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Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer
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Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer
hosted by Sonia Simone

Anniversary Edition! On Finding Your Stubbornness and Going the Distance

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Previous Episode:Q&A: Cornerstone Content, Creativity, and the Future of Our Businesses More Episodes Next Episode:A Simple, Powerful Creativity System to Capture and Generate More Ideas

All Episodes:

July 25, 2016

The 2 Points of Clarity that Will Make You So Much More Productive

July 18, 2016

Launching Your First (or Next) Digital Product

July 11, 2016

A Quick, Enjoyable Way to Sharpen your Vision, Goals, and Values

July 4, 2016

Q&A from Twitter, Independence Day Version!

June 27, 2016

The Difference Between Mindset and Wishful Thinking

June 20, 2016

Things I Love / Things I Hate #4: Trade Secrets, Transparency, and Lemonade Stands

June 13, 2016

Should You Swear on Your Blog?

June 7, 2016

Up All Night to Get Lucky: Sonia’s in a New Documentary!

May 23, 2016

The Context of a Successful Content Strategy: The Harpoon and the Net

May 16, 2016

My #1 Time Management Tip: Don’t Multitask; Compartmentalize

May 9, 2016

The 7 ‘Escape Pod’ Principles (Help Me Write My Book!)

May 2, 2016

Things I Love / Things I Hate #3: Nerdy Nummies and Crummy Content

April 25, 2016

Leadership, Categories of One, and Purple Rain

April 18, 2016

Make Better Mondays! 6 Minutes to a Happier, More Productive Week

April 11, 2016

5 Idea-Generating Techniques We Use on the Copyblogger Team

April 4, 2016

Blog or Podcast? 5 Questions to Help You Decide

March 28, 2016

Two EQ Hacks: A Nifty Trick for Making Big Changes, and How to Handle Hurt Feelings

March 21, 2016

Things I Love/Things I Hate about Health & Fitness Marketing

March 14, 2016

A Simple, Powerful Creativity System to Capture and Generate More Ideas

March 7, 2016

Anniversary Edition! On Finding Your Stubbornness and Going the Distance

February 29, 2016

Q&A: Cornerstone Content, Creativity, and the Future of Our Businesses

February 22, 2016

Getting to Freedom and Business Clarity: A Conversation with Sonia Thompson

February 15, 2016

New Mini-Series: Things I Love / Things I Hate

February 8, 2016

Getting Clear on your Metrics and Benchmarks: The 3 Lenses to Look Through

February 1, 2016

The Untethered Society: Scary or Liberating? (Or Both?)

January 25, 2016

Deep Creative Focus, the Long Haul … and, Yes, David Bowie

January 11, 2016

Motivation and Creativity: A Conversation with Mark McGuinness

January 4, 2016

Vision and Goal-Setting for Your Digital Business

December 21, 2015

Encore: How to Avoid Getting Sucker-Punched by Internet ‘Facts’

December 14, 2015

To Craft Content Marketing that Works: Avoid Silly Fads … and Do this Instead

December 7, 2015

How to Work from Home: Getting Stuff Done when No One is Looking Over Your Shoulder

November 30, 2015

5 Work Habit Hacks from 12 Creative Geniuses

November 23, 2015

Encore: Productivity for Flakes, Head Cases, and Other Natural Disasters

November 16, 2015

What You Need to Know about Guest Posting

November 9, 2015

7 Straightforward Steps to Superior Blog Posts and Podcasts

November 2, 2015

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October 26, 2015

The 7-Minute Content Makeover

October 19, 2015

7 Commandments of Professionalism for Content Marketers

October 12, 2015

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October 5, 2015

Minimalism, Success, and How to Be a Big Shot

September 28, 2015

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September 21, 2015

What Happens at the Crossroads of Content and Social Media

September 14, 2015

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September 7, 2015

Marketing for Writers and Other Creative Souls

September 1, 2015

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August 25, 2015

How to Avoid Getting Sucker-Punched by Internet ‘Facts’

August 18, 2015

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July 14, 2015

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July 7, 2015

A Question of (Writing) Voice: How to Strengthen It, How to Shape It

June 30, 2015

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June 23, 2015

Is Hypersensitivity the New Fascism?

June 16, 2015

Q&A: Duplicate Content Worries, and Other Questions from the Audience

June 9, 2015

Business and Marketing for Artists and Creative Workers, Part Two

June 2, 2015

Business and Marketing for Artists and Creative Workers, Part One

May 27, 2015

The 3 Types of Trolls You Meet Online (and How to Deal with Them)

May 19, 2015

The 7 Circles of Belief that Drive Customers to Your Business

May 12, 2015

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May 5, 2015

Annie Pratt on Resilient Leadership: How to Build a Smart, Agile Business by Crafting an Incredible Team

April 28, 2015

How Not to Be a Dirty, Rotten Spammer

April 21, 2015

4 Deep Marketing Questions (with Answers!)

April 14, 2015

How to Uncover What Your Audience Wants to Buy: An Interview with Ryan Levesque

April 7, 2015

Productivity for Flakes, Head Cases, and Other Natural Disasters

March 31, 2015

8 Harsh Truths about Social Media (and 1 Pretty Awesome One)

March 24, 2015

3 Juicy Marketing Questions Answered

March 17, 2015

How to Strengthen Your Talents

March 3, 2015

The Lies We Tell Ourselves About Business, Part 2

March 2, 2015

The Lies We Tell Ourselves About Business, Part 1

March 7, 2016

Anniversary Edition! On Finding Your Stubbornness and Going the Distance

It’s the podcast’s birthday! To celebrate, today I want to talk about one of my favorite traits: stubbornness.

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There are all kinds of traits our culture insists we “have” to have to run a successful business, but looking around, there’s just one I’ve seen.

In this 22-minute episode, I talk about:

  • How to make the most of our gifts and blessings
  • How to think about your constraints and assets to build something amazing
  • What a box of Legos can teach you about business
  • Finding inspiration for business and life

Listen to Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer below ...

Anniversary Edition! On Finding Your Stubbornness and Going the DistanceSonia Simone
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The Show Notes

  • Gary Vaynerchuk on Entrepreneurial DNA
  • Sean d’Souza on this podcast, also talking about entrepreneurial DNA, How to Strengthen Your Talents
  • Paul Piff’s TedX talk on Whether Money Makes People Mean
  • PBS Frontline, The Long Walk of Nelson Mandela

The Transcript

Sonia Simone: Greetings, superfriends! My name is Sonia Simone and these are the Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer. For those who don’t know me, I’m a co-founder and the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital.

I’m also a champion of running your business and your life according to your own rules. As long as you don’t lie and you don’t hurt people, this podcast is your official pink permission slip to run your business or your career exactly the way you think you should.

This is episode 52 of this podcast, which I vote makes it the one-year anniversary. Because we skipped an episode or two over the holidays that isn’t literally exactly right, but who wants to be that literal?

In honor of my first year of podcasting, I want to talk about my favorite virtue for business owners: Raw, undiluted, and maybe even cranky stubbornness.

If you have this one, you can get the rest

A lot of you have heard me go off on the idea that business owners have to have special “DNA.”

Gary Vaynerchuk is one who really believes in entrepreneurial DNA.

Let’s just say — I don’t agree.

Gary came here from Belarus when he was three. His family owned a liquor store, and Gary did really amazing things in getting more customers to that using content.

He was actually born into a family that gave him amazing gifts — not the kind of privilege with marble bathtubs or gold-plated silverware, but the privilege of a mindset for business.

It looks like DNA because he didn’t ask for it, he didn’t “earn” it — it was given to him as a gift of his birth. And it’s fantastic. And I love the way he looks at the world through this lens that he inherited.

But it’s not DNA. Traits and abilities like “the ability to sell” aren’t DNA. And we know they aren’t DNA, because we have examples all over the place of people who didn’t have it growing up, but learn it or otherwise acquire it along the way.

No matter what I read or who I meet or what workshops I attend or investments I make, I don’t get any taller. How tall I am is DNA.

Privilege and luck

The way I see it is, we have privileges — these are the things we get born with. Sometimes they are DNA, like you’re tall. A few people inherit some crazy gift of resilience, and can come through really horrible beginnings.

A lot of times it’s just being lucky enough to get born to parents who value education and hard work — I was lucky enough to get those. It’s not a small thing.

Experiment a couple of years ago at U.C. Berkeley, which I find hilarious since that’s my alma mater and also the epicenter of political correctness on the planet. Participants played Monopoly — but some were given double the starting money, allowed to roll more dice, or otherwise had the game stacked in their favor.

Part of the scenario is asking them at the end of the game why they won — because of course, with their advantages, they all won. And they gave reasons like their strategy, or having a passion for the game. Some of them even mentioned luck, like lucky die rolls. But none of them seemed to remember that they started with double the money and three dice instead of two.

Now the study was very broad and I notice it’s a bit of a blind-man-and-elephant study. Everyone sees their own bias in it. So don’t get crazy attached to it as scientific evidence … but I think it’s a fascinating microcosm or metaphor.

That’s privilege. I don’t actually believe in apologizing for it, since I’m hoping you didn’t elbow someone else aside to get it, but also don’t think it means you’re smart or hard-working or anything other than just very fortunate. Try hard to be conscious of it, be thankful, and roll up your sleeves.

It strikes me that people have gone a little off the rails with this study, possibly, thinking “that’s why those people are like that.” The researcher, Paul Piff, has a TEDx talk called “does money make you mean.” Those other rich people.

No.

This is why we are sometimes like this.

Every single person listening to this has inherited some privilege. You’re on the internet, you live in this age where so many things are possible, you have access to technology, you have enough to eat, you have clean drinking water. This stuff is not trivial. We take them for granted, they’re double-Monopoly money, but they’re not trivial, and not everyone has them. So take a little time to honor the gifts you received at birth.

Privilege is hard to look at because it’s a little taboo. We think that privileged people are bad people, and the Monopoly study researchers I think brought some of that bias to it.

But we all have some privilege, some very juicy pieces of luck that we did nothing to earn, and I’ve found it’s more constructive to try to be mindful of that instead of falling all over yourself insisting that privilege has no bearing on your life.

The role of blessings

Then there’s the other thing, and I call these blessings. These are the opportunities, the doors that present themselves, and we decide to open them or not to open them.

They’re still gifts, but you have to do something to unlock them. You have to put the work in. You have to assess the situation with your best judgment and try to make the right call. You have to compete on your strengths and train your weaknesses — which means, do what you’re excellent at, and then make a plan for how to work with what you might kind of suck pretty badly at.

Blessings are where things like marketing and business education come in. A blog that teaches you, a conference that inspires and educates you.

They’re opportunities to play the hand we’re dealt in a smarter way. Sometimes they’re opportunities to go get more cards.

So my philosophy is, Be conscious of and grateful for your privileges and don’t let them make you think you’re so smart. Then work hard and leverage the blessings that you come across to the best of your ability.

Luck matters, but plenty of ultra-fortunate people have thrown their success and happiness away with both hands because they put no work into their blessings. So don’t be that person, because seriously, how depressing is that.

Where stubbornness comes in

So I talked about my favorite vice/virtue of stubbornness: this is how I see it playing into that mix.

If you’re going to reach a goal — personal, financial, business, health, relationship, whatever — you have constraints and you have assets. Your assets are the privileges and the blessings. They’re all of those resources you can tap into to make something happen.

Your abilities, your education, your money, your available time, your network, your upbringing, the marketing and business podcasts you listen to, the books and courses you’ve acquired, you get the idea. These are your assets.

Then you have constraints — and funnily enough, these often have the same labels. So there might be something lacking or sub-optimal about your abilities, your education, your money, your available time, your network, your upbringing, etc. You know how to fill those blanks in for yourself.

You sit down — and I’m going to write about this soon — and basically you have a box of Legos. You’re going to make something out of the Legos you have. And you aren’t going to use the Legos that you don’t have, because … you don’t have them.

That’s what reaching goals is all about. So if we’re talking about a success goal or a business or financial goal, you have a unique combination of assets and constraints, and how you put those together is up to you.

Now if you have absolutely everything you need right there in front of you, you happened to be born with the really good set of Lego that had the little wheels and axels and maybe even the electronic motor, then you just go forth and do it.

And probably you don’t listen to podcasts like this one, because you don’t need it. You have what you need. Go you.

But for most of us, we need to work around some things. We need to get creative. We need to build something no one has seen before, because we’re working around constraints.

Constraints make the most beautiful design, actually.

Or if we want to make a life-sized bullfighter out of Legos, and we have no red Legos at all for the cape, we may need to figure out how to get some red Legos. Maybe a friend has some they’ll let us borrow. Or we have a bunch of yellow and green ones, and we can swap. Maybe we can take our birthday money and buy some. Maybe we can create a new character called the Bluefighter who has a blue cape. I don’t know. How you solve this problem is what makes your business or your project unique.

With enough stubbornness, you’ll figure it out. If you have to go out and wander the streets looking for stray pennies and save them up, you will eventually have enough for some red Legos. It’s going to be really hard for some and pretty manageable for others.

But we all will come up against an issue that requires a lot of stubbornness. Another word could be courage. Another word could be “grit.” If you are a meditator, another word could be mindfulness, or equanimity.

But it’s staying with the problem set through the frustrations. Continuing to apply our intelligence and our intention. Sometimes we need to back off of it for a little bit — work hard on it, then back away and sleep on it. To consider and re-consider the assets, and how they match up against the constraints, until we come up with a solution that is pleasing.

If you have the stubbornness, you can get to the rest of it or die trying. For me, there is something really core to human dignity about that.

Finding inspiration

This is why we love those stories where people overcome amazing odds. Something amazing in my lifetime was to see that Nelson Mandela served 27 years in prison, in a country that was known for fanatical — essentially religious — clinging to a system of pervasive injustice. And — this blows my mind every time I think about it — Mandela figured out how to use that as an asset to lead his country to freedom.

In the winter of 1964, Nelson Mandela arrived on Robben Island where he would spend 18 of his 27 prison years. Confined to a small cell, the floor his bed, a bucket for a toilet, he was forced to do hard labor in a quarry. He was allowed one visitor a year for 30 minutes. He could write and receive one letter every six months. But Robben Island became the crucible which transformed him. Through his intelligence, charm and dignified defiance, Mandela eventually bent even the most brutal prison officials to his will, assumed leadership over his jailed comrades and became the master of his own prison. He emerged from it the mature leader who would fight and win the great political battles that would create a new democratic South Africa.
— PBS Frontline, The Long Walk of Nelson Mandela

And of course he became South Africa’s first post-apartheid president. I have to tell you, in the 1980s, really nearly no one thought South Africa could ever overthrow apartheid and become whole. Certainly not in our lifetime. But Mandela saw it.

Whatever constraints you or I have, we can look at someone like Mandela — and of course, thousands of others — and feel inspired to refresh our own stubbornness.

They remind us that we have this unbelievable human ability to keep turning over the assets and constraints, over and over again, keep applying our creativity and our stubbornness. We’re a crazy species and some days I worry about us. But we do have this going for us, and it’s cool.

Any time you can, try to look up from your own problems and say to yourself, “If that person can do it, I can do it.” It’s very helpful.

So: Let me know about your assets and constraints! And if you want to share a time you were able to sit with a problem and get stubborn on it, we would all love to hear about it. If you are in the middle of a problem set that’s got your gears grinding, let us know that too — one of the assets we don’t always mobilize is our community.

People want to help you get to where you’re going. We’re wired for that. It’s so easy, and especially in the West, the U.S. in particular, because we have a big mythology around the “Lone Ranger,” it’s so easy to forget that all of us can pull together a community to reach our goals together. It’s so powerful. It’s so, so powerful.

Or if you just want to wish the podcast happy birthday, I’ll take it. 🙂 Swing by PinkHairedMarketer.FM, or tweet me @soniasimone. See you next time. 🙂

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Comments

  1. Hashim Warren says

    March 7, 2016 at 6:49 PM

    Thanks for being a champion of personal growth and demystifying what it takes to be successful, Sonia.

    Gary Vaynerchuk in his first book, Crush It was a believer in growth, persistence, and the large opportunities that come about because of it :

    “Be patient. In time, if you continue to hustle, you’ll grow your presence and improve your skills to the point where the fish – really, really big fish, will be jumping straight into your hands.”

    Unfortunately recently Gary has specifically written that you either have business skills or you don’t, and those like him with the right DNA will catch big fish while others will be stuckin lifestyle businesses.

    Reply
  2. Shayne says

    March 9, 2016 at 6:02 AM

    Thanks for this episode Sonia!
    I found it quite refreshing to evaluate myself as someone who, might not have double the monopoly money as someone else, but certainly has monopoly money in general.
    I think it is important to be humble, thoughtful and self-aware these days.

    I am currently studying Marketing at a university in Australia and I have found you podcasts, both here and at Copyblogger FM to be essential learning platforms.

    Thanks again,
    Shayne

    (Happy anniversary!)

    Reply
  3. Andrea says

    March 14, 2016 at 4:26 AM

    Hi Sonia,

    thank you for this episode. Especially as I am sometimes wondering, how much stubbornness is still “healthy” … so it really helped me.

    I have a question: Some people are talking about the need to love your customers. But I have the feeling, that this is not the right attitude. Serving them, helping them, bringing value. But like the professional distance of a doctor towards his patients, I think a professional distance to customers is important.

    My question is: What do you think about the topic? And what is the right distance and how can one keep it?

    Kind regards, Andrea Lekies

    Reply

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