The Custom Bully

A thoughtful note from Seth Godin and his blog's latest update on the custom bully: ​

Here's the thing: no matter how much you paid for your ticket, you never bother to even try bullying the conductor or the gate agent to get your train or plane to leave a few minutes later.

It leaves when it leaves, that's the deal.

Part of the challenge of selling custom work is that it sometimes seems that everything is up for grabs. You should stay up all night for a week. You should rearrange the orchids in order of smell, because even though it's not in the spec, hey, that would be good service, and we are paying a lot...

Promising perfect is actually not nearly as useful as promising what the rules are.

Boundaries eliminate the temptation to bully. State them early and often and don't alter them and believe it or not, the client will be happier as well. They didn't sign up to ruin your life. They signed up to get the most they could from you and your team, and the limits are the limits.

The kicker with avoiding the custom bully is sticking to the boundaries and not altering them, not answering emails late at night. But again, clients aren't signing up to "ruin lives". They're looking for the best work they can get. 

Logarithmic vs Exponential Growth

A recent blog post by ​Scott Young has been making the rounds lately. I've recently been thinking about career growth and the boundaries of a given role. Scott's post hits on some important nuances:

Anything you try to improve will have a growth curve. Imagine you ran everyday and you tracked your speed to finish a 5-mile course. Smoothing out the noise, over enough time you’d probably get a graph like this:

Here, improvement works on a logarithmic scale. As you get better, it gets harder and harder to improve. Elite athletes expend enormous effort to shave seconds off their best times. Novice athletes can shave minutes with just a little practice.

Logarithmic growth is the first type of growth. This is where you see a lot of progress in the beginning, but continuing progress is more difficult.

Now imagine a different graph. This time you’ve build a new website you update regularly and you’re measuring subscribers. This graph would likely look very different:

Why might it be important to understand which kind of growth path you're on? ​As Scott puts it, if you're on an exponential path and you don't know it, there's a possibility of pulling out of the game before you hit the breaking point of high growth.