I’ve reached an age where the reflection starts on how I got to be the way I am; what early experiences led to certain personality traits and so on.  And I think it’s the same with my approach to business.

Unfortunately.

See, the longer you have a job, I think, the harder it is to let go of that mindset.  There are tons of great educational opportunities when you’re employed, to say nothing of the networking, but through it all you’re likely to be immersed in five figure thinking.

Or six figure thinking, if that’s where you’re at, but I went with five because most people start out in that bracket, and I’m a sucker for alliteration.

Five figure thinking isn’t going to get you to six, seven, or eight figures.  I’ve had coaches who’ve suggested it takes a different attitude and plan for each of those stages, and I believe it.

Five figure thinking is being given tasks to do instead of choosing tasks to stop doing.

Five figure thinking is measuring your contribution in a day by how many hours of sheer effort you personally put in.

Five figure thinking involves small, safe numbers.

The trouble with five figure thinking is that it’s paired with, and masked by, seven figure dreams.  But dreams without an execution path are just that, and you can keep them, nice and safe, for decades without any real progress.

So how to get out?  How does one graduate, as it were?  I’m looking at coaching and training from people a figure or two ahead of me, combined with studying others through articles and biographies.  The catch to all those is that there’s always an agenda, and it can be hard to get the right answer that isn’t self-serving, however well-intentioned it might be.

Or maybe that’s just five figure skepticism.  We’ll see.

Photo by Michael Arnold

To the future class of 2015, Russian courts have always had juries.

I learned this, plus 74 other factoids, from the 2015 mindset list, an annual report from Beloit College that aims to prepare professors for the incoming cohort by reminding them of how the freshmen class sees the world.  Some of it’s political, like the above, some of it’s technological (“Amazon has never been just a river in South America,”) and some of it’s pop culture-based (“Frasier, Sam, Woody and Rebecca have never Cheerfully frequented a bar in Boston during primetime.”) And to a marketer who does coywriting (also known as a communicator,) it’s pure gold.

One of the more common copywriting exercises out there is to develop one or more avatars that represent the ideal reader of your work. You give them names, jobs, backgrounds, aspirations, and, yes, ages.  The mindset list is a huge asset, or at least it will be to me, especially as it grows over time – the website has it going back to the class of 2002, or roughly how a 31 year old sees the world, but there’s also a book that promises coverage of every generation since 1880. I don’t know if the book gives lists for each age, but if it does, that’s got to be one of the best desk references ever.

What I like best about the list is how each mindset is represented as actual fact. Sure, if you look things up or stop to think about them, facts become opinions, and wrongly held ones at that, but our subconsciousnesses work on our core beliefs, and while I’ve never thought of it that way, there are lots of things we take for granted that are actually core reflections of who we are (I still have to stop myself from checking the time before making a long distance phone call to see if it’s after 6, or better still, after 11 for the big discount, for example.)

So I’ve got a great copywriting tool for framing messages to specific groups, and that’s super cool, but now I’m wondering – are my core assumptions faulty enough to need changing, or is it more useful to keep them?

The Lettera 32 would be an awesome netbook if you could type silently

Lots of saved browser tabs accumulating (and some old mental bookmarks as well) surrounding Cormac McCarthy, who apparently wrote the book No Country for Old Men and The Road, both of which were movies as of late, though he’s been published since 1965, so it seems shallow to just highlight the stuff he’s written in the past 10 years.  I mean, they guy’s typewriter sold for a quarter million, and it helped build way more than two books.

But hey, it’s not like I’ve read anything by him.  I just accumulate the links and tabs and bookmarks until they spill over.

So.

Item the first, which is the most recent, is from this week by Hugh MacLeod, in which he retells the story of a young aspiring writer asking McCarthy for advice on starting writing.  The response was “Don’t do it unless you have to.”

That reminded me of a post from way way back on MemeMachineGo, which retold comics writer Alan Moore’s (Watchmen, V For Vendetta, lots of other good stuff) 5 tips for would-be comics writers.  The first, almost not surprisingly “don’t,” with tips 2 and 3 mirroring tip 1 in Fight Club style, but the one that always stuck in my head was item 5, paraphrased thusly: “if you’re going to be any good, you have to commit yourself to it like an ancient Greek or Egyptian commits himself to a god.”

That always stuck with me, but before we drill into that, we’re going back to McCarthy, who John Gruber quoted from a WSJ profile: “Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.”

I liked that bit, but that same interview yielded this gem, which was a little less bleak until you think of the ramifications: “If you’re good at something it’s very hard not to do it.”

You know, writing good code isn’t that much different than writing great works of literature, at least from a mindset perspective.  I think the biggest thing the blog and Twitter world has exposed is the (not altogether new) talent of making it look like you’re not working very hard on an all-consuming passion.