I’ve been working through my own mini-life-crisis recently, which in truth is interesting to no one other than myself. However, I’m making some major changes to my business because of it – plus, it’s Thursday and I’m Thursday Girl and I don’t feel like writing the AdWords shtick today. This is what’s on my mind instead.
Earlier in the year, I was chastised for expecting that my clients and my site visitors were like me, and for treating them the way I expect to be treated as a power user. And I was a little offended at the time. Being a tad altruistic, I sincerely want people to make what I would consider to be smarter choices about their interactions with the internet and email as a whole. But I let that idea sink in for a while.
And then I was talking to my pal a couple weeks ago – I’d been beating my head against a wall all day at this place that just frustrates me endlessly – and when she got done laughing at me for getting worked up over the quality of things I can’t control, she reminded me that it’s not always the method that counts so much as the result.
So I started considering some changes. And I kept running up against this huge emotional barrier, this moral outrage that wouldn’t even allow me to entertain some of the thoughts I was thinking. But in the end, I have to meet my audience where they are, and not where I want them to be – and I have to run my business like the business it is. And it’s okay to do that. I can embrace other methodology, if I do it in a manner that will keep my inner quality diva happy, because the method is sometimes less important than the result.
I’m not saying I’ve got it all quite worked out yet, but at least I’ve given myself permission to approach things in a new manner – and maybe that doesn’t make me quite as evil as I previously thought.
