Introducing the Impact Generation Culture Wall
Fourteen core beliefs at the heart of the Impact Generation
Personal note: Thanks to everyone who joined as a free subscriber in the first week of launching this newsletter.
My hope is to send you one newsletter every 1-2 weeks that dives deep into a topic to help you define, share and monetize your craft to an audience that appreciates your expertise and the way that you express it.
I am grateful you are here. I hope you are ready to learn and apply some killer insights!
Introducing Our Culture Wall
In this week’s edition of our newsletter, I am proud to announce the Impact Generation Culture Wall™.
A culture wall is a concept that was coined by the folks at Gaping Void.
They are business consultants who will conduct an emotional audit of your business and identify its cultural beliefs. Afterward, they return to their magic shop to create a visual and emotional delight that captures the essence of your business: a culture wall.
This is a series of beautifully drawn color prints that can hang in a prominent place to promote your organization’s social culture.
Source: Microsoft’s India Development Center Culture Wall to commemorate 25 years of service.
In this newsletter, we are taking our inspiration from Gaping Void’s incredible work to create our version of a culture wall.
Our ideals fall into four categories.
Mindset
World / Business Building
Audience Building
Wildcard
Fourteen core beliefs at the heart of the Impact Generation
Mindset
#1 - 80% is the inner game
80% of success in the online world (and in life) is the inner game.
This includes your emotional maturity, patterns of thinking, reactions, fortitude, patience and perseverance ESPECIALLY when facing challenges, conflicts and crises.
When creating a digital business you will experience difficulties, failed campaigns and expectations, the impostor syndrome, criticism, mockery, discouragement, overwhelm, fear, insecurity, doubt, and anxiety.
That’s life and business.
Thus, you should mentally prepare to confront these challenges. This also requires the right motivations, a passion for your craft, and the commitment to see your dreams through despite the challenges.
There is no such thing as failure. There is only data that you can use to improve your next campaign.
You can only fail if you quit.
#2 - Go deep on your motivations
What drives you, deep down? What excites you as you wake up every morning? What motivates you as you show up to your craft every day?
Perhaps you are subconsciously driven by negative emotions. Or you feel pressured into business decisions by the expectations of others. A major problem is that you may not be aware of the sources for your emotions, or the fact that you are still trying to please your parents.
Go deep on your motivations means identifying the root causes of those behaviors and emotions that are keeping you from growing as a person and as a business.
On a more positive note, this maxim requires that you take stock of the reasons why you want to create an Impact Business. What are the personal, familial, vocational, communal or societal reasons? Some entrepreneurs want to change the world. Some, just their backyard.
One motivation is not better than the other. Both require sustained attention and reflection.
#3 - Everything is your responsibility
This is a maxim I borrowed from Gary Vaynerchuk.
As a sovereign creator, you must take responsibility for EVERY aspect of your business. This includes the quality of your customers, the income you produce, the health of your digital enterprise, and whether you are fulfilled in what you do.
It is easy to shift the blame for your setbacks on a tool, software, social media platform, lack of time, your education, class, race, gender, income, parents, spouse, family, the government, who is President, or even the economy.
I know these factors create challenges for you, so I don’t want to minimize them. I was born in Mexico, and grew up in a family with little means. However, at the end of the day, little of that matters if my goal is to create an Impact Business.
Everything is your responsibility is an attitude.
For those things you cannot control, you must exercise emotional maturity. For everything else, the buck stops with you.
#4 - Just do the friggin work.
Just do the friggin’ work is the antidote to the get-rich-quick, easy money, and easy work ethic that is peddled everywhere on the Internet. At the beginning of my online journey, I spent three years in Internet marketing hell, chasing after every hack, secret or get-rich-quick scheme I could find.
Then I learned a secret.
There are no shortcuts to online success. There is hard work, your motivations, your expertise, the right knowledge, lots of testing and experimentation, and patience in the face of obstacles (i.e. the inner game)
Just do the friggin work means you will put in the time, reps, and energy to become better at the skills you need to create an Impact Business. In future newsletters, I’ll lay out our IGen Business Building Roadmap which will shortcut the time to acquire mastery in these areas.
World / Business Building
#5 - Build a world and not just a business.
This is one of the central pillars of an Impact Business, which I talk about it in our manifesto. I will summarize the main points.
World building comes to us from cinema and literature. There, directors and authors dream up “worlds” where characters play a role in a scripted narrative. Each world has a culture, rules, stories, characters, and a physical environment.
When applied to your business, it means that you begin to think of your brand not just as a business but as a world.
Your world is a reflection of you, and your tastes, personality, passions, interests, and craft. This affirms another maxim of our culture wall which is, the personal is the universal.
You create the culture, vibe, narratives, and physical / digital spaces for your world. Then you fill those places with the cool things that appeal to you. Finally, you invite others to join you in the experiences that you create for them.
#6 - Practice creativity, imagination, and innovation
I believe our world suffers from a poverty of creativity, imagination, and innovation.
When was the last time you were wowed by something that happened in government, politics, business, education, manufacturing, the legal system, the criminal justice system, public health, the legacy media, or even entertainment? (I mean, do we need another Marvel movie?)
Closer to home, when was the last time something in the Internet marketing world impressed you, especially when it came to selling?
I’ll wait…
On social media, it’s a relentless pitchfest of “buy my stuff” or a series of shallow polarized messages. Even the cat videos have lost their charm. (Wait, strike that. Cats and their antics will never go out of style.) But you get my point
The broader question is do you practice creativity, imagination and innovation in your shop? Is this something that you have built into your day-to-day, or your world? Are these topics about which you study, reflect upon or try to improve?
When you practice creativity, imagination, and innovation it can be a real game changer. It will give you a competitive advantage. Your work will be more engaging. And it will allow you to delight your peeps with your work.
P.S. If you need some inspiration, check out Rick Rubin’s latest book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. It takes a Zen-like approach to creativity from one of the top record producers in the business.
#7 - Go with your superpower
Go with your superpower represents the ultimate transformation that you bring to your audiences with your craft.
This is not your talent or expertise or even your craft. It’s the way that you combine these elements to produce the outcomes your audiences desire.
Stated more concretely, your superpower is:
the expertise that you bring to your craft COMBINED with
a unique solution to a problem your audience encounters which PRODUCES
a transformation in the audiences you want to impact
This mix is your secret sauce to pulling away from the marketing pack and attracting the right audience for your product or services. It is what makes you the only choice for a certain group of people.
#8 - Do things that don’t scale
This is a concept that was coined by Paul Graham over at Y Combinator in his iconic 2013 post. Y Combinator is a VC firm that has invested in over 4,000 startups since 2005 including AirBnB, Stripe, and Dropbox.
Graham’s advice is for many would-be founders of startups. They often believe that growth automatically happens by “building a better mousetrap” and then waiting for customers to break down the door. Graham counters that an organization grows because its founders do things that don’t scale.
Graham provides several examples of companies as they launched. The founders personally recruited their initial group of customers (AirBnB), configured their software on users’ computers instead of sending out demos (Stripe) or sent a personal thank you note to everyone who purchased their software (Wufoo).
For the Impact Generation, do things that don’t scale can be applied in two ways.
First, as you launch your venture, do as much personal outreach as you can.
Send e-mails and DMs, network at live events, and network in virtual groups (but not with ulterior motives). Secondly, if you are growing, don’t rule out going back to personal outreach. This is especially important to solicit critical feedback from key users about new products, services or workshops you’d like to offer. You’ll get a lot more than just sending out a poll or survey.
Building Audiences
#9 - Do no harm.
Do no harm is a principle most closely associated with the medical profession (though it can be applied to a number of contexts: legal, ecological, and bio-medical to name a few).
It is an underlying principle of medical ethics, which requires that health care professionals prioritize the well-being of their patients and refrain from actions that could cause harm or exacerbate existing conditions.
Applied to marketing, this ideal should guide every decision for sovereign creators of the Impact Generation.
Audiences are real people (with emotions). They are not statistics, commissions, or ego boosters. Therefore, whether you produce a product or service, campaign, digital asset, or copy, every element should adhere to the do no harm principle.
To do this, simply ask yourself (at any given moment), “will what I am releasing into the marketing eco-sphere harm or help the people I’m trying to reach?”
#10 - Everything impacts the quality downstream.
Everything impacts the quality downstream is a way of saying that EVERY element of your business, impacts the quality of your audiences. You cannot poison the river upstream, for example, with dicey copy, manipulative language, or low-quality products, and expect healthy fish further down.
In our manifesto, I spoke about soulless marketing. This translates into an over reliance on engineered funnels based on coercion. Indeed, the click has become more important than the person.
Thus, if everything impacts the quality downstream, you must audit everything you do to acquire a customer: how you generate traffic, sources of traffic, your copy, website, every page of your sales funnel, your products, how you deliver them, and your follow-up.
#11 - The personal is the universal.
The personal is the universal comes from the world of Jungian psychology.
NOTE: The original phrase “the most personal is the most universal” is often attributed to Carl Jung, though I could not find this direct quote in my research.
Jung’s theory of the “collective unconscious” suggests that everyone inherits a reservoir of universal experiences, memories, and symbols that shape their perceptions and behavior. This is why you will often find common myths, stories, and dreams across different cultures.
Applied to the Impact Generation, the personal is the universal means that what you are passionate about or find interesting will resonate with large swaths of people. This also means you don’t have to follow the crowd, or see “what’s working now”. You can also do away with swipe files or cookie cutter funnels.
#12 - When in doubt, solve a problem
All purchases fulfill a need for the buyer, whether psychological, emotional, spiritual or functional. The purchase of a Porsche 911 may be primarily for status; the minivan primarily for function.
However, some of the most pressing needs for people revolve around solving a problem in their personal, domestic, or professional lives.
Every day, billions of people search Google and YouTube for “how to” instructions to solve challenging problems in their lives. For more creative types (artists, musicians, writers), your audience’s needs may be more abstract. Still, they can be framed in a problem-solving way.
A prospect may feel an unconscious desire for more beauty, inspiration, or joy in their lives. That’s when they’ll reach for the search engine to quiet that need.
So, when in doubt, think of a problem (or series of problems) that your audiences would love to solve, and promote that.
This is a key that opens many doors.
Wildcard
#13 - When they go shallow, you go deep.
When they go shallow you go deep is one of the content strategies for sovereign creators of the Impact Generation.
With the birth of AI content, and the massive surge of content creators since 2020, we are now experiencing a tsunami of content on the Internet. However, even before these trends, a great deal of content on the Internet was rehashed, shallow information whose purpose was to agitate a prospect’s pain so they could click the buy button.
Our strategy at the Impact Generation is to help you define your craft into its important sub-topics, and then help you create the most comprehensive set of articles on each of those topics.
This is going to set you worlds apart from typical content on the Internet. It will also raise your status as an expert on your topic.
#14 - You only get one shot
This one’s a little deep, but worth contemplating.
You only get one shot means that you only get ONE life to live here on earth. What are you going to do with your precious time?
This week I visited a national museum dedicated to the Revolutionary War and the founding of the United States. And just like other historical periods I have studied (the Roman Empire, for example), I was struck by how quickly and arbitrarily one’s life could be taken away back then. Never mind that life expectancy was abysmal and that an alarming percentage of children never made it past the age ten.
========
Learning about history gives me a tremendous appreciation for the life I have. I live in the 21st century, in this remarkable age, in relative comfort, and I have the opportunity to pursue my dreams. I do not take those things for granted.
You only get one shot means that you should give some serious thought to your life and its meaning. These questions may be helpful:
What am I supposed to do with the life that I have?
What kind of person do I want to be?
What crafts, skills or expertise do I want to pursue?
How do I want to spend my time and talents?
What mission can I stake out?
What contributions can I make?
What impact do I want to make in my corner of the world?
These are the questions that ultimately matter, so why not cut straight to the chase. In addition, these are the questions we’d love to help you answer here at the Impact Generation.
Now It’s Your Turn
Now that you’ve seen our culture wall, what would you place on yours? Write down 20-30 of the most important values that you want to promote in your business. Then, review each one, prioritize them, and choose your top 15.
This small beginning will set the tone for your business and generate many future rewards.
Here’s to your success!
NOTE: This article contains affiliate links to different resources. We receive a commission for anything you purchase through them.
Thank you for sharing this Gustavo. This is a very helpful compass for when I'll need one. I am in alignment with most of the 14 points but always good to back and review...