I’ve been watching with interest as the Basecamp creators have waged war against the Apple App Store over the principle of app approval. Basecamp’s corporate entity 37 Signals is rolling out a marginally interesting platform called HEY, a premium-priced email hosting service with some smart filters and UX improvements. This obviously requires client applications on iOS and Android, and thus these were created and submitted to their respective app stores for approval.

Apple has a very specific policy, though, when it comes to apps which do signup and payment for hosted services. In essence, Apple thinks that if you’re acquiring customers on their devices and paying for their service via your own app functioning within their mobile app framework, you oughtta pay them 30%. This has worked favourably for mobile games and some other types of entertainment products which lean on in-app purchases for revenue, and for whom the 30% is worth it to focus their funnel on the app ecosystem almost entirely, and wash their hands of transaction management — leaving all of that up to Apple.

Where you have to build this anyway, however, for the web and for the management of subscriptions to a service, the economics of handing 30% to Apple vs. 2% to a payment processor start to look punitive.

I have surfed this reef for more than a decade, and the workarounds are generally well-understood. Netflix and many others offer subscription services, yet you can’t sign up via the iOS app. Slack might allow you to sign up / sign into a group as a user, but the flow quickly exits the app and continues via email if you start creating a new group. Is this ideal? No. Does it allow Apple to suck and blow at the same time, allowing app developers to serve their users on Apple devices while still escaping usury at the hands of Phil Schiller? Yes.

The creators of Hey, for their own reasons, chose not to use any of these workarounds — workarounds they clearly have made use of in the past for their core SaaS business. I’m not here to point out the merits or pain associated with Apple’s 30% policy. I’m here to speculate on the reason for the crusade undertaken by DHH and Hey in picking this fight simultaneous with the launch of their app.

First, a rewind: in 1984, Nike was roundly criticized for signing an unproven basketball player to a $250,000.00 endorsement contract and designing a special basketball shoe — just for him. That player was Michael Jordan, and the first shoe out of the factory was the Jordan 1. You can read more about the history here, but because of the shoe’s controversial appearance it was banned by the NBA. Initially, they fined Michael Jordan (Nike paid the fines) and then banned the shoe outright for breaking “uniform rules”. This could have been a disaster for Nike. Instead, they used it to propel a marketing campaign positioning Nike as a countercultural revolutionary. This pitted the black, urban fan base that the NBA was attempting to cultivate at the time against them, and positioned Nike as sympathetic to the issue of race inequality at the hands of powerful corporations. The NBA gave Nike a huge gift with the ban: previously, basketball shoes were just leather and foam and stitching; but the NBA gifted the Jordan 1 with symbolism.

Jordans were not just taken up by urban kids aspiring to dunk in the Big League; they became objets within a hodgepodge of American, and indeed global, misfits and countercultural types. Everyone from skaters to grunge rockers to oddball intellectuals donned Jordans as a sign of rebellion. Thanks to campaigns and contributions from the likes of Spike Lee, the shoes became a symbol of the rise of black culture (and hip-hop along with it) that wonderfully infected global culture for the next three decades, and which continues today. While that unproven basketball player clearly delivered on the court and in the community Air Jordans attained a cultural prestige that grew far, far beyond the NBA. As the story goes: the NBA eventually relented, the deal with Michael eventually became worth tens of billions of dollars to Nike, and Jordan became an enduring symbol of freedom, athleticism, aspiration, and more.

This was an early example of conflict marketing. It turns out people generally side with Davids, not Goliaths.

As a founder of Basecamp and creator of Ruby on Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson is notorious for picking fights on Twitter. Like a certain orange-tinged President, DHH has learned that by being controversial he can garner attention. Attention is a currency he can then bestow upon his programming language, his project management software, his books, or whatever else he seeks to promote. This has worked pretty well. Basecamp is worth >$100Bn according to estimates.

With the launch of Hey, DHH and his partners have taken this conflict-centred marketing technique a step further: they picked a fight with Apple.

What’s most conspicuous about this, leading me to conclude that the conflict was deliberate, is that prior to launch the Hey crew submitted a fully-featured app to the App Store, sans signup/payment, for approval. Once this was cleared, available for release, and the launch had commenced, however, they uploaded a newer version which explicitly conflicts with Apple’s policy. This leaves the working app in the store, available for download. — while they are free to carry out their campaign against Apple to reform that policy.

They have now taken the guise of the revolutionary, positioning Apple as the big bad corporation, hiding behind its greed, old-world-thinking, and ideological zeal. They have become Jordan, and Apple is the NBA.

Email hosting is notoriously difficult to market, and even once users do sign up for a service it’s very difficult to onboard them. Who wants to change their email address? Who wants to abandon an online inbox filled with gigabytes of mail? Who wants to pay for an email service when they can use Gmail, Hotmail, etc. for free? How many people know how to move their personal domain from one email host to another, manipulating DNS and configuring SPF and DKIM? The audience narrows rather quickly.

As a result true innovation around email has been very slow, though we can all admit it’s very needed. Very few companies have launched that represent new ideas in the past ten years, let alone the past 20. And on the surface, “better email” is a bit of a yawn compared to, say, free music available instantly from the entire pantheon of recorded music.

So it makes sense, if you’ve spent a ridiculous amount of money (my guess is the hey.com domain name cost ~$2M), to juice the marketing at launch in any way you can. Most developers will see this fight as a worthy one, so their desire to amplify someone punching up at what they see as the schoolyard bully shaking them down for lunch money is strong. There has been resounding support in the several days since this has emerged. And the story of Hey’s launch, which did garner some attention because of who was launching it, has now been vastly overshadowed by the story about this fight. The natural early audience for Hey being a technical one, this also represents very good targeting.

Still, Apple maintains these policies for a reason, and the technique driving this controversial launch may in fact be backfiring. Hey could in fact find themselves with no access whatsoever to the Mac or iOS app stores, if they stick to their guns and let this controversy rage, which I assume they will.

Still, this mission could ultimately prove quixotic.

Michael Jordan has spent his entire adult life recognizing the need to fulfill his role as an inspiring and uncontroversial professional athlete in service of his brand. Along with Kaepernick, Woods, Gretzky, and other greats he has successfully cultivated a public image as a David smashing goliaths with sheer determination and some degree of moral righteousness.

Hansson and Fried, on the other hand, have used their pulpit to pick on Venture Capitalists, justify excluding employees from equity ownership in startups, and taken on other questionable debates. Nowadays there is no great shortage of programmers with messiah complexes, and one of this pairing may in fact be the patient zero of that phenomenon. In other words, DHH and Fried are far from puritanical when it comes to their business ethics, and this may ultimately blunt their assault on Apple, though they very clearly have delivered one or two slam dunks.

I’ve actually reversed my earlier position — I think that now is the time for regulators to step in and enshrine the tenets of Net Neutrality that have helped the internet to flourish as the fastest growing communications technology in human history.

Here’s the PPT Slide Deck (better in its original Keynote form below):

… and better yet, here’s video of the event:

… as always, a huge influence on my approach to the internet, and communications technology in general, is David Isenberg… in particular his paper “Rise of the Stupid Network“.

I also gave an interview to the Vancouver Sun in 2017 underpinning the same argument: that is, that if carriers are permitted to prioritize traffic commercially, the result would be immediately chilling for early-stage ventures who can’t afford to pay the vig.

Also, some funny stories from Silicon Valley bubble 1.0

I’ve uploaded the slide deck here.  Of course, delivery is always better when given by the deck’s creator.  For the students, I promised to post some of my favourite startup pitch deck breakdowns: here, here, here, and here.

It’s time we nipped this in the bud, people.  I’ll confess that, in writing this column, for the first time I googled the term.  I’ve heard it thrown around for at least half a decade, heard it misapplied to various marketing and software and product management roles at various startups on both sides of the border, and heard people use it to describe.. me.

It’s an appealing term for someone who began his career as an actual hacker: trying and failing and trying again until ultimately succeeding at various software and actual [ahem] hacking projects.  Eventually, I progressed to Product Management and Marketing and that is where I’ve hung my hat for 20 years.  So, you’d think I would be all over this validation of my craft, right?

Click to view slideshow.

Wrong.  Here’s the problem:  like so much modern business terminology, “Growth Hacking” has become quickly co-opted, misconstrued, misapplied, over-promoted, and ultimately used to denigrate the role of marketers within the startup community and elsewhere.  In particular, I recently noted a company with no VP Marketing or any senior marketing roles on their web site, advertising for a Growth Hacker role.

Despite its title-du-jour status, Growth Hacking is not a replacement for Marketing.  It’s one of the arrows in the quiver.  People often like to cite the “hack” of Hotmail juicing their growth by appending a footer to every outbound email by default that promoted the service and contained a link to the site.

In the early days of RingCentral, and before that BuzMe, we ensured that all callers to users of our service got a hint at what service was routing their calls.  We didn’t think to call this “Growth Hacking” or anything else.  But while pitching Venture Capitalists in those days, this was our response to how we made our service viral.

This sort of engineered virality has become a staple of early-stage service and product marketing: what is it about your product that the very act of using it helps promote it?  But that’s just the thing: it’s not all they do.

But wait!  There’s more:  During this interview about How Stewart Butterfield scaled Slack, wherein he provides no actual information about how he scaled Slack, Butterfield does drop this little gem about so-called “Growth Hacking”, and why he hates it:

“It’s so easy to fall into the trap of like maximizing for some local position or juking the stats in the– Juking the stats. Yeah, in ‘The Wire’ terminology. So a quick example of that is an email that Twitter would send that would give you the top five interesting tweets from your network today. And they would show you the tweet, but they didn’t link directly to the tweet. They linked just to the timeline of the person who tweeted it. And the inference, and I’m almost positive this is why, they did it is because you would go click on the timeline, and then you would try to find that tweet. And you would end up frustrated and angry at Twitter, but you’d spend a few more moments on the site. And so when they did A/B test, if some people got this email and some people got this email, they’re like oh, people got this email spent a little bit longer on the site, and that’s the result that I want.”

Looking purely at the data yields a false dividend.  And in the specific case cited by Stewart, frustrated users.  Services compromising their user experience in favour of techniques to maximize time-on-site or other metrics ultimately could corrode growth and engagement, or much worse: leave a service open to an attack from a competitor.

Concepts like Growth Hacking can grab hold of a culture, within a community or a company. This one in particular seems appealing

because of its implication of low cost, accessibility, and measurability.  But taken as a snapshot without the benefit of a broader marketing approach, or an appreciation of the product’s need to service happy users, the overall effects and the burden of expectations can bury the noblest of intentions for those who identify themselves as Growth Hackers.

I’m all for the idea of taking ideas and techniques for building and marketing better businesses, applying labels to them, and sharing the concepts broadly.  But the danger in too much hype around these concepts is that they’ll be considered and promoted by some as an end-all / be-all solution, which none of them is.

Every successful marketing effort blends the appropriate mix of marketing techniques and, yes, hacks.  That alchemy is as unique as the team, and the organization, implementing it.  There is no panacea.  Beware of anyone who says there is.  I feel like I say this a lot.

Nowadays that’s really no longer possible. I still snicker when sitting in meetings where we talk about moving a few pixels around on a screen or changing the shading of a button (the kind of thing I’d do myself between sips of Jolt Cola in the 1990s), but it takes a substantial team to create a credible web service that offers a meaningful experience to end customers. There is some respite from this, though: If you’re just looking to sell stuff there are hosted services like Shopify, and if you’re just looking to publish stuff, there are open-source software web frameworks like WordPress that can make this pretty easy to customize on the cheap.

But for making apps? Not so much. People assume, without really thinking through the problem at hand, that apps are easier to create than a full-blown website. In reality, they are ever so much harder. First of all, you have the problem that there are multiple platforms (iOS, Android being the primary ones) for creating an app. Want to serve everyone? You’ll need to support more than one platform. Want to choose just one? Remember that there are a lot fewer iOS (iPhone, iPad) users than there are Android (Samsung, LG, HTC, and more) users. However, in a strange quirk of fate more iOS users actively seek out and use apps.

And sure, more sophisticated developers will tell you that there are open-source and commercial frameworks that promise to allow you to write a single codebase and support multiple mobile phone platforms. Depending on the complexity of what you’re looking to do, that may or may not solve or exacerbate your problem. But the more important, dynamic people often fail to understand is that apps are just a beachhead. The overwhelming majority of apps you see in the App and Play stores communicate with a server somewhere on the Internet in order to store, retrieve, and compare information—particularly apps that have social features or which operate some sort of service. So really, the app is just the tip of the iceberg. You’ll have to think about what sort of functions the server element of your solution needs to perform. Data stored on one app cannot be shared on another user’s app without transiting your server, remember. So, broadly speaking, most apps are really just a user interface slapped on to a series of tasks performed by an internet server floating out there somewhere in the cloud.

Most developers tend to specialize. If you’re creating an app for iOS, generally that coder will have specialized skills for that development environment (xCode or Swift). If you’re building the Android version of your app, there are coders who work in Java or other frameworks created for that platform. Neither of these developers will probably want to tackle the server-side element of your service… which requires yet another set of skills and programming tools.

Furthermore, apps are not typically fire-and-forget. Once your team finishes coding and testing, and you release your app, you are now obligated to maintain it. Shifts in the frameworks, operating systems and the screen resolutions of the devices themselves means you now have to keep on top of these changes and adjust your app to accommodate these. So building and running an app is a protracted ground war which is powered exclusively by your money.

The core message, then, is that this app thing usually isn’t so simple as it might seem. There are many forks in the road and pitfalls that can either cost or save you a mountain of money initially, or down the road. If you bump into me on a street corner and share your big idea, I’m not going to be able to quote you a price and a timeline on the spot. It is just not that easy. Anyone who convinces you that you can simply knock out an app for your business from their basement, in their spare time, is most likely focused on parting you from your money.

Ian Bell has been bending bits into business since 1993 and is creator of ‪Tingle, ‪RosterBot and other things celebrated and ignominious. Follow him @ianb on Twitter. This article originally appeared in 2016 for Profit Magazine.

1) Don’t be Chicken Little

Awesome. You found something wrong. Your impulse will be to tell the team (this is a good impulse) and help the members understand why this is important to you. The matter of importance is usually where the non-techies get into trouble, because one has to remember that when you find a bug, it’s probably the result of someone’s mistake—and they’re likely to feel bad about it. But the sky probably isn’t falling. If you layer too much hyperbole on the affair then you’re likely to take them from feeling guilty to feeling offended. Then they will begin to debate the importance, versus fixing the bug, and time gets lost. Also bear in mind that any given day for a software developer is spent slaying a vast array of similar bugs; they might have a different understanding of your bug’s importance than you do. Providing context for why a malfunction is affecting things is good. Freaking out and demanding immediate action is bad.

2) Use the tools they do

These days most software teams use workflow management and issue tracking tools (like Pivotal Tracker).  These are usually web-based tools that are easy to learn. Take the time to learn them.  When you have an idea for a feature or discover a bug, rather than barking out an email and CCing the world it is generally appreciated by all when you submit these via the issue tracker. The team members will also appreciate your interest in learning how they manage their tasks, so when you ask for a little training on the tracker they will probably be pretty jazzed to help you out. This has an added bonus: once submitted to the tracker, your idea is kept in a safe place, not buried in months of email and convoluted threads. So nobody can claim they forgot about it and lost your suggestion.

3) Take things as far as you can

Say you’re at a cocktail party and Dmitri tells you there’s a problem with your website on his computer. You’re obviously going to want to tell the team. However, this information alone is not particularly useful. Who’s Dmitri? Where can he be reached? What kind of computer was he using? What web browser? Is he a user? Or trying to sign up? Or trying to buy something? Chase down as much context as you can so that when someone rolls in to tackle this heinousness, they have already grabbed some of the information from you to save them time. You’re also showing respect for the team in not sending them on a wild goose chase. Many such reports can be dismissed with even the most cursory information: “Oh, he’s running Windows ME and Internet Explorer 6 on an ACER Palmtop? That’s hisproblem.”

4) Be interested in the process

Prioritizing tasks within a software team is black art. Mapping these to the business objectives of your company is where you come in. But you don’t necessarily get to put one thing in front of the other without understanding that even writing software effectively requires strategic thinking. Sometimes you need to make three left turns in order to head right. Sometimes the best way to do something takes longer, and other times, you just want to bash something out. There are many many schools of thought on this like “lean” and “agile,” but in 21 years of creating software within teams I can assure you that we’ve never done it the same way twice. There is no cookie-cutter methodology, and anyone who tells you there is is trying to sell you their book. Work collaboratively within the team, and allow every voice to contribute. This is also a good way to learn who your smarter players are.

5) Encourage yes men

This is worthy of an entire piece, which we’ll get to some other day. The easiest way to sound smart in a group is to be a blocker. When an idea is floated, the expert will scoff “no, because…” and provide some poorly strung together but authoritative diatribe on why something can’t be done. The temptation is for the crew to lean back in awe of the dissident’s expertise. But in the context of a startup it’s wrong. Don’t be that person. Don’t allow that person in the room. The correct response to pushing the envelope of the possible is “Yes, If…” and explore what conditions need to change for something to be possible. Maybe those conditions are impractical, or maybe someone else in the group knows how to meet that “if” requirement to cross the chasm. If the whole discussions stops at a “No” and a self-professed expert digs their heels in, then you’ll never really know, will you?

6) Don’t be a feature creep

When teams get good at working together, they get better at understanding how long it will take to do something. Agreeing on a timeline for a specific set of objectives is good and, though these’ll be soft, the one thing that tends to lead to massive expansion in the length of a project is a continuous stream of “Oh, another thing…” suggestions which we call “feature creep.” New ideas will pop up as you proceed, sure, but try to understand what’s substantial and what’s negligible in terms of impact to the development timeline. To minimize delays, before you start it’s important to sit down and sketch out both the objectives of the project and its detailed requirements. Writing them down into a document doesn’t hurt. But poking your head into the development team’s work area and saying “you know what would be great?…” will lead to rolling eyeballs and stretched timelines. The more you know at the outset, the better off you are.

Creating good software is collaborative and iterative and successful projects are rarely managed in a truly top-down fashion. Be understanding that developers’ time, like yours, is pretty valuable. By doing the things that you can do to ease their job, working within the set of tools they use to guide their work weeks, and by actually communicating with the team as a peer, you can both learn a whole lot about the process and ensure that everyone is aligned on the goals and timelines of the project. It’ll also enhance the team’s respect for your contribution as the business/marketing/sales/support/warehouse/etc. person, a role they likely only vaguely understand.

The basis of making everybody smarter is good communication. These techniques are a key part of being successful in any software endeavour, and though I don’t have a book to sell you they are an excellent starting point in diving into the process of creating new technology. And if this all seems like a lot of work to you? Time to hire a product manager.

Ian Bell has been bending bits into business since 1993 and is creator of ‪Tingle, ‪RosterBot and other things celebrated and ignominious.  Follow him @ianb on Twitter.  This article originally appeared in Profit Guide magazine.

As a rule of thumb, advertising experts believe that it takes an average of five “impressions” of your brand in order for an individual to form enough of a bond to become your customer. They might, in fact, click your ads or experience your brand several times before they become a purchaser.

This real-world behaviour, of course, wreaks havoc on the budgets and plans of online marketers, because we have been building and measuring our online campaigns like we just finished watching Glengarry Glen Ross.

The sales funnel is dead. Or, at least, the traditional sales funnel is dead. We’re now starting to design and to measure campaigns as they guide a consumer along a “decision journey” and to build the relationship with the consumer progressively and with increasing effectiveness.

The decision journey (or at least this moniker) was brought to the fore by researchers from McKinsey& Co. in 2009. In their paper, the authors described the consumer’s experience with a new brand or idea as a “circular journey, with four primary phases representing potential battlegrounds where marketers can win or lose.”

When we began actively marketing RosterBot in 2014, we realized the effects of this behaviour as we started to use social marketing methodologies (engaging users in scale via Facebook, Twitter, our company blog, etc.). We were very good at driving traffic in the tens of thousands by writing great blog posts, posting hilarious video content and so on, and encouraging people to share them. This was happening at pennies per visitor, and fractions of a penny per impression. These were not, however, leading to a compelling number of customer signups.

So we turned to retargeting. If you’ve ever abandoned a purchase at an online store, and then were suddenly beset by ads for the items from your deserted cart at that online merchant, you’ve been the object of a retargeted ad. Retargeting networks like AdRoll buy online advertising inventory in bulk on traditional ad networks (Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, etc.) and then resell these at a higher value. Here’s the retargeting cycle:

You should be willing to pay more for retargeted ads (still on a pay-per-click basis, by the way) than for generic ads because the retargeter is actually taking contextual information from your website and the user’s browser to target them directly based on their prior visit to your site. But here’s the good news: the retargeted ads generally cost roughly the same as any other online advertisement.

The challenge for our team is that we’re only interested in people who play sports, not simply those who ‘like’ sports. So, on Facebook, we market the content to people who “like” certain sports, but our content is really only designed to appeal to actual players. In this way the content acts as both a separator to filter the athletes out from the fans and as an amplifier that encourages them to share RosterBot with their friends.

The reality is that in this “social” session, at least, the site visitor is less likely to sign up–they’re just meeting us for the first time, after all. The best we can hope for in that first visit is that they share our funny video or post. This is where retargeting takes over.

Now that we’ve got their cookie (or rather they’ve got ours), we can retarget these visitors with a progressive campaign of ads to nurture their interest in signing up. This might take days, weeks or months. A healthy percentage of those do eventually return, and regardless of how high or low that number is, we only pay when they do. In the interim, we’re extending their understanding of our brand completely for free.

Unlike visits generated by our social content, visits generated by retargeted ads convert with very favourable economics. As a bonus, retargeting also plugs into our other campaigns such as press, radio ads, and search advertising, to radically increase their overall effectiveness. In essence all we need to do is generate that first impression, drive the user to visit our site, and then we are able to bring them back and develop that relationship further via off-board ads.

Customer acquisition, whether online or not, is really a conversation between a brand and the consumer. The key to success is to take a more considered, nuanced approach to developing your relationship with the consumer, and to understand that the funnel simply ain’t what it used to be.

Ian Bell has been bending bits into business since 1993 and is creator of ‪Tingle, ‪RosterBot and other things celebrated and ignominious.  Follow him @ianb on Twitter.  This article originally appeared in Profit Magazine.

Its central character Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt) serves as the fast-talking alter-ego to an unnamed wage slave played by Edward Norton, and could be fairly characterized as the film’s prolifically entrepreneurial sparkplug.  Durden offers a set of challenges to the travails of modernity including picking fights with random individuals on the street, and destroying the world’s financial institutions with massive nitroglycerine bombs — much of it under the moniker “Project Mayhem”.

Those particular strategies might not sit well with most of us.  The movie so upset studio executives when it was released in 1999 that marketing budgets were slashed and the exec who greenlit the project was fired — but “Fight Club” has since found a huge following and massive commercial success.

Amid Tyler’s, shall we say, “creative” set of approaches to modern life, however, rest a litany of lessons which will serve you, the real-world entrepreneur, as you set forth growing your business.  If you aspire to nurture your own Project Mayhem to reach or exceed the success of Tyler Durden’s, try following his straightforward advice ripped straight from the movie (my interpretations follow his lines):

TD: “You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis.”

IB:  If you’re the kind of person who’s happy defining yourself by titles, semi-monthly pay, the corner office, or the parking spot with your name on it – startups aren’t for you.  You’ll need to get way out of your comfort zone to succeed on your own.  Some of those perks will come along anyway, if you’re successful, but that’s not the real reward.

TD:  “I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let… lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may.”

IB:  This is akin to Steve Jobs’ advice to “stay hungry; stay foolish”.  You’ll never grow unless you concede that you don’t have all the answers, and until you are able to accept results that differ from what you expect.  This is about putting yourself out there, warts and all, and rolling with the punches.

TD:  “I don’t wanna die without any scars.”

IB:  Seriously, what’s wrong with taking risks?  Your scars denote experience, earned wisdom, and courage.  That latter attribute is what will lead you down the path to success the quickest.  Starting a new business is risky no matter how you play it, so don’t make the mistake of taking the conservative line.

TD:  “Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.”

IB:  Don’t get caught up believing your own press.  By all means, in many circumstances you’ll have to “fake it until you make it”, but don’t internalize that performance.  You are what you are.  You know your limitations.  You are not yet a chicken, but you’re working to get there… and the second you forget that fact, you’ll jump the shark.  Therefore, stay humble.

TD:  “You choose your own level of involvement.”

IB:  Output is generally a proportional measure of input.  Want the fruits of your effort to succeed?  Work at it.  Work with passion.  Work with focus.  Simply going through the motions, and “putting it on your action items list” doesn’t cut it.

TD:  “Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing. Like the first monkey shot into space.”

IB:  Remember this: You will encounter resistance, friction, and obstacles.  You will be frustrated.  This is part of the journey.  Progress is made one monkey at a time and for a time you will be that monkey, bewildered by the goings on outside your tiny little capsule.  Embrace the challenges that beset you and understand the universe at its worst is benevolent, not malicious.

TD:  “No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.”

IB:  (Confession: This is my favourite).. Know what does not matter? The colour of the sofa in the office lobby.  Or even whether or not you should have an office lobby.  Work on the big stuff, let others sweat the small stuff.  Your mind is a finite resource.  If you’re thinking about frivolities, you’re not thinking about the important issues for exactly that slice of time.  Shame on you.

If you have not read it, the movie is very faithful to Chuck Pahlaniuk’s original book… it’s worth a quick weekend of reading.  There are many lessons for living simply, and the book confronts our relationship with material possessions head-on.  Most importantly a major objective of “Fight Club” is to inspire those of us who might seek to leave their mark on the planet (hopefully constructively) to get off the couch and get things moving.  Let’s hope that, whatever your vision of the future looks like, that inspiration touches you.

** this article was originally published under another, much worse title at Profit Magazine.