Where marketing is about spamming people with your message until they remember you, helpeting is about serving people and building relationships that turn into business. Where marketing is about spending as much cash as you can to blast your message across the sky, helpeting is about spending a limited budget carefully, focusing on how to serve your target audience with resources, advice and connections.
It isn’t who you know. It’s who knows you.
Help someone, then disappear before you wear out your welcome. Don’t worry, people tend to remember helpful people.
There are times when persisting with someone you care about deeply is a beautiful thing but in most situations, if you’re volunteering your time and money to help someone, you should expect that they honor your investment by taking your advice seriously and making an effort to implement it.
if anyone wants to become great, they must become the servant of all. Greatness, according to Jesus, is serving.
It doesn’t matter how famous you are, people don’t care about you so much as they care about how you can help them.
He gave me something that had cost him time and effort and that contained some of his most valuable intellectual property.
The world is full of people trying to help others for their own gain and the world is therefore full of crappy help. The best way for you to stand out is to have excellent help, help so amazing that it shocks your customers to know you’d give it away.
People know how to lose weight, but most don’t have the drive, the commitment and the patience.
If there are no one star reviews, that means the book hasn’t been read by anyone. So you have to find a book that’s popular enough to have at least ten.
Nothing is more beautiful than a slow, steady climb.
But the truth is that the vast majority of success comes over a long period of time.
The slow, steady climb, one in which you peak late, is ideal. You go out on top. You learn to appreciate what it takes to get to the top because you’ve worked so hard for so long.
If you’re starting from scratch, I usually advise that you get a one time opportunity to add everyone you know to your list. After adding them, send an email that says that you did, why you thought they might want to be on the list and how they can unsubscribe easily.
I often advise clients to set up multiple lists that subscribers are automatically subscribed to. One should be an everything list. People on this list will get everything you send, including an email for all your new blog entries. A second list should be for the weekly or monthly group. This would be a newsletter and a recap of posts for the last week or month, respectively. The final list is an occasional list that only gets used for major events and top posts. I might send to this list once a quarter.
I find that sending emails on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday at noon PST is the best time because it reaches all the U.S. markets during prime working hours that aren’t as busy as the morning hours.
Within your book, I highly recommend you lean heavily on stories. If you can replace a list of bullet points with a story, do it.
The multiple two star reviews on the same day and the kindhearted emails I’d get from readers with variations on, “Dear God, please stop rewriting this book” and the people who went to creative lengths to tell me what an ugly little baby I’d conceived. Eventually, I learned not to care. Then I learned to do whatever I damn well pleased. Finally I learned to do what I loved.
The point is, great helpeters, like great artists, aren’t out to win popularity contests. They do what they love because they love what they do. They keep their motives pure. These things are intangible, but they make a big difference when it comes to either being pretty good at something or great at it. Your audience can tell if you don’t love what you do and if you’re doing it to get money or something else from them.
When you live in Seattle, a place known worldwide for its rain and depressed, indie rock culture, flying to Orange County, California can make you feel like a million bucks.
All through school, whatever teacher I had would encourage me to explore a career in the field they taught. The science teacher thought I had a talent for science. The English teacher thought I should become a writer. The PE teacher thought—well scratch that. I wasn’t ever any good at PE. I was frustrated by their responses. I had ten different people telling me to do ten different things with my life. Looking back, I can see what they were really telling me was that I was good at learning. This same skill enabled me to do about three hundred different careers—maybe not brilliantly, but well enough to provide for my family. I picked up a variety of skills well enough to get by for a while, but they never quite fit. I grew tired of whatever I was doing as soon as I’d learned about 70% of what it might take to reach mastery—a point where I reached a level of diminishing return on my investment of energy.
many people don’t figure out their life purpose until their mid to late forties. The problem we have is that magazines and newspapers are all filled with 30 most influential people under 30 lists and billionaire techies who can barely drive a car and bestselling authors who tried their hand at writing in English 101 and turned out a Hemingway. These are rare exceptions, not the rule.
Highly successful people don’t do things exactly like average-successful people. Some of it is natural ability, but I think part of that natural ability is a willingness to do things differently or to try a little harder. They find ways to separate themselves, whether consciously or not.
But when all else is equal, those who rise to the top find a way to separate themselves from everyone else a little bit each day until they become so successful everyone wonders how they got there.
Yan Ren 