The 20 Percent is a weekly newsletter that brings you breakthrough ideas applied to website marketing.
Hello friends, and welcome to this edition of The 20 Percent. Pablo Picasso is often quoted as saying: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” Whether Picasso did indeed say that is open to some debate, but Steve Jobs was certainly a brand convert. Radical originality doesn’t have a high return on investment. Instead, there is a high … Read More
Hello friends, and welcome to this edition of The 20 Percent. This week’s breakthrough idea is about building your opportunity space with content curation: Consistently creating original content is hard. It’s hard because creativity needs fostering, and original ideas need time to mature. But writing your content from scratch isn’t the only way to build an audience. There’s an … Read More
Hello friends, and welcome to this edition of The 20 Percent. This week’s breakthrough idea is from Seth Godin’s This Is Marketing. The marketing that has suffused our entire lives is not the marketing that you want to do. The shortcuts using money to buy attention to sell average stuff to average people are an … Read More
Hello friends, and welcome to this edition of The 20 Percent. This week’s breakthrough idea comes from the mid-1990s and is called The Overton Window. The Overton Window is a model for understanding how ideas in society change over time and influence politics. The core concept is that politicians are limited in what policy ideas they … Read More
Hello friends, and welcome to this edition of The 20 Percent. This week’s breakthrough idea is from Wil Reynolds, founder & director of strategy at Seer Interactive. In a service industry like mine, if you out care your competition, you will kill them. If you care more about your customer’s outcome, if you care more about your team’s outcome… we can destroy our … Read More
Hello friends, and welcome to this edition of The 20 Percent. This week’s breakthrough idea is from Peter Thiel’s Zero to One. Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum. You could build the best version of an app that … Read More
Hello friends, and welcome to this edition of The 20 Percent. This week’s breakthrough idea is from Daniel Hillis, co-founder of The Long Now Foundation. “When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by … Read More
Hello friends, and welcome to this edition of The 20 Percent. This week’s breakthrough idea is a methodological principle (and one of my favorite mental models) called the Ockham’s razor. Suppose that there are two explanations for something. The explanation that requires the least speculation is invariably better. The more assumptions you have to make, … Read More
Hello friends, and welcome to this edition of The 20 Percent. This week’s breakthrough idea comes from Naval’s Making Money Isn’t About Luck. A lot of people think making money is about luck. It’s not. It’s about becoming the kind of person that makes money. Naval is one of my favorite thinkers. Moreover, his breakthrough … Read More
Hello friends, and welcome to this edition of The 20 Percent. This week’s breakthrough idea is from Alan Weiss’s Million Dollar Consulting. Marketing is the art and science of creating need […]. When you knock on a door, you have to justify why you want entry. When people knock on your door, they’re happy to … Read More