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He (he) has done it again. And I hate (read ‘love‘) it when he does.
I don’t have much time …time is a disappearing luxury… to read much outside of my current workload (clients and postgrad studies) but for some bizarre (wonderful) reason I checked out ChangeThis.com (something I occasionally do for new reads) and found another Tom Peters manifesto (aka ‘rant‘).
So I print off 114 pages for the journey to/from work and again (as always) am angry and annoyed (read ‘displaced’ and ‘challenged’).
He always leaves me breathless after just ten …or is it 5?… Pages. He’s done it again. Again. Damn him.
This time he also cites …frequently… another hero (’villain’) of mine, Seth Godin.
I love reading (devouring) Seth’s work and I hate the bugger, too. Because Seth always challenges me to rethink my brand of one and to search for my purple cow. He is always (well, nearly always… not when I’m too tired to understand what he’s saying) interrupting (aka ‘violating with permission’) my complacency.
So along Peters …again… again…to do the same.
…And I can’t keep trying to write like Peters - he is his own unique style, so I’ll revert back to mine.
A few years ago I threw his ‘Project 50‘ book across the office whilst disregarding it as totally unworkable jibberish. A day later I picked it up to put it back in the bookshelf and it randomly fell open at a page. I finished the book two hours later. Each of the three times I have now read the book I have wanted to hurl it across the room.
His work championing the concept of ‘Brand YOU!‘ has been instrumental in raising my own awareness of what a fragile existence I have as a PSF (Professional Service Firm).
Again via his latest rant (”The PSF is Everything!“) I am challenged to redefine myself, to determine, via exploration of other’s perceptions and my own introspection, my limits in order to break my barriers and find new experiences I can deliver to my clients. To WOW! them.
After reading him I again find myself lacking.
Damn him and Godin for being so right! The earth-denting dream-making value-adding knowledge worker is the only way forward (aka ’survival’) if one is to be satisfied to one’s core. Complacency will see me fired by my own clients as someone, somewhere half my age steps into my shoes and is able to do what I do for a tenth of the price in half the time (e.g. while I sleep).
Do yourself a favour — go get the ebook, print if off, read it in bed, get no sleep with worry, convince yourself to hang up your ‘consultancy closed’ sign, realise that there are mouths to feed so hanging up the sign is not an option, decide that only you can save your brand (even if it’s a brand of one), let your mind stew on Peters’ gumbo mix… and pray that an idea the seed of which will germinate into something startling will bubble up out of your subconscious over the next week or so.
And if you want to join into a collective that swaps each other’s random seeds in the hope that something greater than the sum of its parts emerges, let’s do it here, via this blog. Let’s redefine ourselves and what we mean as communicators with a personal brand with one employee - ourselves.
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