The Indiefield Blog

If you play music in a tube station with a bucket or card reader for donations, every song must be a showstopper. There's no chance for nuance and pauses while you build up to a crescendo. If the commuter doesn't stop, it's all for nought. So your music changes. You're always at 11, always jamming it, always pushing the moment. Most of us behave like this, sometimes anyway. But occasionally someone will stop to actually listen to you, and then you have a choice. You can take that person on a journey, forego the next stranger and instead seduce the one you've got... or you can keep pushing for more attention from more commuters. Both work. The challenge is in making a choice, your choice, a choice based on why you're doing the work in the first place. It's not up to the commuter, it's up to you.

Yeah whatever. This is tough advice. Sometimes it seems as though the only way to take it is personally. Here's the thing: it's never personal. It's never about you. How could it be? That critic doesn't truly know you, understand you, or hear the voices in your head. All they know is themselves. So you just carry on doing your work, the best way you know how, producing the best you can. Is there really any other choice?

I love the lottery, because it's easy. Not certain, but easy. If you win, you've hit the lottery, literally. Most of us are searching for a path to success that is both easy and certain. Most paths are neither.

When you are truly living on the edge, maybe going into space, or traipsing to the North Pole, there's no room at all for error. It's a luxury you can't afford. Make a mistake and you die. For the rest of us, though, it's not quite as serious. Being wrong won't kill us, it's just something we'd prefer to avoid. We have the privilege of being wrong. You won't advance your cause or discover new truths if you're obsessed with being right all the time. And the only way not to be right all the time (and to compound your advantage and accomplish even more than you already have set out to) is to be as open to being wrong as often as you can afford to be.

...if you stopped actively messing up your own work.

You are a talented, powerful, and resilient creature. I mean look at how far you have come, and how much you manage to do despite the lack of time, constant self doubt, ridicule and needless criticism you aim at yourself.

When I was a kid my dream was to be Head of the British Library. Lofty ambition I know! I had this dream of being in charge of something that was truly worth sharing, where people could come and read things that they did not have to own. I now realise that a librarian is so much more than a cataloguer of books. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa, a sheepdog, and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the highly motivated user. Somehow that's exactly what we have ended up doing at Indiefield.

The original library was all about educating the working man who would work all day and become a more civilised member of society by reading at night. Things like Netflix are an even better library, with a librarian who knows almost every single film, and also knows what you've seen and what you're likely to want to see. It connects viewers with films. The way Indiefield connects clients with respondents.

We need librarians more than ever to figure out creative ways to find and use data. The modern library is so much more than just a warehouse of data and the modern librarian is a producer, concierge, connector, teacher, and fixer because with literally every book now available on a Kindle (cheap, not worth warehousing) the scarce resource is knowledge and insight, not access to data. The librarian is the gateway to the information economy and for the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime.

Many years ago Arthur C. Clarke said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." And wow isn't that true? If you time travelled back to the 1600s with an iPhone or a Tesla you would probably be worshipped (or burnt at the stake, who knows?). And the magic continues today with biotech, quantum mechanics, and of course AI. There's so much magic around us that we've probably started taking it for granted.

It's easy:

1. See me
2. Love me
3. Interact with me
4. Do what I ask
5. Miss me when I'm gone

Obviously your company is the best. You work there, you helped build it, everything it does makes sense to you, you have been involved from the start. So that means your company doesn't do anything wrong, and it always does the best it can do under the given circumstances. Everyone should use you! But the problem with truly believing that you are the best is that it leaves very little room to innovate and change. After all, the only reason to ever change is to be the best but you are already there so...

Being humble is the best response to a fast-changing and competitive marketplace. The humble company understands that it needs to re-earn attention, re-earn loyalty and reconnect with its clients as if every day is the very first day.

Has anyone ever looked you in the eye and said "I expected more from you"? Or asked why you are not making a difference? Or demanded that you set aside your fear and try anyway. Or accused you of holding back? If they have it's because they are showing you love and kindness and want the best for you.

People use personal trainers because the trainer pushes you to make more of an effort - you'll do more push ups or another lap if someone is shouting at you. So we hire a trainer or a coach or a whatever it is that we are into in order to make us do more and whip us into shape. Effort is transitory and hard to measure and even harder to do on a regular basis so it requires oversight. But ultimately, if we only grow on demand are we selling ourselves short? Can the student ever really become the master if the master is there simply to keep us motivated? Are you really helpless without someone telling you what to do?

We don't need cameras or watches because we have our phones. Nobody buys cameras. Nobody buys watches. Books are on our Kindles now. Nobody buys books. The market to nobody is huge and sometimes it's better to sell your product to nobody than to try to sell to everyone. Companies selling to nobody outperform those that are trying to sell to everyone

If I invite you to a party there is very little resistance. You either immediately say yes or if you have a diary clash, you tell me you can't make it. Either way, the decision is instant. So if your marketing and product departments are doing their job every sale is more like an invitation. It's hard to argue that the guys in the Apple store on Regent Street are really selling iPads when there's a queue out the door. You don't want it? Next! So the idea is to align everything in the company so that a sale is not a sale - it's an invitation. We all know that the salesperson's job is to help people overcome their fears so that they can purchase something they will ultimately be happy with. The goal of the marketing and product offering is to turn your salesman into an inviter.

If you are building something new, particularly a new digital product, you can't be online with your users to help them and guide them and show them how it works. Instead you need to build something that works intuitively. But something that's definitely worth doing is to have a "share your confusions" button. This is not about comments and suggestions it's about allowing users to help with your work and bring to your attention things that are not as clear as they should be.

There are companies that have been around for hundreds of years and plan to be around for hundreds more. No doubt their long run is more than ours. But too often we think in terms of the short run only. Do we really know what our long terms plans are? And how long is long?

I hope that these are the things children are learning:

• The ability to focus on a problem until it is solved
• The benefit of deferring short term gain for long term success
• Critical thinking (and reading)
• An ability to lead without clear delegated authority
• Project management, self management and idea management
• How to retain an insatiable desire for knowledge
• Self reliance

If you are too trusting of the invisible then you buy an e-book for £50 that promises to make you an overnight millionaire. So the trick is to discern the invisible stuff that's true from the invisible stuff that's a trick otherwise you're helpless in a world where just about every decision you make has to do with things that are invisible. The best advice is to be skeptical. Test and measure and do your research (seeing if the thing is the truth is often a useful starting point to help you move forward). The truth can't be a relative concept, it's just so often invisible.

Popularity is not a measure of impact. Popularity definitely does not correlate with having guts, working hard, and a willingness to take on a new and difficult project. You'd think that popularity is the most important thing in the world but you're wrong - delighting an audience that matters to you is.

Long work is spending a 12 hour working day filling in forms. Hard work is having an insight that pulls multiple an seemingly disparate ideas into one idea that ultimately helps the client improve their product.

Long work is always required. But hard work is scary. You might fail, something that you cannot do with long work (assuming you can fill in forms). So long work sets the stage, because you show up and you practice and you learn. Only after the long work can you be ready for the hard work. And you only get the benefits from the hard work if you are willing to think differently.

On the day that everyone finally notices your work, wholeheartedly approves of everything you have done and sings your praises, then what will happen? We all work so hard thinking about and planning for that day. Why? Maybe the approval of others is not as all it's cracked up to be. Maybe we don't need the whole world to know how great we are. What if knowing you did a great job yourself was actually enough?