Psychotactics

Most people want to do everything.
They want to do blogs, websites, video, Twitter, Facebook and add another twenty thousand things to that list. What’s worse is that they get bad advice. People giving advice tell you, you should branch out, do different things. And that you if you do different things, you can become good at all of them all at once.

I agree—only to disagree.
Yes, do twenty thousand things if you wish.  But understand that it’s like spinning plates.
If you spin one plate, then you can indeed put another plate. But that assumes you then are still in a position to spin the first plate.

At all times, the plates need momentum. The more you put on, the more you have to watch. If one stops, then the whole thing crashes.

This plate spinning isn’t marketing. It’s management.
It becomes a nightmare in management more than anything else. If you can be brilliant in one field, then you can indeed go on to other fields. But would I recommend it all at once? I’d be very un-keen to do so.

And I take my own advice.
I stopped cartoons to do marketing. And now that my marketing sites are well and truly spinning, I’ve gone back to cartoons (not commercially though) on this blog.

Now I have the ability to spin several plates without losing momentum.

If you’re just starting up an online or offline business today with a store and no staff, etc., you could still do a few things  but nowhere close to what you could do in the future. Always make sure you have resources in place, before doing several things at a time. And there’s a bit of a caveat too. Not only do you need the resources, but you also can bet that dozens of things will go wrong. And you’ll need chaos time as well.

Spin all the plates you want.
But first get started with one. Then even as that is spinning, add another. And another. But make sure that you can keep them all going. As you can see, on this blog alone, I draw the cartoons, write the article, format the article, create an audio, format the audio, upload all relevant files. And to this, I’m adding video.

But I can manage it. And I can do it faster than ever before.
So what am I saying? I’m strongly suggesting you spin plates. But don’t try start with eight at once, will ya?

Note: There must be a ‘downside’ to spinning plates. I actually recorded the audio twice over. And with slightly different content too.    Both the audio files are below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 14th, 2009 at 4:29 am and is filed under Consumption, Human Nature, Podcasts, Testing 1,2,3. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.