The Indiefield Blog

We're all money nerds - earning, spending, and obsessing over price tags. Companies? They're even worse, obsessing about commissions, margins, and cost of sales.

But while everyone's busy crunching numbers, there's a booming invisible economy we're ignoring: attention.

• "Blasting my entire email list - what's that gonna cost me in annoyed subscribers?"
• "Could a decent user manual save our customers (and us) hours of frustration?"
• "If we don’t ask for permission to follow up, are we flushing trust down the drain?"

Attention is finite and ridiculously valuable. Its price tag only goes up. Spend it wisely.

A tribe thrives when its members give, not just take. If everyone's hunting loopholes and trying to game the system, the whole thing crumbles.

Here's the deal: culture is bigger than management. A strong group lifts itself up; leadership follows. Same for society - government isn't the tribe, we are.

So stop waiting for a leader to fix it. The maths is simple: the more you give, the more everyone, including you, gets back.

Poetry is easy: call yourself a poet, grab a pencil, and voilà - bad poetry is born. Same goes for tweets, emails, Facebook posts, and songs. No barriers mean plenty of bad art.

But here's the twist: the flood of bad also brings more good. Sometimes, you don't need a gatekeeper - just the freedom to create (and let the audience sort the rest).

Sometimes info finds you, like a car recall. Other times, it's on you - like checking if hurricane season overlaps with your holiday. In today's world, ignorance isn't bliss; it's laziness.

Whether it's launching a marketing campaign, forwarding a sketchy email, or booking a trip, the rule is simple: before you act, look it up. No one's going to do it for you.

Stuck in a rut? Two ways out:

1. Take something mediocre everyone tolerates and make it undeniably awesome.
2. Identify the dead weight in your life (bad tools, habits, policies) and chuck it.

If something's unbetterable, stop clinging to it. Toss it, make space, and let something amazing take its place. Sometimes the best upgrade is a good purge.

Deadlines aren't the goal. The real goal? Do great work, do it fast, and then do more of it.

If deadlines are the only thing pushing you, just move them up. This isn't assembly-line life, it's project world. More projects mean more chances to fail, learn, and make a difference. When it's you vs. the project, do more.

Do great ideas always have a wow factor? The real question is: What's "great", and who decides what's "wow"?

As one of my favourite ever films Moneyball shows, baseball scouts spent years chasing the wrong wow until statistics flipped the game and revealed what truly mattered.

The secret? Sharpen your radar, learn from failures, and spot the wow before the rest of the world catches up.

Another small high street business closes its doors, pushed out by a giant chain chasing profits. Local stores thrive on connection: they know your name, they care about their product, and they make your day a little brighter. Big chains? They're about squeezing every penny from every square foot, indifferent to the community they disrupt.

Landlords and corporations often prioritise profits over people, leaving local businesses with little chance to compete. Protests, boycotts, and petitions rarely move the needle when the system favours scale over soul.

Online businesses can escape this trap by focusing on unique products and building customer trust. But for local shops tied to physical spaces, the race to the bottom feels inevitable.

Every time we lose a small business on our high street, we lose a piece of what makes our communities special. It's up to all of us to support what we want to see thrive.

Orwell's rules, simplified:

1. Skip clichés.
2. Use short words.
3. Cut unnecessary words.
4. Go active, not passive.
5. Ditch jargon - say it plainly.
6. Break the rules if it keeps things interesting.

Business writing is often terrible because people are scared. They are scared of criticism, misunderstanding, or just saying something real.

Here's the fix: speak like a human. Record yourself talking to your audience, type it up, simplify, and hit send.

Clarity beats fear every time.

Sunscreen is supposed to protect you, not mislead you. But for years, marketers dodged regulations, pushing claims like "waterproof" or SPF 120 that sound great but don't tell the whole truth. Meanwhile, skin cancer took tens of thousands of lives.

Here's the real issue: sunscreen isn't a magic bullet. You need to use more and reapply often, but that's not sexy to sell. So, marketers hyped easy fixes instead of educating the public.

Two questions:

1. Without strict rules, how can consumers trust what's on the label?
2. Why wouldn’t ethical companies want clear regulations to level the playing field?

Honest marketing isn't just ethical - it's good business, too. Unless, of course, you're making money in the shade.