John Mayer has this amazing song, Clarity, the first track on his Heavier Things album, an album I love because, as man of girth, I could use the same title for my autobiography.
Anyway, this song Clarity, I’m not even sure what it’s about, but if I had to guess, it’s about those brief, infrequent moments, where things are just aligned, where the stresses and pressures are gone, and where you’re just alive. Check it here:
So good. The best lyric, as always, is the Ooooooh, Oooooooh. Oh, the Oooooohs. Those are the musical equivalent of those perfect moments I’m talking about, captured by the sultry stylings of John Mayer. For me, these moments of clarity happen at random, sometimes they are about business, sometimes about family, sometimes about Utah football, sometimes about just breathing and being a person.
But I’m reading this book, To Sell is Human, by Daniel Pink, and in it he’s formulated the new ABCs of selling. Instead of Always Be Closing, the new ABCs are Attunement, Buoyancy, and Clarity. And he closes the section on Clarity with what he calls Finding the 1%. The idea is that in an attempt to understand anything, the key is to find the one percent. Don’t get lost in the absolute tsunami of ideas and information that’s so readily available, “don’t get lost in the crabgrass of the details.” Instead, find the essence of what you’re exploring, the 1% that gives life to the other 99%. The ability to understand that 1% and explain it to others is the hallmark of successful thinking about anything.
Clarity as a general business principle is so necessary. It’s so relentlessly easy to get bogged down in the morass of meaningless detail. Business, at some level, is very simple. Clarity comes when we find that simplicity, that 1% that infuses the rest.
Because I am a texting zealot, this Clarity concept got me thinking about texting. What is the 1% idea about texting? What’s the single concept that infuses the rest with any purpose? It’s a very, very, very crowded world for information. There are billions of messages being sent and received every single day – SMS and MMS and iMessage and GroupMe and WhatsApp and FBMessenger and IG and Snaps and Polos and radio and TV and podcasts and emails and probably somewhere maybe even a fax. It’s an absolutely overwhelming mountain of information, and there are countless ways to measure and manage and track and engage and connect. So much big data. So much information. So tricky to find clarity.
But, the Clarity about texting is so simple, the 1% idea is so easy.
Texts get read.
Period. Such a simple, simple thing, captured in my favorite texting statistic: 98% of texts are read within 10 minutes.
Like, no matter your business, no matter who your people are, no matter what you’re trying to communicate, no matter what else you’re doing to engage your audiences, a stat like that matters. That’s the 1%.
Texts get read.
Clarity.
Texts get read.
Beyond that, there’s almost limitless applicability for texting, limitless options for fit and tactics and blend with all other customer engagement strategies, but the 1% is the thing.
So, like, this RateNow Clarity is not quite as transcendent as John Mayer’s. Still, like, pretty clear, though. And my wife is sooooooo much higher quality than any of the random roster of women John Mayer has dated, so, we RateNow people are pretty happy with where we’re at.
Ooooooh, Ooooooh!!