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The Harvard Business Review has an article entitled, Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything. I actually haven’t read it yet, or at least at the point of writing this post I hadn’t. I saw the title and thought that I’d like to read it, but then I thought it would be an interesting exercise if I would come up with my six keys, then compare them to the ones that HBR had.

So here are MY six keys to being excellent at anything:

1) You have to be passionate about it. It takes so much to be excellent at anything that if you don’t enjoy the experience, the hard work, the dedication it will take to get there, there’s very little chance you’ll ever get there.

Addition by @Rebecca_Jarrett – I’m a big fan of #1. I don’t think anyone ever became an expert at something they were only moderately interested in, passion is a must.

2) Experience is mandatory. This may be obvious, but its critical. In the immortal words of Allen Iverson, “Practice?!?”. That’s right, practice. If Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell taught me anything, it takes 10,000 hours to be great at something.

3) Be willing to learn. What experience can’t teach you, books can. Or classes. Or mentors. The list goes on and on, but you have to be willing to educate yourself constantly if you want to be excellent at anything.

Addition by @ktmel – I think humbly asking for advice is so important. No one is perfect and we can learn something from each and every person in our lives. Continual growth!

4) Singular focus. This one might be a little controversial, but my experience tells me if you want to be excellent at something, it almost has to be your single driving force. Want to be excellent at a sport? You can’t play other sports in the offseason. You have to practice the sport you want to be excellent at no matter the season. Very few have been able to be excellent at more than one thing at a time.

Addition by K Keller – One comment that supports “Singular Focus”: It’s very important to know what you’re not…to know what not to do. That might sound like a trivial distinction, but it can be very helpful in selecting and prioritizing your activities. Some of the best strategy statements clearly express what to do and what not to do.

5) Work harder than everyone else. And want it more than anyone else. Michael Jordan. Jerry Rice. Both considered by many to be the greatest to ever play their sport. Both were known to be the most competitive freaks to suit up. And probably most important, both were known to work harder than anyone else. And say what you will about Tiger Woods, but he does this same thing. No one puts in more time on the course than Tiger.

6) Believe in yourself. Take two people with the exact same skill in something. One has confidence in themselves. One doesn’t. Who do you think’s going to be excellent?

7) Addition by @t0mharris – Get good at failing. On the way to excellence, your results may often fall short of your expectations. If you get hung up on perfection, you’ll slow yourself down. Getting better means failing quickly and often.

8) Addition by @jayjhun – Problem solving is an art/skill that I fear may get lost in the shuffle but one other key to success that i’d humbly submit.

9) Addition by @MargaretJWarner – Don’t fret or change strategy when being excellent leads you off the beaten path.

10) Addition by @webiegal – Live it. Breathe it. Be it.

11) Addition by @fmccaul – I’d add “be flexible” in there.

Ok, so those are my six keys. Looking at what the HBR article has…

1 – Pursue what you love. Perfect, same as my first one.

2 – Do the hardest work first. Interesting, I didn’t consider that. Could debate it.

3 – Practice intensely. Yep, have that one.

4 – Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. Man, I was so close to having this one. I almost made one of mine, “Be humble and ask for advice.” But then I changed it at the last minute to “Believe in yourself”. I almost put the caveat that although you need to believe in yourself, you also have to be humble enough to ask for advice. But I could easily say its part of my “Be willing to learn” as I mention the need for mentors. So close :)

5 – Take regular renewal breaks. Like it but didn’t think of it.

6 – Ritualize practice. Ok, I get it, but seems similar to #3 on the list or at least could have been combined with it.

Seems HBR and I were on a similar tact with this. Anyone else have some additions they’d like to make?

So here are MY six keys to being excellent at anything:

1) You have to be passionate about it. It takes so much to be excellent at anything that if you don’t enjoy the experience, the hard work, the dedication it will take to get there, there’s very little chance you’ll ever get there.

2) Experience is mandatory.  This may be obvious, but its critical. In the immortal words of Allen Iverson, “Practice?!?”.  That’s right, practice.  If Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell taught me anything, it takes 10,000 hours to be great at something.

3) Be willing to learn. What experience can’t teach you, books can.  Or classes.  Or mentors.  The list goes on and on, but you have to be willing to educate yourself constantly if you want to be excellent at anything.

4) Singular focus. This one might be a little controversial, but my experience tells me if you want to be excellent at something, it almost has to be your single driving force.  Want to be excellent at a sport?  You can’t play other sports in the offseason.  You have to practice the sport you want to be excellent at no matter the season.  Very few have been able to be excellent at more than one thing at a time.

5) Work harder than everyone else.  And want it more than anyone else. Michael Jordan.  Jerry Rice.  Both considered by many to be the greatest to ever play their sport.  Both were known to be the most competitive freaks to suit up.  And probably most important, both were known to work harder than anyone else.  And say what you will about Tiger Woods, but he does this same thing.  No one puts in more time on the course than Tiger.

6) Believe in yourself.  Take two people with the exact same skill in something.  One has confidence in themselves.  One doesn’t.  Who do you think’s going to be excellent?

Ok, so those are my six keys.  Looking at what the HBR article has…

1 – Pursue what you love.  Perfect, same as my first one.

2 – Do the hardest work first.  Interesting, I didn’t consider that.  Could debate it.

3 – Practice intensely.  Yep, have that one.

4 – Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses.  Man, I was so close to having this one.  I almost made one of mine, “Be humble and ask for advice.”  But then I changed it at the last minute to “Believe in yourself”.  I almost put the caveat that although you need to believe in yourself, you also have to be humble enough to ask for advice.  But I could easily say its part of my “Be willing to learn” as I mention the need for mentors.  So close :)

5 – Take regular renewal breaks.  Like it but didn’t think of it.

6 – Ritualize practice.  Ok, I get it, but seems similar to #3 on the list or at least could have been combined with it.

Seems HBR and I were on a similar tact with this.  Anyone else have some additions they’d like to make?

And I had seen their CEO, Tony Hsieh (pronounced “shay”), on Celebrity Apprentice and I’ve seen his tweets, but I was never really that impressed.  Boy, should I have been.  Guy is awesome.

I’m not sure why I downloaded the book, Delivering Happiness, but once I started reading it I couldn’t put it down.  Finished it in 2 days.  Couldn’t put it down and considering I read it on the iPad where there are a million distractions built right in, that’s an impressive feat in my book.

First and foremost, it’s a phenomenal book for anyone involved in startups.  Tony’s story of founding LinkExchange (which he eventually sold to Microsoft for $250 million) and then funding and ultimately running Zappos is a great story for anyone that has either started a company or wants to.  Truly inspirational.

While the name is actually a great title for the book, it doesn’t scream “must read startup book” like, say, Founders at Work does.  At the end of Tony’s journey he realizes that his purpose, and that of Zappos, is to deliver happiness to the world.  A little hokey for my taste but the guy is living it and all evidence points to that being a rallying cry that has lead him to being extremely successful.  But it takes him over 10 years to get to that realization and the journey is worth reading.

So I’ve added Delivering Happiness to the list of books I recommend.  Hope you like it as well.

And if you’ve already read it, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

And I’ve been equally vocal about my current WeRewards obsession (go ahead and sign up and see what I mean, and yes I’m pimping the referral program, guilty).  I’ve made over $10 from using it so far.  I love it and if you’re interested in them, check out the podcast we did with their CEO, Ted Murphy.

Last week Stacy and I recorded a DIG:this podcast with Tungle CEO, Marc Gingras.  I’ve blogged about Tungle, along with some other apps/sites I am playing with, but essentially its a social calendar service.  I love it.

The podcast should be up soon, maybe next week, and I expected to hear about Marc’s entrepreneurial past and about Tungle’s startup story.  What I didn’t expect is to uncover a glimpse of the future of location-based apps.

I don’t want to give too much away because hey, I want you to listen to the podcast, but since its not up yet and I’m excited about this, I’ll start the conversation.

Marc pointed out that if you think about it, your true social network, your true friends, the people that you actually want to connect with, can most likely be found in your calendar.  These are people you are actually meeting with.  Novel idea, huh.  Your calendar is a rich source of your likes (where you eat, what you do), your friends and contacts (your real ones, not your phony/fake ones), and your future (where you’ll be and what you’ll be doing).

I’ve had a nagging problem with the current batch of check-in apps in that it only tells me where people are right now, not where they will be.  Most of the time it does me no good to find out where my friends were.  It’s a novelty to see that Josh went to Chick-fil-A for the 41st time this week, but I couldn’t really ever meet him there because I can’t be ready to go at a moment’s notice.

But, if his calendar was somehow attached to his social presence, I might have known that he was going to Chick-fil-A.  The connection of your calendar to your check-in activity holds a massive amount of rich data.  We’re just beginning to see how mobile can be relevant in people’s lives by messaging them when they are checking-in at places.  But imagine if we know where people are going, what they’ll be doing and who they’ll be doing it with… (and no I don’t mean this, sickos).

I’ll stop there and see if any of you want to continue that thought.  I have my ideas but I’d rather hear what other people think of the potential of unlocking someone’s calendar and making that part of their social graph.

So far we’ve interviewed some really interesting companies that we think are changing the landscape of social and mobile marketing.

Here’s what we’ve done so far.  We’d love to hear any feedback and/or suggestions on who we might interview next.

Podcast #1: Andrew Knight of Case-Mate

Podcast #2: Vivek Sodera of Rapleaf

Podcast #3: Group conversation (the all dude version)

Podcast #4: Pete Reilly of Retality

Podcast #5: Ryan Holmes of Hootsuite

Podcast #6: Ted Murphy of WeReward

Podcast #7: Brant Barton of Bazaarvoice

Podcast #8: Group conversation (all dude-ette version)

We should be so much farther along this path by now!  The first iPhone was launched in January 2007, supposedly bringing about a new wave of marketing to people on their mobile devices, yet we still have barely begun to realize the power of this medium.

The last part of my lunch and learn focused briefly on how to get started.  To me, it has to be a mind-shift for marketers to embrace any new medium.  We’re seeing this now with social.  Ever so slowly, marketers are starting to test out social marketing.  They’re building a fan base on Facebook, but don’t really know why, they’re tweeting out from their Twitter account, but they really don’t know what to say, and they’re posting their videos on YouTube, but they don’t really know what to do next.

But at least they know how to get started.  With mobile, most companies are really lost on how to even approach the space.  And I think its because marketers are stuck in this process that has been defined over decades, and its ingrained in our DNA.  Words like “research,” demographics,” “reach” (how I hate that one), “budgets,” “projections,” “plans,” etc., all get in the way of testing new marketing technology.

So I’m going to borrow some principles from my startup roots and give some of my perspective on how companies can start embracing, not just mobile, but new technology.

1. IT’S OK TO FAIL, JUST FAIL FAST.  That’s right.  In corporate America, we think any failure is, well, a failure.  In the startup world that’s part of the game.  The only way you get better is to try, fail, learn and re-try.  The key with being good at failure is failing fast.  Don’t let something linger for weeks and weeks because that is what your plan said.  Instead, be ready to turn it on, turn it off and adjust as you go.  No one has the magic bullet for these new technologies, so there’s no way to plan your success.

2. FIGHT ANALYSIS PARALYSIS. I’m all for making sure you have a plan in place, and research to support that plan is great.  But if that plan is being used as a crutch to getting started in mobile, then you need to find a way to move through it.  Which gets me to my next point…

3. REMEMBER HENRY FORD. Mr. Ford is often quoted as saying, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse.”  Visionaries like Steve Jobs often use this quote to emphasize why they do things that are contrary to what research might indicate is the right path. Sometimes your customers don’t know what they want until you give it to them.

Think about this, if a year ago you had asked people if they wanted a digital farm that they had to maintain almost hourly to make sure their crops didn’t wilt, what do you think they would have said?  But over 80 million people play Farmville today!  Or how about asking your friends if they want to send you text-like messages, but only limit them to 140 characters?  Over 20 million people are doing that on Twitter.  Sometimes people don’t know they want something until you show it to them.

4. GET IT IN THE HANDS OF YOUR CUSTOMERS. Today, successful startups work hard to get their product in front of customers as soon as possible.  This allows them to get immediate feedback and iterate in order to get to a product that their customers will actually use.  It also reduces the amount of time and money that is spent on something that people won’t want to use.

With mobile, testing campaigns or apps in specific markets and rolling out functionality as you go is a great way to get customers to give you invaluable and timely feedback.

5. And lastly, you have to ask yourself: DO YOU REALLY WANT TO BE AN IMMOBILE BRAND? Do you want to be a brand that is locked to interacting with your customers either in your business location, on a computer or on a landline phone?  Don’t you want to be able to be there when and where your customers need you?

Of course, you don’t want to be an immobile brand.  But continuing to find reasons why your company isn’t ready to start testing mobile is going to ensure that you’re an immobile brand.

But I’ve been studying the “check-in” apps for quite a while now and some things are becoming clear to me.  I should make the point that I’m talking specifically about applications where the main feature is to check-in at a location.  For instance, I’m not talking about Yelp (which added checking-in but is still focused primarily on restaurant reviews and ratings).

The 3 reasons that check-in apps aren’t going to make it:

1. Checking-in a feature, not a product.  Startups face this dilemma constantly, striving to determine whether or not their company is a stand-alone business or if its better served being a part of another business.  We’ll see this play out when Facebook rolls out their check-in feature.  If they fail miserably only 10 million people will use it.  Foursquare only has 2 million users today.

2. They currently demand too much from their users.  As people get more and more comfortable lifestreaming – sharing their experiences with their friends via digital mediums – they become encumbered with too many applications required to share their experience.

Let’s say I go to a concert.  I need to check-in on Foursquare to let my friends know I got there.  I then take photos of the band on stage and I put them on Flickr.  All my friends get in a group shot and I quickly post that on Facebook and tag them.  I want to see what other people at the concert think about the playlist so far, and I need to search Twitter for that information.  So you see quickly I am opening up 3 or 4 apps to share this experience.  The first to go will be Foursquare as I can easily tell my friends I’m at the concert by updating my Facebook status.

3. Unlike the successful social networks, they become less useful with growth.  This to me is the most interesting phenomena and perhaps the most telling when looking at the long-term value of check-in applications.

When you first use Facebook or Twitter, before you’ve really connected to people, you have that moment of, “Ok, now what?”.  Then this amazing thing starts happening.  You start connecting with people and pretty soon you’re checking these networks throughout the day to share more stuff with your connections and see what is happening in their lives.  The more people you connect with, the better the network.

But with Foursquare, the exact opposite thing happens to most people.  You start by checking in, getting badges (which seem cool at first then you quickly start saying, “Ok, now what?”) and you’re high on the leaderboard.  But the more people you connect with the farther down the leaderboard you get.  And the more people that are on Foursquare, the harder it is to get a mayorship.  Foursquare was a lot more interesting to me when a few hundred thousand people were using it then today with almost 2 million.

So now what?

I’m in no way saying these companies don’t have a future.  But they’ll have to adapt as any successful startup has to.  Some things that I think will start happening in the space:

Checking-in to a location will morph to checking-in to an activity.  This will expand the experience dramatically, allowing people connect in new ways.  Hot Potato is one company doing this.  “I’m watching the Lost series finale” for instance.

The applications will become more useful to the end user.  Foursquare and Gowalla are starting to do a little of this by allowing deals/coupons/incentives through their platform.  But the one I like the most is WeReward which actually gives you money via paypal for checking-in or performing tasks.  I’ll open an additional app to get some cash money yo.

Some players will be snatched up and become a feature of a larger business.  We’ve seen talks in this area for a while including a supposed courtship of Foursquare by Yahoo.

Checking-in will be embedded (as a feature) in brand applications.  You go to Walmart, open up your Walmart app and check-in, unlocking coupons/deals/etc.  Similarly you attend a conference, open up the conference app and check-in to the sessions you’re attending, where you can also download the presentation, interact with people, give feedback, etc.

We’ll see where this space ends up.  Foursquare claims to want to be the 3rd major player in social networking, next to Facebook and Twitter.  At this point I just don’t see it.

Do you?

WeReward – I’ve been using this “check-in” app for a few months now and its replaced Foursquare and Gowalla for me.  I’ve written about it here and we recently interviewed the CEO on the DIG:This podcast, and that should be out next week.

Tungle.me – I just started playing with this and the next one over the weekend.  Tungle.me allows you to share your calendar with people via the web.  I’ve been looking for an easy way to do this and have tried other tools, so far this one seems pretty cool.

Plancast – This is one I’m really excited about.  Essentially you can connect with people to share what conferences/events you’re going to.  I was surprised at how many people I’m connected to are already using this, which means I’m way behind on finding out about this one. I’m always interested in finding out what conferences people are going to.

Connect with me Plancast! Oh, and Plancast has my favorite logo of the bunch.

Glympse – Want to share your location with someone continuously for a limited time?  Let’s say you’re at a conference and you and your colleague want to attend a few different sessions.  With Glympse you can share your location with your friend so that whenever they click the link (or refresh) that Glympse sends them, they can see where you are at that point in time.  And if you only want to share that for 2 hours, just set the time range.

Glympse has worked great when I’ve been running errands and my wife wants to know when I’ll be home to help with the kids.  She can refresh the link and see exactly where I am in my route.

Specifically on their site they say:

Earn WeReward points by completing tasks and checkins at your favorite businesses with your iPhone. Each point is worth a penny, earn 1,000 points and cashout to PayPal.

The model is very interesting and I’m all for companies that are trying to maximize the location-based check-in apps because without some kind of points or incentive, my feeling is that they get a little boring (see my 6 Reasons I’m down on Foursquare post from a few months back).

I tested WeRewards recently by doing the “Butt Paste” task.  It asked me to take a picture of Butt Paste (no idea what that is) and I’d earn 62 points, which equals $.62.

So I took a picture of the best example of Butt Paste I could find and whatdayaknow, it worked!  I’m now $.62 richer and @jmart730 got punked.  All in all, a good day.

A true example of Butt Paste

I’ve given a version of this presentation several times now but it keeps changing as, well, digital trends change.  So here is the updated version: