The "freedom seemed overwhelming"
How to pick a direction when they're all available to you.
In his book The Happiness of Pursuit, Chris Guillebeau tells about his quest to visit all the countries in the world. All 193 of them.
At the end of his quest, he talks about how he’s not going to stop traveling, but it will be different. During the quest, he traveled to new places so he could finish the quest. Choosing where to go was easy.
Have I been there already? Yes or No. If no, go there.
Now that the quest was over, he was “free to choose… and freedom seemed overwhelming.”
Similarly, the freedom to run almost any kind of marketing or growth or success campaign is overwhelming and paralyzing.
1 — Pick a destination
Chris had a long list of destinations, you could say, but the one I’ll use to tie this back to work is visiting all the countries in the world.
I’ve been thinking recently a lot about how to keep customers happier for longer. It’s one of the main reasons we started Accoil - help teams keep customers happy (and paying).
When we work with teams to build new workflows, it always starts with finding the right problem or opportunity to solve for.
Knowing what we want to accomplish makes it easy to start. If you lose too many customers each month, the goal could be to shrink that number. If too many people sign up but never buy a product, onboarding may need a fix.
Pick a number to improve and start moving towards it. Make it a meaningful, high-impact, important number.
2 — Define the constraints
The more countries Chris visited, the simpler his agenda got. Every time he ticked another country off the list, he had fewer to choose from next time.
When doing any work to keep more customers happier longer, there are a lot of ways to approach it. But if you list out all the things that you can’t do — like spend millions with a budget of $0 — you’ll start to see all the things you can try.
Your audience is your customer base. Even if you have a ton of customers, it’s a small list in the grand scheme of it.
Everyone is emailing, messaging, calling, advertising, and otherwise competing for customers’ attention, so you get only a little of it.
Your work has to be valuable to customers and to your company.
You probably have limited tools, limited budget, and limited people to try stuff.
Write down all the constraints. It’s freeing. If it helps, draw it out like world map and start crossing off the boxes you’ve already tried or simply can’t do.
3 — Start with one thing
I’ve done a lot of sales calls and worked with a lot of teams. There’s this thing that happens when people don’t pick a destination and define their constraints:
They realize they “can do all of it” and the freedom to choose gets immediately overwhelming.
Here’s what this looks like on a call: we’ll narrow in on a need to get more enterprise customers using a key feature. We’ll work out an approach… and then someone asks about doing the same for another customer segment, and another, and another.
It’s like there’s this “We can do all the things!” frenzy that happens. If nobody stops it and brings the focus back to the one thing we all already agreed is top priority, the freedom to choose makes it too hard to… choose.
So start with one thing that is a priority for the business. For so many teams, fixing even one thing can have an enormous impact on revenue and company health.
Off you go
Chris had the luxury of someone else making his list for him. 193 countries are all that exist, so it’s hard to change scope.
You may feel like “where do I even start?!” so maybe the best place to start is to pick one thing to improve, list out the ways you can and can’t do that, and then start.
To doing more things,
Peter
PS: I wonder if Chris quietly hopes for another country to be born so he can find one more way to continue his quest. Even for one more trip.
PPS: Always remember, you can just do things.