Distilling down to “one word” is a “Creative Constraint”. Once you land on this, you have space to improvise on that theme.
It’s true, at least for now, that there are plenty of fish in the sea. And it’s also true that shooting fish in a barrel is pretty easy if there are enough fish and the barrel is small enough. You can’t have both. Either you approach the world as a widely dispersed bunch of opportunities where you’re never specific or on the hook. Or you realize that finding a very focused place to do your work rewards you many times over.
Seth Godin – “The fish, the sea and the barrel“
Seth is best known as a marketer, so his daily posts, like the one reposted here, often focus on marketing wisdom.
When I work with people on the most strategic of marketing conversations, taking their Brand (“who you are”) into their Positioning (“what do you want to be famous for”), we take time to distil that Positioning to one word or a short phrase.
Distilling down to “one word” is a “Creative Constraint”. Once you land on this, you have space to improvise on that theme, as well as to bring real focus to yourself, your business, those who may wish to hire you. However, to do this is “simple, but not easy”, as humans we often feel that such constraints are, well, constraining and restrictive rather than empowering, energising, clarifying.
The process of distilling to one word can feel hard for clients. I’ll often hear statements like: “but we can’t just say we do one thing, we can do so many things!”. Yes, I’ll say, but if you say you can do everything, you can’t be known for, be famous for anything.
I’m on a riff the last few daily posts on constraints, on boundaries, on what they can create in a positive way. Note, though, that sometimes you must be brave enough to trust the process, as well as the person who is taking you through it. The photo above is from the home page of Design Cayman, a client in Cayman, a wonderful set of creatives in architectural design. Last year I took them through the Positioning process. A massively and multi-talented team, sometimes the distillation felt challenging, but they stuck with it, then finally landed on their “one word”, which is, as you see: “We Know the Art of Building“.
From this, not only did they develop a deep and rich website, but they focussed in with absolute clarity on the types of clients they wanted, the service, product and value they offer those clients and, oh yes, that they are focussed on that “very focused place” Seth refers to.
If you would like to gain that level of focus, I’d love to talk to you. Though I only rarely do this specific work myself, I am happy to have a zoom with you and help you with “What Comes Next”. PS, for those who may be reading this post on or via a platform so that you haven’t seen my home page, my one word is simple: “What Comes Next“.