Here are two interesting reads from this week:

Could we BE more obsessed with sarcasm? at RELEVANT Magazine. I’m as frugal with sarcasm in my life as Subway is with mayo on their sandwiches, so this post got me thinking.

How Warby Parker’s co-founders disrupted the eyewear industry and remained friends at Fast Company. My favorite part of the article: “It didn’t make sense to us that a pair of eyeglasses should cost as much or more as an iPhone.”

And in case you missed it, or in case you’re hungry to read my stuff all over again, we had two posts up this week:

What I learned the hard way before Jim Collins taught me

If you want things to be dramatically different

What’s three x four? 

If you want your revenue next year to be twice what it is today, you need to put the right pieces in place today.

If you want to be out of debt in a year, you need to spend your money differently today.

If you want to have a baby…you get the idea.

Plant the seed today. Get the fruit later.

What’s one thing you’d like to be different a year from now?

Several nights later, when I could move my legs again, I did the same thing. I ran until my body said, “No more!” and waited a few days until I could try again.

I repeated this cycle for a few weeks without ever seeing any improvement in my endurance.

Later I learned that there are better ways to get started jogging, and tried one of those successfully.

The new way I learned was to go slow and do reasonable amounts on a regular schedule.

What I learned from that first ugly attempt at becoming a runner was that intense bursts of desire, focus and energy had no power compared to consistently applied effort.

This idea was broadcast back to me in a big way in October at Catalyst as Jim Collins shared some of the ideas in his book Great by Choice: Uncertainly, Chaos and Luck – Why Some Thrive Despite Them All.

In his talk Collins shared the idea of the 20 Mile March. Click that link to get the idea fleshed out. It’s FASCINATING. But if you’re content with the grossly oversimplified version it’s this:

• Companies that win know how much effort they need to put in each day
• They put in that effort
• They stop
• They get up the next day and do it again
• Over and over and over again

That’s one of the dimensions of great companies – they do this consistently.

And that’s how you get great at other stuff.

You get up and walk around the neighborhood for 30 minutes. Every day.

You read the Bible for 10 minutes. Every day.

You call 10 clients before noon. Every day.

You pick a different friend to call, text or email. Every day.

Not in a legalistic, trudging, “Ughhh, I gotta do this again?” kinda way. But just knowing that consistent effort applied over time is likely to have more benefit than spurts here and there.

So what about you? Do you already have a 20 Mile March? Is there something you want to make your 20 Mile March?

If you fired up your computer last week, only to face crushing disappointment when you visited on Friday, here’s what was up: I didn’t get a post up last Friday because Mary Craig and I were rocketing down the highway on our whirlwind trip to Knoxville, Nashville and back to Knoxville for seals on our adoption dossier.

Without further jibber-jabber, here’s some good stuff I read this week:

5 Early Birds Share Everyday Productivity Strategies at Fast Company. I think it’s obnoxious when I read about people who get up and do an hour of yoga, read half the Bible, write three blog posts, cook omelettes for their kids and take a new company public before 6:30 a.m. But I’m also a morning person, so I get it. This one’s for you, morning people.

3 Types of Goals You Need to Murder Today by Jon Acuff. These are great insights and right on time as we let our last remaining New Year’s Resolutions slip out of our hands.

Note to Men: It’s About Being Intentional by Rhett Smith. The key to being seen as a man by other people? Live on purpose. Live by design.

And in case you missed it, or you’re dying to get an extra helping, we had two posts up here this week:

The simplest formula for building a successful business

Three questions to ask when you’re facing a challenge

What’s on the agenda for the weekend?

I wanted the writers of the show to make everyone get along and for everything to go their way. I thought it would be more fun and more funny that way.

Of course, that’s not the case. Conflict – even among friends – is what keeps a TV show moving. Conflict is the thing that will keep you in a novel for 500 pages. Struggle is what will bind you to a movie for two hours.

Conflict is a part of life. Difficulty, hardship, challenge – it’s just part of the deal. And as much as we might try to avoid it in ourselves, it’s part of what keeps our own personal stories moving forward.

But just because difficulty is a part of life doesn’t mean it’s any easier to deal with while we’re walking through it. Tough times are…tough.

We talked about tough times in our small group recently. In his resource Everything is Possible with God, Rick Warren talks about difficult circumstances. Here are three questions to ask if you’re facing a challenge:

1) Do I need my circumstances to change?

Is there something about the situation outside of me that needs to change in order for things to get better? What is it? How does it get changed?

2) Do I need to change?

Would this situation be resolved if I were to adapt my behavior or attitude? In what specific way do I need to adapt?

3) Do I just need to give it time / get some perspective?

Is this a temporary trial that will pass with time? Is there a way I can step out of this situation and see it from a different view to check if my heart and mind are in the right place?

Conflict and challenges are part of life. They’re part of what keep moving the plot lines of our life forward. But that doesn’t mean it’s any fun when you’re living through it.

Next time you find yourself facing a challenge, I hope you find these questions helpful.

Do you like it when TV characters fight?

I read case studies, did group work and wrote a bunch of papers. I read about a lot of companies, strategies and management styles.

It was a good experience. I’m glad I did it.

But in August 2011, I got another MBA in 11 seconds.

I was listening to Len Schlesinger, president of Babson College, give a talk at the Global Leadership Summit. He started his talk with the simplest formula I’ve ever heard for building a successful business:

1. Find out who your customers are
2. Find out what your customers want
3. Give it to them

It’s so simple. So easy to remember.

You can generate two dozen questions about any new idea you might have or any enterprise you’re currently running using those three points as your guide.

What’s one practical way you would find out what your customers want?

In those five years, here are the stages of acceptance / awareness that blogging has had in culture:

• What’s a blog?
• So it’s a website and you write it?
• Blogs are sooo over.

At the same time blogging was really gaining traction a few years ago, Facebook and Twitter were growing explosively, so those two platforms may have killed some of the momentum.

All that said, I’m still passionate about blogging. It’s an amazing way to share ideas and connect with other people.

And I’m passionate about non-bloggers getting started blogging. If you don’t already have a blog of your own, here are three reasons why I think you should have a blog:

1. Blogging is fun.

When you have your own blog, you’re in charge 100%. You’re your own publisher. You pick what gets posted. There’s excitement that comes when you press the “Publish” button and it’s fun to see how many visits your blog gets. And when a total stranger makes a nice comment or shares one of your posts, I guarantee you’ll be hooked. This stuff is fun.

2. Blogging helps you establish your personal brand.

Your blog can be a reflection of who you are and what it’s like to know you. It can show off your personality and the way you think. And you can do that by design or you can just let it flow through the things you post.

For more ideas on how blogging can help you establish your personal brand, check out these posts:

Why You Must Have a Blog to Increase Your Online Personal Brand

Launching a New Year With a Great Personal Brand

3. Blogging helps you organize and clarify your thoughts.

It doesn’t matter what your day looks like – whether you’re a nurse practitioner or a toll booth attendant – you take in a lot of information every day. And if you’re like me, sometimes my head feels a little messy after a while. Sitting down at a computer to put thoughts into a blog post brings order to the mess.

Blogging is fun, helps other people know who you are, and will help you organize your thoughts. I can’t recommend it enough.

If you could start a new blog today, what would your first post be about?

Think for a minute about how many brands or companies you interact with before you ever get to your office in the morning.

I interact with a host of coffee-related companies, then a handful of soap, shave and shampoo-related companies. I interact with the cable company, Twitter, WordPress and the Today Show. I interact with my kids’ school. I interact with the dry cleaner. I interact with the gas station. And every now and then if I think I need a treat I interact with Dunkin Donuts or Chick-fil-a.

That’s all before 8:15 a.m.

We interact with tons of brands. Tons of companies. Every day.

And while most of those interactions are unremarkable, the broader relationships can be transformed by knowing what customers want. It’s when we know what customers want and when we deliver it well that we make a real impact in a customer’s life.

What do customers want right now? Five things:

1) Customers want connection.

Feeling unconnected is difficult. People want to be connected to you. Tell them how they can contact you. Tell them when they can contact you. In some cases, people want to be connected with other customers of yours. Help them make those links. Initiate connection by calling, emailing, sending a newsletter, texting or DM’ing. Just don’t spam. People want to feel personally connected to a place they send their money.

2) Customers want information.

If feeling unconnected is difficult, feeling ignorant is worse. Who likes being out of the loop? Who likes having a product they don’t know how to use? Who wants to pull into the drive-through at the bank and find that the name has changed? Who likes having the channel lineup change but no guide to go with it? Feed your customers information, maybe more than they want. They don’t want to feel ignorant.

3) Customers want value.

A friend bought a $700 computer for $500 at Sam’s Club the other day. He was attracted to the price, but was he shopping for a $500 computer and the stuff that comes loaded on a $500 computer? No. He was shopping for a $700 computer and the chips and processors and the 1.21 jigowatts that come loaded on it, but got a great price by paying $500.

People will beat you up over price. They’ll burn $50 in gas driving around town to save $2 on AA batteries. But what they want is value. They want to know that what they have is worth something. They want to know that what they have is worth what they paid for it or more than what they paid for it. That’s value.

Always show customers that what they’re getting is worth what they’re paying for it, or maybe even more.

4) Customers want purpose.

You can read a lot into who your customers think they are or who they want to be from the purchases they make. Our spending is often a few steps ahead of us in terms of who we’re becoming.

If your paper goods shop starts selling more calendars and organizers, you can bet some folks are resolved to become more organized and focused. If you sell juicers and vitamins, your customers have made some choices about what they’re putting in their bodies.

But here’s the thing: customers don’t always have purpose. Sometimes they’re waiting for someone else to give it to them.

Tell them they can run a half marathon. Tell them they can write a book. Tell them they can research and build a family tree that goes back nine generations. Tell them they can change a broken system.

And then watch the money flow.

Not to get in their pocket, but because connecting people with purpose is one of the most powerful things anyone can do.

5) Customers want a path.

You want 100% of your customer’s wallet.

Your customer may or may not be willing to do that, but they’re probably not willing to do it all at once.

Show your customers the path. Show your customers what it’s going to be like to take the next couple of steps with you.

We can make a difference in the lives of our customers when we give them connection, information, value, purpose and a path.

Think about some of the brands you use. What do you want more of from them?

The boy has a basketball game this morning. Early in the season, we struggled to get him engaged in the game. He’s so used to playing nicely with his sisters, asking for things, sharing, etc. that the idea of trying to snatch a ball from someone was a little new. Then he got the ball snatched from him a few times. Last week, less than a minute into the game, he got called for a foul because he was playing aggressive defense, reaching in an trying to slap the ball out of another boy’s hand. That’s development.

We’ve been watching Downton Abbey. It’s a great show. I like it enough that I’m looking at having an elaborate bell system installed in our house. The only trouble is that, out of the entire first season and a few episodes of the second season, I’ve only seen about 45 minutes. The theme song is like Ambien to me, folks. I hear the music and I’m gone.

Speaking of TV, you know what we got back into this week? Some good ol’ fashioned CSI.  After watching a few seasons of Dexter it was refreshing to watch something that had a nice twisty story but that didn’t leave you with that “This kinda freaks me out about humanity” feeling.

We took the baby (she’s two – why do I call her “the baby?”) to get a passport this week. We’re not going anywhere abroad, but if we ever want to go somewhere and have her with us, the kid needs a passport. Passport people are very serious. You know who’s not very serious? A two year old. Fortunately, what could have been very stuffy, bureaucratic and time-consuming ended up being very painless, thanks in large part to the nice passport man at the post office. I like to think the baby won him over with her charms.

That’s got to be it for today. I’ve got to go meet some friends and work on a thing we’re doing for some high school kids this summer. I hope you’ve had a good week.

What’s one thing you’ve got going on this weekend?

Can introverts succeed in business? by Laura Vanderkam on the CNN Money blog caught my eye. I think I just wanted to see if I’m wasting my time trying to make it in the business world or if – as an introvert – the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against me.

Have you ever played “Phone Stack?” by Eric Dye at ChurchCrunch. Ever been with someone who answers texts and takes calls while you’re eating lunch? What did you do? Grab your phone and kill time? Stare straight at their eyeballs? Ever been the person texting and taking calls? This is the answer.

“They” do not decide your success by Greg Darley. This post from Greg and an email from a helpful friend this week reminded me of this: comparison is a trap. Play your game, play it as well as you can, and strive to grow.

And in case you missed it (gasp – how could you?!?) we had two posts up here this week:

Three reasons your customers are leaving you (and how to get them to stay)

Three reasons to find a mentor now

What has been the best part of your week?