The Subtle Art of Giving a F*

The Subtle Art of Giving a F*

Mark Manson’s popular book “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F***” is marketed as a “A dose of raw, refreshing, honest truth that is sorely lacking today”, it doesn’t literally mean to not give any F*’s, it’s just a ballsy way of repeating other self help books like “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff”.

A caveat before we get started, I know that neither of these books is about shortcuts, in fact they’re about helping people see the big picture, and understanding what is important, and what isn’t. They’re also about living your best life, your authentic self, and generally being true to yourself.  These are all good things.

The scary part about messages like that is that some people have taken this to mean that you can just do a surface level skim coat and call it “good enough”. If I shouldn’t sweat the small stuff, why do you care that the thumbnail for your news story grabs the right part of the image?

Sometimes we need to give a F***, sometimes we need to give all of the F***’s, and borrow a cup of F***’s from a neighbour to add some extra F***’s to your awesome sauce, otherwise you’ll just end up with a big lump of “adequate sauce”.

Hey, maybe adequate sauce is exactly what you need on your Corporate Chain Pizza of life.

Then again, maybe you need to give a f***.

What is the “Subtle art of giving a F***”?

The Subtle Art of Giving a F*** is more than just “sweating the small stuff” and in fact it’s a lot about big picture thinking, and how small details add up to the big picture.

Let’s start with a website. You can tell within 30 seconds of looking at a website how the company is going to treat you.

  • How does it look? Is the site old and tired, or is it fairly modern?
  • Does the navigation make sense?
  • Is it obvious what you should do? Is it simple to find the thing you’re looking for?
  • Is it easy to get in touch with them?
  • When you want to get in touch with them, do they require a whole bunch of seemingly irrelevant information?

Sometimes it’s the little things. Maybe they have a really intricate logo, but the thing is so small that it loses all context – it was likely designed for print, not for a 300px phone screen, where 87% of your potential customers initiate their first contact. Maybe it’s the fact that a captcha form takes seven attempts to get through.

You can tell very quickly when thought hasn’t been given to who is using the website, and what they’re doing with it.

When the basics are taken care of, then the difference is in how an experience can delight you. The little things can take something from 90% or “good enough” to 125% – “Wow, this is great”

Sometimes it’s about doing something that only you will care about.

The other day I spent over an hour on a single image for a blog post.  The post itself probably took me another hour. I doubt anyone will even notice the difference between my picture and the default. The post was – How to Survive the Retail Paradigm Shift over on my Manage Comics blog.

Comic book store before and after

For those of you wondering, I went in and added actual comic books to the book covers, so that the picture was actually reflective of the source material. This may not seem like a huge deal, but it felt important to me at the time. It was fun, I flexed some Photoshop muscles I don’t normally use, and it lends some extra context to the post.

It’s also the kind of thing that a detail oriented person might notice, and since this particular post was going in front of hundreds of thousands of eyes that’s the kind of detail that matters.

For that post I also recorded a video, it took me 14 minutes to record the video, and another three revisions of the thumbnail image to make sure it was exactly right.

3 Versions, Paradigm Shift

In the first version, I realized that at certain screen sizes, the sides were being cut off, so I resized the caption and moved the logo a bit.  However reading it I realized that the title needed some juice to make it more relevant, so I revised it again. Each revision only took a few minutes, but they were important.

In short, I did sweat the small stuff, and I gave a F***.

Don’t miss the forest for the trees

The little things gave me a sense of accomplishment. However, I worked on the things that I thought would make an impact, I did things quickly and efficiently, and I only worked on these little things after I had the big picture covered.

The video I did was recorded quickly, and without fuss. The idea behind the videos I am making right now is that I want to do things that have a low barrier to entry, that don’t take me a ton of time, but that can hit an adjacent audience to the text.

I recorded the video twice, the first time I hemmed and hawed quite a bit, but the second time I managed to get through the entire thing with only one minor screw up (I couldn’t remember the name “Geek Easy” no matter how hard I tried).  Now I could have done a quick edit and fixed that up, but after watching it, I liked the raw energy of the unedited video.

What was important was that I got it up, that it enhanced the original post, and that it didn’t take a whole ton of time to do.

The Takeaway

I’m a big fan of the term “Appropriate Effort”, meaning that you don’t spend a ton of time on things you know very few people will ever see, but you do put a lot of effort into the details on things that many people would see.  I can’t imagine myself spending an hour on a graphic for a blog post just for Manage Comics, but when I’m going to draw in a much bigger audience, it makes a ton of sense.

  1. Cover the big picture, make sure your message is consistent.
  2. Don’t kill yourself over the little details that aren’t important.
  3. Work fast, work well, do things you enjoy.
  4. Give a F***, and make it matter.
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As a major upgrade, it could be a little bit scary to do the updates, but it’s very important that you keep your WordPress website up to date with the latest versions. We’ve put together a small guide for how to update to WordPress 5.0 safely, and we’ve added some specific instructions for our customers who also use a custom Divi Child Theme from us. (more…)

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I totally understand, I eat two vegetarian meals a day right now, and I plan out a vegetarian dinner once a week. I don’t do it because of ethical reasons, I find that a mostly plant based diet makes me feel better. I’ve tried to convince my parents that they need to adopt a similar diet, but they’re not really interested. Now with that said, I honestly believe chickens wouldn’t exist if they didn’t provide us eggs…but I also don’t like factory farming conditions. However, I understand that without modern advances in agriculture, we wouldn’t be able to support our massively ballooning population.

WAIT!!!

Be honest. You totally scanned over that last paragraph didn’t you?

The reason you scanned over it is simple, you really don’t care WHY I choose to eat the way I choose to eat. I either had you, or lost you at the word “vegetarian”.

It’s the exact same with your business.

  • Nobody cares WHY you choose to sell sprockets*.
  • Nobody cares about the history of your sprocket sales.
  • Nobody cares what the ethical reasons for your sprocket manufacturing process is.
  • They want to know that your sprockets will solve a problem they have.
  • They want to know what pain points your sprockets fix in their business.
  • People care how your sprockets will make their lives better.

*NOTE: I don’t care if you sell artisanal platypus abodes, or high end consulting services, for the sake of this post, we’re calling all of it sprockets…WHAT you sell doesn’t matter.  HOW you sell it is what matters. (more…)

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Creating and sustaining a strong social media presence for your business is essential in the digital age.

41% of social media users believe that the businesses they interact with should have a strong digital presence on social media.

To ensure that you’re using your social media platforms to their full potential, it’s important to measure their success.

By taking the time to look at your metrics, you can identify what tactics are working, and what areas need more attention as you move forward.

Here are five ways to measure your business’s social media profile that is sure to help you with your digital strategy moving forward.

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I recently got an urgent text from Peter at All New Comics. He had a letter from a company called “IDNS” who told him that he needed to renew his domain immediately, or he would risk using it. All he needed to do was provide his credit card number and mail the form back for him. Domain renewal would be done for $40.00USD per year (with a 2 year $10 discount, and a whopping $40 discount if he renewed for 5 years). (more…)