We supply *Free inspiration to the World. That’s what gets us out of bed in the morning. It inspires us to be able to inspire others. But *Free doesn’t come cheap.
We have to find ways to pay for it. That’s why we sell tickets for the event, Do an auction, and yes, sell posters. So if you’re sitting there right now thinking that talk I just saw was *amazing, *wow, *incredible, *wonderful *or any words similar to those, well, a little donation would be a big help.
It takes time to figure out where the roads of passion and talent meet.
For some people, it’s obvious – for others it takes a while, with some wrong turns and dead ends thrown in along the way.
It’s always easier to point out the detours in retrospective. However, we all are the sum of those experiences and take our learnings -hopefully- from our meandering, albeit perhaps at a later stage.
We might not all take the most direct path of life, but it is those random turns that sometimes help us change direction, and enable us to gather strength for our next ascent.
Poster in the photo by Stephen Kenny
My father came to England from Naples on a boat in 1958. Born in 1928, he endured the very worst of the devastating circumstances that befell the Neapolitans during WW2 – a period he spoke about to me only twice during his life. His trip, sponsored by the Italian and UK governments as the re-building of post war Europe gathered pace, was to him, a supreme adventure. He spoke not a word of English but was determined to self teach using only a Collins Italian-English dictionary and the daily Times newspaper. His stay was intended to last for 6 months but he met an attractive girl 10 years his junior in Torquay, and never went home.
He was a sommelier my dad, and later in life, a restaurant manager, working for Mario Cassandro and Franco Lagatolla – the pioneers of the modern London restaurant scene as it developed after the austerity of rationing. He didn’t get the modern cult of the celebrity chef, and was quick to point out that the very best culinary maestros preferred to stay out of the limelight, running their crews with passion, and loving nothing more than creating great dishes from often humble, but always quality, fresh, ingredients. He worked 6 days a week most of his life, minimum 90 hours a week, often more.
He was difficult to please but always selfless. An old fashioned man whose family responsibilities subsumed all else. He died in 2006. He was my counsellor and his departure has left a terribly deep void. However, as I consider my life as a father just a year after the arrival of my third child, I find myself considering more and more the teachings he left me, the wisdom, the irreplaceable patina of expertise he built up during his life. Conclusion is he was a doer, he was an 18 carat doer my old man.
He taught me that families should break bread and eat together as often as possible. Eat at a table, preferably with some Italian red wine, and without hurrying; he taught me to cook well, to respect food, and to respect the producers and labourers that create it, and to be parsimonious with leftovers and waste. He used to say there needn’t be any waste, that waste was laziness. He showed me how to cook outside – to experience the unrivalled flavour of cooking over wood burnt down to embers; he taught me that when a task is to be taken on (whatever it might entail), to plan, prepare, take time to accomplish it well, and to do it with conviction.
He also taught me the value of stuff and how to upcycle. Decades before the concept was fashionable he was a pioneer of sustainable living. He up-cycled everything. (His personal favourite was 1lb aluminium marmalade tins – he gave those babies so many new lives it isn’t true). He also tutored me in the virtues of compost. He had a system as sophisticated as anything I’ve seen in the 35 years since, based on scrap pallets, sliding front access hatches, and warmth generated by old carpets and discarded tent canvas. Man that compost was beautiful. (Upside – as a young angler I had an endless supply of first class worms that Tom Szaky would have been proud of). I saw him consume little but consume well. He taught me to consume nothing that that you cannot afford to pay for in cash. He told me to avoid borrowing.
He also taught me to be loyal to family however difficult that can be at times.
As I reflect on my father I realise that his teachings were subtle, not overt. He did his stuff, and I watched. When I got a chance to muck in all I wanted to do was to please him. And boy was he tough to please. He used to say to me later in life when I phoned to discuss cooking something I’d earlier eaten with him, and I was in need of quantities and timings – why do you not watch and learn. Learn by watching and doing not studying he’d say.
If my father was still alive he’d love the Do Lectures.
Fforest are setting up for The Do Lectures next week.
Plumbers, chefs, electricians all have their trade secrets. Those little tools or techniques that just make it easier for them to do what they do. It’s the things that make them professional and separates them from the amateurs.
The Internet is the same. It has its tools and techniques that help you stand out. I discovered this by accident.
At some point last year, I was trying to figure out why I was having so many visitors to my blog (davidhieatt@typepad.com). It’s a small blog and the traffic is small but regular. But suddenly the traffic was spiking. That one article had been viewed 45,000 times.
And I didn’t know why. So I began to dig.
When I started to look into it, it turned out that 99% of my traffic was coming from Stumble Upon. It was coming from a single piece I had put on my blog that someone had obviously liked and then had put up on Stumble Upon. And from there it just went a little bit crazy.
I knew of Stumble Upon before this. But I didn’t use it. It wasn’t on my radar. But it was dawning on me just how powerful a tool it is.
So I decided to try and find out more about how to use Stumble Upon. I watched a video by Tim Ferris who I believe amongst other things, is a truly great direct marketeer.
I visited his blog and found a video where he tells the audience just how important Stumble Upon was as a tool for getting his great content out there. I know how good Tim is at using the secret tools of the Internet, so that made me ask the question why doesn’t everyone know how good Stumble Upon is? It was like some secret tool for those in the know. Except, and I keep saying it, it’s massive.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96Gi3QNdN2w&feature=player_embedded)
Everyone talks about Facebook, Twitter and Google, (and understandably so) but no one talks about Stumble Upon. And yet it is huge. This set of Internet stats put it second to Facebook with a 25% share of traffic. (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_accounts_for_half_social_traffic_stumbleu.php)
So then I asked someone to go and research Stumble Upon and for them to tell me how we could use it for The Do Lectures. (www.thedolectures.com) To get our great content out there to more people and faster.
Then coincidentally at the same time, we got an email from Stumble Upon saying they would like to give The Do Lectures $5000 worth of free advertising. At first I thought it was spam. But I checked out the email address and it was for real.
Yeehah.
So not only had we just found out how important Stumble Upon was. And how powerful it is. But they wanted to help us. We were going to get $5000 worth of free advertising. That would bring us 100,000 views plus more if it went viral.
So this August, we spent their money. And correspondingly our viewing figures went crazy. It worked so well for us because we could target their interests to our interest so accurately. And, here’s the other good thing. It keeps on working. If people think your content is great they keep telling people they like it. So it keeps on being spread out there for free. So even though we spent the money real quick, it is still working for us now. Like a snowball going down hill. It just keeps getting bigger. And it keeps rolling without us pushing.
We have tried many things at The Do Lectures to get our talks out there to more people. We have tried Facebook but it hardly made any difference to us. We know Google adwords works but they aren’t cheap.
So when we have some money next year to spend on getting people to see our talks, where will be spending our money? Stumble Upon, no doubt.
I would have said that before we were given $5000 to spend on it. But now I have proof. I saw what it did to our traffic. And, importantly, what it keeps doing to our traffic. I know spending money on Stumble Upon is a super smart way to spend our money.
Just to finish up, whenever we get some spike in our figures now, the first question I ask is it Stumble Upon? The answer is often “Yup”.
Stumble Upon may not get talked about that much, but it is one trade secret worth knowing about.
Because it works.
More info:
http://www.stumbleupon.com/audiencetools
