Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 by Seth Godin

and longevity?
Embrace an instinct to accept consistent ongoing costs instead of swallowing a one-time expense?
Slow implementation and decision making down instead of speeding them up?
Embrace sunk costs?
Imagine that your competition is going to be as afraid of change as you are? Even the competition that hasn’t entered the market yet and has nothing to lose?
Emphasize emergency preparation at the expense of handling a chronic and degenerative condition?
Compare the best of what you have now with the possible worst of what a change might bring?
    Calling it out when you see it might give your team the strength to make a leap.
Talker’s Block
    No one ever gets talker’s block. No one wakes up in the morning, discovers he has nothing to say, and sits quietly, for days or weeks, until the muse hits, until the moment is right, until all the craziness in his life has died down.
    Why, then, is writer’s block endemic?
    The reason we don’t get talker’s block is that we’re in the habit of talking without a lot of concern about whether our inane blather will come back to haunt us. Talk is cheap. Talk is ephemeral. Talk can be easily denied.
    We talk poorly, and then eventually (or sometimes), we talk smart. We get better at talking precisely because we talk. We see what works and what doesn’t, and if we’re insightful, do more of what works. How can we get talker’s block after all this practice?
    Writer’s block isn’t hard to cure.
    Just write poorly. Continue to write poorly, in public, until you can write better.
    I believe that everyone should write in public. Get a blog. Or use Squidoo or Tumblr or a microblogging site. Use an alias if you like. Turn off comments, certainly—you don’t need more criticism, you need more writing.
    Do it every day. Every single day. Not a diary, not fiction, but analysis. Clear, crisp, honest writing about what you see in the world. Or want to see. Or teach (in writing). Tell us how to do something.
    If you know you have to write
something
every single day, even a paragraph, you will improve your writing. If you’re concerned withquality, of course, then not writing is not a problem, because zero is perfect and without defects. Shipping nothing is safe.
    The second best thing to zero is something better than bad. So if you know you have to write tomorrow, your brain will start working on something better than bad. And then you’ll inevitably redefine bad, and tomorrow will be better than that. And on and on.
    Write like you talk. Often.
Your Competitive Advantage
    Are you going to succeed because you return emails a few minutes faster, tweet a bit more often, and stay at work an hour longer than anyone else?
    I think that’s unlikely. When you push to turn intellectual work into factory work (which means more showing up and more following instructions), you’re racing to the bottom.
    It seems to me that you will succeed because you confronted and overcame anxiety and the lizard brain better than anyone else. Perhaps because you overcame inertia and got significantly better at your craft, even when it was uncomfortable because you were risking failure. When you increase your discernment, maximize your awareness of the available options, and then go ahead and ship work that scares others—that’s when you succeed.
    More time on the problem isn’t the way. More guts is. When you expose yourself to the opportunities that scare you, you create something scarce, something others won’t do.
The More or Less Choice
    I think it comes down to one or the other:
    How little can I get away with?
    vs.
    How much can I do?
    Surprisingly, they both take a lot of work. The closer you get to either edge, the more it takes. That’s why most people settle for the simplest path, which is to do just enough to remain unnoticed.
    No one can maximize on every engagement, every project, everycustomer, and every opportunity. The art of it, I think, is to be rigorous about where you’re prepared