Stop being useless
Out of 96 emails waiting for me, maybe two of them weren't complete wastes of pixels.
I'm going through email in a sort of detached mode. I'm outside of myself, watching myself, amused and astonished at my rapidly diminishing attention span.
I don't even skim anymore. I take in the whole damn email in a single chunk, waiting for something to pop out at me. Not necessarily pictures. Just something worth my attention.
This is where we're all going, even if you process email with an attention span greater than that of a tweaker squirrel.
Everyone is useless. I'm not negative or pessimistic. I like people for the most part. But in my inbox, they're all useless.
This is why Seth Godin has been talking about the purple cow almost every day for years and years. Be remarkable.
More people should follow the Gun To The Head approach of producing things. John Carlton taught me this. It's from copywriting. "If I had a gun to my head... and this ad HAD to work. HAD to pull sales. Or that trigger would go click and my head would go splat... would I really use this headline? This subhead? This offer?" Applies to anything.
Every single word must earn its way onto the page.
It's a macro and a micro thing. Are what you are doing even worth doing?
If it's not, every step you take moving forward is just digging your own grave.
Bob Lefsetz and James Altucher are my two favorite writers right now.