Hey Reader,

Have you ever asked so many questions you got kicked out of a store?

That’s what happened to Sam Walton. Before Walmart was what it is today, Sam would walk into stores owned by his competitors with a tape recorder. He studied how they ran everything and recorded conversations with anyone who would talk to him.

He asked so many questions he'd get thrown out.

Sam was relentlessly focused on what his competitors did best so he could do the same thing even better.

Recently on my podcast, I interviewed Will Guidara, author of Unreasonable Hospitality. If you don’t know Will, he's built a career out of turning what might have otherwise been an ordinary meal into an experience you’ll never forget.

He also studies his competition closely but does something very different from Sam:

Will ignores what his competitors do well and obsesses over what they do poorly.

So here we have two obviously smart people recommending different approaches.

One says to do what your competition does best but even better. The other says to ignore their strengths and focus on their weaknesses.

And that brings me to what I want to talk about today:

What do you do when smart people give you opposite advice?

This is something you’ll run into constantly in business (and as a human). You’re going to get conflicting advice from people you respect all of the time—either in person or online with people you follow.

The first thing is to get comfortable with that. Your job is to take those inputs and figure out what's right for you.

The second thing is to look for the layer underneath the conflict and ask yourself: Is there actually a conflict here? Are these two things truly opposed to each other?

In the case with Sam and Will, what they’re doing is quite similar. They just chose to solve for it a little differently. Both obsess over the customer experience, and both learn everything they can from their competition. They just point that obsession at different things.

We can get so caught up in trying to figure out which is the “right” advice to take when really the bigger, and much more common, issue is trying to do everything—or jump from thing to thing.

I see this happen a lot where someone hears they should focus on Instagram and then attends a mastermind where someone else shares how well they’re doing on LinkedIn, and they feel like they need to jump to that.

Oftentimes, following either one would have worked. It’s just that you didn’t focus and stick with it long enough.

For a lot of questions in life, there’s rarely one right answer.

The final lens I like to use is: Do I want to live the life they have?

I like to keep their life circumstances and experiences at the forefront of my mind and listen to their stories. Sometimes that can help you determine which advice to follow.

Smart people disagree all the time, and that's okay. Look for what’s underneath what they’re sharing. Pick one route and follow it long enough to tell whether it's working for you.

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PODCAST

I Asked a Speaking Coach to Roast My Biggest Speech

I know I had Mike Pacchione on the podcast last week to talk about how to take a talk from good to great.

But this is a second episode—and it's different.

I had Mike back on the show to roast the keynote talk I gave at Craft + Commerce.

We put the recording up to watch on the screen and stopped every time Mike saw something worth talking about.

You may have heard people give speaking advice before, but seeing a talk critiqued in real time with commentary from an expert coach will help you learn what makes a great talk in a whole new way.

Join me for a behind-the-scenes look at the biggest keynote I’ve ever delivered.

​Watch or listen to episode »​

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X POST

"Things I'm not doing anymore"

This is a great list from Greg Eisenberg of things he says he's not doing anymore.

Among them:

• refreshing analytics dashboards more than once a day
• multitasking during family or friend time
• comparing myself to others who are playing different games
• keeping friendships going purely out of history instead of actual enjoyment

Read the full list here:

​View post »​

—Nathan

P.S.

I recently had a fun "how is this my life?" moment.

Last week on a whim, I flew over Idaho's Sawtooth Mountains at sunset and went to Redfish Lake. It was something I'd decided to do maybe 3 hours earlier.

And I just had this moment where I thought: I'm flying a plane that I own, with skills that I learned, going to one of my favorite places, and it's just a casual after-work thing.

When I landed the plane at a little grass runway up in the mountains, someone from the transportation department who maintains the runway asked if I'd been to Redfish Lake before.

Some quick mental math and I estimated I'd visited Redfish 30 of the last 36 years.

In this crazy world, doing all of these different things, it was really good to still feel grounded in my childhood, and who I am, and to spend some time in mountains I'd backpacked all over throughout my life.