The Two Fractals

In personal productivity, you got to-do’s on the small scale, goals and objectives and five-year plans on the bigger scale, and the important vs urgent matrix in the middle.

In marketing and sales, you got playbooks on cold email and drip sequences, page-order for landing pages, and tips on writing good headlines. That’s on the small scale. And on the bigger end of things, you have enterprise sales playbooks, brand strategy, and so on.

It helps to know that there are two through-lines, both in productivity and in marketing, two useful strategies that can be used in the small scales and the large scales alike.

You can learn these two strategies and apply them to different scales. These strategies are fractal.

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“Before the end of the day, I’ll have…”
“Before the end of the week, I’ll have…”
“Before the end of the year, I’ll have…”

This is the principle of “Beginning with the end in mind”, popularized by Stephen Covey’s 7 habits book. You might have also heard of the Pareto Principle (20% contribute to 80% of the output) and Parkinson’s Law (we inflate the time it takes to do something to the available time budget). They both naturally manifest themselves in your decisions when you put a deadline, and so imagining the end elicits them both naturally.

Imagine you’re at the end, and you’re celebrating. What are you celebrating? The sentences which come next will be describing a future past, a future perfect. Re-order these statements so the top will be the most true, and you now have your priority. “I’ll have published that video I’m scared to ship”. “I’ll have improved the quality of my relationships”. And this technique works on any scale of time. It’s fractal.

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“What causes someone to buy?”
“What causes someone to say ‘yes, this, now’?”
“What causes someone to part ways with the past, to say ‘enough is enough’?”

These are the questions behind Jobs-to-be-done. A good theory helps make predictions, and this theory gets you there with these badass tools: people just want to make progress, a sales decision is made by a person, there’s always a level of push and pull in the mind of the person deliberating a buying decision, those forces evolving with time and products are “hired” for a job. Their struggle must be hard enough to propel them to get moving, your solution must be more attractive than creating anxieties, and it should be better then all the other “I’ll just” alternatives.

Whether you want to sell to an executive, whether you want to compose sales copy for a landing page, whether you want to shape the features of a product, whether you want to create word-of-mouth, or whether you need to sell an idea, the tools apply just the same. Someone wants progress, away from a ‘from’, toward a ‘to’, and your job is to present something that will help them get there. You’re being useful with your sales, and you need to exercise empathy to do so, at any scale. It’s fractal.

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Mastering these two tools beats the need to study more frameworks.

With just the two, you can get moving to build what you dream to build, and you can gain empathy to sell to the people you meet along the way. At any scale. Because they’re fractal.

In a sense, in both cases, you’re exercising a single unifiying muscle. They’re both about empathy. Empathy for your future self, and empathy for your buyer, allowing you to get out of your own fear, and to get moving, today. Everyone wants progress.