The Sandler Effect

Well this is harder than I thought.  When I started this blog on April 22nd, I had all of these grandiose ideas running through my head.  Since I love writing, I would enter in at least one post every week. Piece of cake. If that wasn’t enough and I still had more to write about, then definitely two posts a week.  Well here I am 9 weeks later and this is only my 6^th post, which puts me at 67% to expectations, which ironically is the same grade I received in Business Law at Kent State after slacking in a similar fashion.  It was my only D in 20 years of schooling – and I’m kind of proud of it actually.  I mean, at least I can say I accomplished that.  Well...maybe not the only D – I got my name taken off of the Big Yellow Sun in preschool for not sharing, which is probably the equivalent to a preschool D.  In case you’re not well versed in pre-school discipline – if you got your name taken off the Big Yellow Sun, then you did not get a snack, which was fine by me because I routinely ate snacks for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, so I didn’t need anymore.  I have never met a sugary-boxed treat that I didn’t like.

Anyways, I have been struggling with finding things to blog about.  I mean there are plenty of things to write about.  In fact, I have started and stopped 4 different blog posts before ultimately deleting them due to reading them and thinking how overwhelmingly boring they were to read.  If I can’t find what I write interesting, then how is somebody from my old high-school who wasn’t in my class, who I have spoken three words to my entire life, who I am friends with on social media, who is going to read this on Facebook going to find this interesting?  So clearly, I owe it to everybody to be on my game.  I don’t like to associate myself with crap, so I try to only post things that are a decent read.  Well that’s not entirely true, I associate myself with the Cleveland Browns, and so I sometimes associate myself with crap.

The message that I have found is that it is better to take the time and deliver something you can be proud of instead of throwing the Cleveland Browns against the wall and hoping something sticks.  Guns N Roses essentially had 2 albums and the rest was garbage.  Think of how awesome Use Your Illusion would have been if it were not released separately.  Take the best songs off of I and II and that is a monster album.  Appetite for Destruction and one killer Use Your Illusion?  That’s all you need.  Same goes for Springsteen.  Bruce is by far my favorite artist of all time, but he has had some duds that would of served him better to not release.  As an uber Springsteen fan, I appreciate the effort, but sometimes you need to force yourself not to settle for just being average.  In 2009, Springsteen released a song named "Queen of the Supermarket", in which he falls in love with an employee at his local supermarket with a "dream that awaits in aisle number two". Well I guess thats what happens when you release four studio albums in four years.  Most of the time quantity over quality never pans out - unless you're a sophomore at Kent State with $10 and a yearning to get wasted on a Thursday night.

We see it all of the time in social media marketing.  It is not the sheer number of Facebook posts or Tweets that makes a business successful online, but the quality and value of the message that is being delivered to the customer.  I’d rather get one or two awesome sales messages a year, than a weekly email, post, or tweet reminding me how I can save 10% off my regular purchase.  Businesses do this all of the time and it just doesn’t make sense to me if you want to create meaningful, lasting customer relationships.  The focus should be on building the extraordinary - not throwing darts with your eyes closed.

Which is why I am curtailing my own expectations of this blog.  In reality, it's really a dumb little outlet for me to write.  I know that maybe 35 people will end up reading this if I'm lucky.  But for those 35 people, I'd rather give them Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore every other month, than weeks worth of Jack and Jill, Don't Mess With The Zohan, and That's My Boy.  Hopefully somebody reading this will be motivated to focus on truly being remarkable in whatever they do in their life.  Once you find what inspires you, don't settle on simply being average.  Which is what I'm trying to avoid with Losing Touch.