It isn't enough to think outside the box. Thinking is passive. Get used to acting outside the box.
Tim FerrissRead
If you take a print magazine with a million person circulation, and a blog with a devout readership of 1 million, for the purpose of selling anything that can be sold online, the blog is infinitely more powerful, because it's only a click away.
Interpretation
Online platforms like blogs have a more immediate and accessible reach compared to traditional print media.
Tim Ferriss highlights the significant difference in accessibility and engagement between traditional print media and digital platforms. While a print magazine may have a large circulation, a blog with a dedicated audience offers a more powerful means of selling products online due to its convenience and immediacy, allowing readers to engage with content and make purchases with just a click.
In practice
In a marketing seminar to emphasize the power of digital marketing.
It isn't enough to think outside the box. Thinking is passive. Get used to acting outside the box.
The way we measure productivity is flawed. People checking their BlackBerry over dinner is not the measure of productivity.
It's just astonishing to me, but not surprising in some respects, how dependent we are on the somewhat meaningless and certainly ephemeral feedback that we get from strangers on the Internet. I think that's a dangerous dependence to develop.
I always point people to the article '1,000 True Fans' by Kevin Kelly. If you choose your thousand ideal customers or readers properly and find the single author blog that targets that audience, you never have to do any more marketing. You're done. That is a lesson that very few product developers and marketers have learned, and it's unfortunate.
By using money as the scapegoat and work as our all-consuming routine, we are able to conveniently disallow ourselves to do otherwise: 'John, I'd love to talk about the gaping void I feel in my life, the hopelessness that hits me like a punch in the eye every time I start my computer in the morning, but I have so much work to do! I've got at least three hours of unimportant email to reply to before calling prospects who said 'no' yesterday. Gotta run!
Being busy is a form of laziness - lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.
We have spent so much time worrying about a 'cyber Pearl Harbor,'' the attack that takes out the power grid, that we have focused far too little on the subtle manipulation of data that can mean that no election, medical record, or self-driving car can be truly trusted.
We live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.
Is it a fact-or have I dreamt it-that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?
The danger of the Internet is cocooning with the like-minded online - of sending an email or Twitter and confusing that with action - while the real corporate and military and government centers of power go right on.
Our growing ability to eliminate the slow-moving aspects of entertainment and go hopping from one peak to another is not without cost. Stand-up comics, movie-makers and others who earn their living entertaining no longer "waste" time with setups and plot development, lest we reach for the remote and click them off our screen. The result is a loss of subtlety, anticipation and nuance and, in the process, a coarsening of our discourse.
We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.
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