Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

It's all about connecting
I used to think life was unfair. I grew up as one of the smartest kids in my school. But as I got closer and closer to college graduation, it became ever more evident: good grades and book learning was not what the world was after.

Again and again, I saw that advancement in the real world was based on something other than who got the highest grades. It was based on people skills. It was based on something I had neglected while I was tucked away in the safety of my little world, learning facts and formulas, far away from the unpredictability of that messy thing known as human interaction.

I call it messy because it's unpredictable. With fact and formulas, you have certainty. The facts don't change, and once you know the formulas, you can calculate all the answers you want with blessed certainty.

With unpredictable human interaction, you never know what you're getting. People don't fit into formulas that allow for only one solution. So I felt betrayed when after seeking after facts and formulas all my life, I was smacked in the face with seeing far lesser students advance ahead of me based on their ability to understand and influence people.

And though I still sometimes still catch myself trying to turn everything into a neat, predictable formula, I've pretty much gotten over the feeling that life was unfair because it valued people skills over my grasp of facts.

Because I realize that that's what it should value.

Life is all about connections. From little on, connections are the glue that holds our lives together: parents, family, friends—they're all a necessary part of life. And that doesn't end when we walk through the school door and are introduced to academic competition. We still need to use what we learn in some manner that is useful to those around us. Otherwise, what reason is there for anyone to reward us with a paycheck, or sales, or commissions?

Yet it's so easy when we start a business, to fall back into that isolationist thinking of "what product do I need in order to make lots of sales?" or "what marketing tricks do I need to learn to make a lot of money?" In one case the question seeks a fact (what product?) and in the other it seeks a formula (what marketing tricks?). But both leave the central part of making a sale completely out of the picture: the people buying your product or service.

Seeking these facts and formulas puts us squarely back in that academic cocoon—trying to solve our needs by surrounding ourselves with nice, predictable certainties instead of seeking to provide a useful service to all those unpredictable, unknown people we'd just as soon avoid.

"How can I ever hope to know what they want? Just give me something certain, something generic that frees me from risking failure by putting myself at the mercy of that unpredictable mass of people!"

But our desire for safe certainty instead of wondrous, but unpredictable, discovery is no more valid than my feeling of betrayal was when I first discovered that I couldn't slide through life on my ability to remember facts and formulas.

Find a niche—namely, people who share a common interest and common needs—rather than a product or a formula. Only once you find people's needs that need solving and a way to solve those needs will any of the facts or formulas do you—or anyone else—any good.
Jeff