KonzeptioNerd

Courage and Writing Impediments

Swiss sales guru Umberto Saxer has started to mail out his podcast (”Audio-Minutentipp”) to his newsletter-subscribers. This first installment I received is concerned with courage.

Those of you who understand (Swiss) German can check out the episode here: Minutentipp 07-20: Thema Angst vor dem Nein gesprochen von Umberto Saxer und Wolfgang Niedermeyer.

Saxer and Niedermeyer talk about the presence of mind and the courage necessary to act on an opportunity immediately. The reason we often don’t do this, says Saxer, is that we are afraid of the potential NO we might encounter. However, he continues, if we do not even try, we take the potential NO and turn it into a fact. Saxer advises to Just do it and take the opportunity, because, if just doing it is our aim, we’ll have succeeded no matter what.

This is excellent advice for all sorts of situations, not just sales pitches. It’s relevant for blogging, too. Often, the fear that I might not have anything smart to say or that an observation merits a longer post than I can presently manage keeps me from writing. And in the end, I haven’t written anything - smart or dumb - at all. But much of the merit of keeping a blog consists in keeping it in the first place. As a repository for observations, as a reminder for later work. Not every post needs to be fit for the Spiegel, as someone pointed out to me only recently.

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