for whom do you make the world a better place?

August 3rd, 2010 • posts i've written

Quick, try to answer the question – for whom do you make the world a better place?

Drawing a blank? Not good.

Yourself? Even worse.

It’s a simple exercise to walk through with a client that attempts to answer a fundamental question – who are your constituents? Or as Seth Godin puts it, who’s your tribe?

Once you can put your finger on a group of people, or groups of people, who share your values, you can begin to ask deeper questions about what they need and how you can serve those needs. Start with too big of a group (everybody, for instance) and there’s no way you’ll end up with a remarkable purpose. Start with too few and you’ll never scale – besides, at a fundamental level, we all want to belong to a larger consciousness – but we’re picky about our shared identities. Know your values, find your constituents, explore what they need, throw in some creativity, and pretty quickly you have a business model. Then, work tirelessly and fall face forward into a pile of good luck.

We used to say, ‘Who’s your target market?,’ and everybody answered, ‘teens!’ or ‘millenials!’ or some other heterogenous group with discretionary income drawn together by ineffective or inadequate data points like age or geography.

If you’re smart, and I know my readers are pretty smart, this is routine. You know this. In fact, I’ve almost bored you. You probably have Simon Sinek’s TEDx speech memorized, too.

But do you spend much time asking yourself this question?

I’ve been spending a lot of my time lately wracked by this question. My book will only be an empty personal exercise if I don’t successfully connect it to a formed or even nascent community to serve. Very few people are brilliant enough to pursue their own intellectual follies and draw a crowd. I need my amazing network with me. Bud Caddell & His Amazing Network sounds like my performance at the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

And our industry, too, will likely suffer more than it needs to if the people inside it can’t figure out whom we make the world a better place for.

You might rush to say, “Our clients, of course.” But I’d argue that you’re just drawing another ineffective or inadequate circle around a heterogenous group that happens to have some discretionary income. Unless, of course, you stand for something remarkable – something profound enough to rally like-minded clients to you like Amish folk to a dinner bell (slightly more upbeat of a metaphor than moths to a flame, don’t you think?). And, frankly, I can’t name many agencies that don’t stand for the same boring things as every other agency stands for. If you want the answer to be, “Our clients,” then you’ve got some work ahead of yourself. But by all means, it’s a worthy endeavor.

But I think there’s a second, equally important, answer to consider though. We can make the world a better place for creatives. Yesterday, the team at Behance wrote a post entitled, Welcome to the Era of Creative Meritocracy, in which they explored challenges facing creatives today and how they might offer assistance. It’s definitely worth a read.

With all of the democratizing power of the web and for all the freedom of modern culture, we often forget that it’s made life in some contexts more difficult. For one, careers themselves are especially frightening to new creatives just leaving school. The notion of a career ladder might make people like myself shudder, but for most it offers at least some expectance of consistency or predictability. I like to say that careers used to be like Mario Bros: it was by far easier to know how to move forward (with the screen, of course) and how to level up (eat that mushroom). But today, careers are much more like World of Warcraft: there’s an incredible number of options before you, and to a newbie all on her/his own, it’s paralyzing.

And that’s just one challenge creatives face. I’d go on, but I know a team of brilliant folks that are addressing some of these problems and I’d rather not give too much away.

But the basic idea behind identifying your constituency is that if your values really do align, if you can identify what they truly need, and if you serve those needs in the most compelling way, you can sometimes gain a network of passionate people willing to act on your behalf (and on their own behalf of course). And if you can sustain this behavior over time and facilitate connections between your constituents, you can start to call them a community.

And in our industry, he/she who rallies the best creative community wins. Because clients want the best creative work consistently.

Giving credit where credit is due, I can’t take any credit for this thinking, see previously mentioned team of brilliant folks.

But I digress. Start more simply. For whom do you make the world a better place?

For inspiration, see Benjamin Franklin’s daily schedule below and add “for _________” after “What good shall I do this day?,” filling in your constituency in the blank, of course.

Related posts:

1. free idea: answers and questions
2. missing step number two
3. make cool stuff happen

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