Sally Hogshead (yes, that’s her real name) is a marketer.
She has some great content. She’s mostly known for her book Fascinate. I’d strongly recommend you read if you haven’t already. She also has a personalty test that shows where you’re most fascinating.
I’ve done that one too. Check it out. https://www.howtofascinate.com It’s not free but totally worth it.
I’m not trying to push her work, and I definitely don’t have a “deal” to talk about her products. But I wanted to share one of my favorite quotes by her.
She said, “To become more fascinating, you don’t have to change who you are. You have to become more of who you are.”
It’s natural for us to want to look at our competitors and care about what the market is doing. But sometimes we have to ignore them and focus on being more of ourselves.
In some ways you need to be what Ben Settle calls being “anti-professional”.
“There are people who are professional, there are people who are unprofessional, and then there are people like me who don’t fit either label who I call anti-professionals.
It’s a term I first wrote about several years ago, and it describes a certain kind of businessman who’s like an old-school cowboy on his horse going it alone, living by his own code of honor, and following his own rules.”
You need to look at industry norms and do the opposite of what doesn’t make sense for you.
For me? I don’t see me ever doing super-hyped up or high pressure sales and marketing again.
It’s broken.
It doesn’t work for me.
It’s not who I am. It never was.
It felt about as natural as typing a text on my cell phone with my nose.
I learned ‘that style’ of marketing when I started but then I had to un-learn it. And the more things I find that are broken in marketing the more I find myself being anti-professional.
Seth Godin did a great speech called This is Broken. It’s an older speech but you can find it easily online. Seth gives real life examples of things that are broken that people are too lazy to fix.
They keep doing the same old shiz nit maintaining the status quo.
But that’s not you and it ain’t me either.
When Stan Lee died Seth Rogen tweeted, “Thank you Stan Lee for making people who feel different realize they are special.”
We are special! Take pride in being different.
And the more of the anti-professional you become, you’ll stand out, and more people will follow you.
Wanna keep learning how to stand out? https://www.adamstreet.net/
Adam