in the spirit of Henry David Thoreau, Buckminster Fuller and Isaac Newton unintentionally resulted in uncovering practices and steps to consistently tap into a deep reservoir of inspiration.
Exactly what I feared...people really did want to hear more of personal stories and less abstract theory and
intellectualizing. I'd been trying to avoid revealing too much of myself and the why and how the practices and processes evolved.
I sought the group's counsel. After my short tirade, Mark, the retired lawyer co-authoring a true crime novel with a prisoner at San Quentin, interrupted me. "Whoa, back up a minute...did you hear what you said?"
"Uh, what do you mean?"
"'Business books aren't supposed to speak to the person'. That's what you said."
He paused and said: "But this one does."
It's tempting to stay at the superficial level and in the process miss the underlying plea, the deep-seated ache or sense the desire that's been squashed and nearly forgotten - both in yourself and the customer.
If you are doing anything new you won't fit in. You must have the conviction required to create the ground under your own feet rather than seeking to find a ready-made foundation you can hop to. Be careful where you seek permission or validation.
The counsel the world gives you: Just do what everyone else does (i.e. everyone knows all lawyers bill by the hour, right?).
Authentic conversation with the customer digs below the surface and goes further and in directions the rest of your competitors never consider. Authentic observation sees through and beyond the preconceptions and expectations we are afraid to part with.
Véronique Vienne, author of The Art of Doing Nothing relates in a Tom Peters' interview how her editor brought her back to authenticity. At least her editor was in touch with the customer:
And of course, I wrote something very complicated, very obscure, very French. After I sent Annetta [her editor at Clarkson Potter] the first couple of chapters, there was no reaction. I didn't hear from her. Eventually she called me, and she said, "You know, there is not one paragraph, one sentence, one chapter in this book that I can sell. It doesn't work, it completely doesn't work." ...And she said, "It's very simple. I want you to tell me how I can let go. I don't want you to be smarter than the reader, I don't want you to be intelligent, I don't want you to have a chip on your shoulder, I don't want you to be cynical, I don't want you to be particularly funny. I just want you to tell me how I can let go of my grip." ...
And so I have to come to the point, and I have to really work hard, to come to the point of where I let go and I alleviate my anxiety and in the process, the anxiety of the reader.
You don't need to impress anyone or parade your expertise. The important thing is to know when you are in sync with the needs and desires of the people who's hands your product or service will land into. That starts with being in sync with yourself.
Don't worry if the clerk is perplexed whether your book fits in business or self-help or philosophy or...the bestseller section.
Be authentic - to thine own self be true. That requires a great deal of self-awareness - being in sync with yourself. We see people and things not as they are, but as we are.
"When we look at a person, we really don't see that person, we only think we do. What we're seeing is something that we fixed in our mind. We get an impression and we hold on to that impression, and we keep looking at a person through that impression." - Awareness, Anthony De Mello
And I mean self as in you the marketer as well as you the company. To be in tune authentically with the only relationship that counts for "market validation"...
Stay true to yourself and your customer.
Stay tuned in to your audience's dreams, wants and pains and preempt your competition with your own bold, new offerings that improve people's lives. (- Tom Asacker points to an article from the August 2004 issue of Inc. Magazine by Norm Brodsky, via [non]billablehour)
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