Make Your Mark: The Creative’s Guide to Building a Business With Impact. Edited by Joceylyn K. Glei.
Making Your Mark on the World by Making an Impact
This is the third book in the 99U series by Behance for creative thinkers. The editor, Jocelyn Glei, has the best description of this book when she states in the introduction, “this collection will offer you fresh thinking, practical advice, and the moxie to get out there and make something that matters.” (Preface to the book). In other words, it is about making your mark on the world by making an impact.
Like the other books, this one is divided into four sections, and my highlights from the book are listed below according to each section:
1. Defining Your Purpose
2. Building Your Product
3. Serving Your Customers
4. Leading Your Team
Although the book focuses on business, much of the advice is applicable to one’s personal life and overall life experiences. Making a dent in the world with significant, positive impact can also happen by being who we are in addition to doing what we do.
Creation must be made accessible for consumption. This is your real job. – Scott Belsky
1. Defining Your Purpose – Your Modus Operandi
- Make something that matters, no matter what you do
- Focus on creating value, and let everything else follow
- Questions to help you define your purpose (advice from Keith Yamashita p. 27)
- What are your unique gifts and superpowers?
- Who have you been when you’ve been at your best?
- How will the world be better off thanks to you having been on this earth?
- Who must you fearlessly become?
- There is no magical timeline; move at your own pace
- Innovation starts with enthusiasts
- Create more value than you capture
- Do a better job of telling the truth
- More questions (from Tim O’Reilly p. 51)
- What does the world need?
- Do my customers need?
- What can I do?
- Who is your actual target?
- What are you actually trying to accomplish in the world?
- Find your “why”
- Ask the right questions (from Warren Berger p. 68-72)
- Why are we here in the first place?
- If we disappeared, who would miss us? And why?
- What business are we really in?
- How can we become a cause and not just a company?
- What are we willing to sacrifice?
- How can we make a better experiment?
- What is your mission question?
Find out who you are, and do it on purpose. – Dolly Parton
2. Building Your Product
- Proof is in the process
- A great product must have empathy for the user’s experience
- Have 15 seconds to hook your customers
- Creating a product is creating an experience
- Failure is information (growth-mindset mentality)
Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinary well. – E.F. Schumacher
3. Serving Your Customers
- Are you ready to serve?
- Every day, ask yourself these two questions (from Chris Buillebeau p. 137)
- What am I making?
- Who am I helping?
- Reciprocity is a powerful practice
- Focus relentlessly on the customer
- People have extremely sensitive BS detectors – important to be authentic
- More questions (from Craig Dalton p. 167-170)
- How are you tapping into your audience’s aspirations and dreams?
- How is my product going to change the way people think or go about their daily lives?
- Achievement is measured in four new metrics:
- Wisdom
- Wonder
- Well-Being
- Giving
Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient. – Jeff Bezos
4. Leading Your Team
- Focus on your core competencies – your strengths
- Leadership is about serving
- Default to transparency in everything you do
- Transparency breeds trust and loyalty
- Creative people are driven by passion, integrity, and quality
- Establish a culture that supports great communication
- Human acts of greatness are always in the service of others
- Help others embrace their inner superhero
Leadership is not a position, leadership is a choice. – Simon Sinek
So what? Why not? Action in small steps can make a difference. I have been both the giver and recipient of service, excellence, trust, loyalty, and empowerment. I am reminded and inspired that there is might in the small steps toward the good. My desire is to find the courage to keep on working to make a mark in the world, an impression of goodness, an imprint of positivity.
Do I dare disturb the universe? – T.S. Eliot
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