Last year, I spent 4 hours on a lazy Sunday morning to enter into an international (copywriting or marketing) contest without hoping much. For a guy from the stone age who had not won anything all his life, hope was indeed a luxury. How on earth I manage to win the first prize, A MacBook Pro, in a fiercely contested competition was indeed a miracle.
It took some time to sink in, and even though I wanted to share this achievement, I wanted to make sense of all this. I wanted to see if there were any lessons that I could draw from this experience that may help others. I did not get much for nearly 6 months and luckily, last Saturday, I got up to meet a new idea and this post is a result of that.
In this post, I am going to share 3 big lessons that I have learned for myself. Two of them are generic lessons while the third is a marketing lesson but a lesson that all of us need. Below is the summary of 3 lessons none of which may seem unique on their own. You may have seen some variations of these lessons somewhere in some form.
If you are in a hurry, here are the lessons first.
- Everyday is an opportunity, Use them – We are good at somethings and we are not so good at others. There are cases where we want to be good at something but our past stops us even from trying. In this lesson, I give an example of how I almost bailed out of this contest by looking at the past “data” and how this lesson has changed things for me.
- Identify the Untold Rules, Break Them – Even though I chose to participate, I was well on my way to be just another contestant with no real chance of winning had I followed my first instincts. Sometimes, instincts come laden with rules that do not exist or do not apply. In this lesson, I show case how I identified 2 critical assumed rules and how I went about breaking them which put me in the path towards winning a prize, though not the first prize just yet.
- No Product is a Person, Make them – This was a contest organised by Elementor, a product-based company. They, like any product-based company have a huge challenge in promoting their product. In this lesson, I was able to raise my empathy to a new level to flip a marketing concept and develop my award-winning entry.
This is the summary for you. If this sounds interesting, grab a cup of coffee or a hot beverage and join me in this journey of insight, inspiration, and growth.