One of Chris Brogan’s newsletters offered this nugget:

We have to throw out multitasking. It’s basically an excuse we use to be bad at multiple things. Be better at one. Or a few.

If we “stay busy,” we think that’s progress. But progress is progress. Seeing one needle (one number) move is the real target.

Sell one thing really well. (Man, I really need to embrace this.)

I think of Chris as someone who does many things well, and who doesn’t fit easily into a box. So I wrote him this reply:

What you are suggesting works great for some people. But I am one of the ones who has enough ADD that it wouldn’t work well for me. I always say I became a writer because I’m interested in almost everything. And writing is at the core of what I do as a marketer.

But that ADD has driven me to keep expanding the scope of what I do, while narrowing the focus toward businesses that want to make the world better in some way.

In the earliest days of my business, most of my work was typing term papers. You may be too young to remember when that was a thing. By the time I got my first computer, in 1984, I had been in business almost 3 years.

Over time, my focus shifted first into editing and resume writing, then PR materials for small businesses and authors, then book publishing consulting, and now a mix of all of the above (except typing, which I let go of in 1990) – plus strategic marketing consulting, all with a much narrower focus on who I would like to serve. And the other strand has always been activism. The evolution of my business over the past 20 years has a LOT to do with a conscious decision to braid those two together, following a successful campaign I started to stop a hideous housing development on the side of a local mountain. That campaign brought a lot of my marketing and negotiating skills into my activist work, and I started thinking about how I could bring the values of my activism into the business world.

[I didn’t go into detail about the work I’m doing helping business find the sweet spot where profitable products and services make an actual difference on things like hunger, poverty, war, catastrophic climate change, and pandemics, because Chris and I have corresponded many times, and I think he already knows this about me. He even endorsed my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. If we’d had less contact, I would have inserted that right here.]

From the 30-thousand-foot level, this shifting path actually makes sense and feels somewhat linear. But looking at piece by piece, it would come across as chaos.

There is a wonderful book called The Renaissance Soul by my late friend Margaret Lobenstine that posits two paradigms for a successful career path. The first is Mozart, who knew what he wanted to do at age 4 and kept doing it, getting better and better at it, until he died.

But the second is Benjamin Franklin, a person with half a dozen career paths and a gazillion interests. Was he a postmaster? An inventor? A diplomat? A revolutionary? He was all this and more.

Many of our greatest successes as a society have come out of the work of people like Franklin, Hedy Lamar (famous as an actress, she was also an inventor whose work made cell phones possible), DaVinci, Eleanor Roosevelt, Buckminster Fuller, Helen Keller, Franklin’s contemporary Thomas Jefferson… People who see the world and their own contributions through a holistic lens.

So that’s multitasking on the macro level. On the micro level, I find I’m not as good at doing several things at once in the same moment as I used to be, and have tried to focus more deeply. But I can only keep that intensity for so long, so I take a lot of breaks. If I’m doing client work, I am not multitasking, but I might only work for 20 or 30 minutes before clearing my brain for at least a few minutes. If I’m on a learning call, I typically am [multitasking]. I listen to a lot of learning calls, and in many cases prefer the replay recordings, because if I hear something that sounds important, I can rewind a minute or two and give it my undivided attention for a moment. And if I’m hiking, I often find that part of my brain is chewing on a problem, and sometimes I have the solution at the end of my walk.

PS: I think of you as someone whose natural strengths lead much more toward the Franklin than the Mozart.

PPS: Along with multitasking is multipurposing. This letter will become the main article in one of my newsletters.

Warmly,
Shel

He wrote back a one-sentence reply wondering how successful the approach would be—and acknowledging that he’s much more in the Franklin camp.

I answered,

I really think it depends on how we are wired. Some of us work very well in the do one-thing-at-a-time mode. Margaret’s whole point is that it is a mistake to assume that because it works for some people, it should work for everyone. Not that people can’t change their style but I think on the whole it is much easier to adapt your work can the style that works for you, rather than trying to adapt your style to someone else’s idea of how you should work.

This one didn’t get a reply. Perhaps you have a thought on this? If so, write back (and please tell me if I have permission to quote you).

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Would you like to be quoted or featured in media like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, ABC TV News, Redbook, and Reader’s Digest? I do at least 30 interviews in a typical year, 50 or more if I’ve got a new book out.

My favorite way to get coverage is to respond to reporters who have posted that they’re actively looking for sources for a story they’re working on. It’s so much easier to get press by giving a journalist the exact information they need to write a story than to “spray and pray” by sending press releases or cold-calling. I see many people doing this all wrong–so

Several services match journalists with story sources—and most of them don’t charge anything. There’s one called HARO, also known as Help A Reporter, that I’m particularly fond of. I put time aside three times every weekday to look over the queries and respond to the ones that could benefit me. But here’s the thing: I’ve forwarded reporters’ source queries to friends many times. And when I see their responses, I often cringe. I got tired of cringing, so I wrote a 40-page quick-read ebook on how to answer those queries the right way. It includes six actual queries (by me and four other people) that resulted in coverage in Reader’s Digest, the Toronto Globe and Mail, and elsewhere—with analysis of why they worked and how some of them could have been even better.

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