Learning to Be Better

Some of the greatest ideas and inspiration in regards to SEO and Internet Marketing are often found by borrowing ideas and concepts from other fields and aspects of life. I believe one of the most important traits an SEO can possess is curiosity and inquisitiveness, the drive to look at something else and say “Wow, that’s really interesting, and I can totally apply that in my field.” Why do I ramble such? Because I recently had the privilege of borrowing an amazing book from our friend, who is a doctor of Emergency Medicine. The book was written by a surgeon and completely centered on medicine. My wife, who is a voracious reader, had finished reading whatever she could get her hands on, and had borrowed the book from our friend in desperation. After she finished it in a day and a half, I decided to pick it up, and am truly thankful that I did.

Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, by Dr. Atul Gawande, a Boston surgeon and lecturer at Harvard Medical School, is Gawande’s second published book, and is a critical look at how doctors and the medical profession struggle to improve and be better at what they do and how they do it. A later book of his, The Checklist Manifesto, was covered by Tom Critchlow as well and I’d recommend checking out the post, where Tom writes about using checklists for SEO.) A major point of Gawande’s book, and an essential takeway, is that it’s not always the major innovations in medicine that make the difference, but rather the methodical and diligent application of best practices on a daily basis that saves more lives and makes a greater impact on the system. From things which seem as trivial to assigning a newborn baby a score (the Apgar score, created by an anesthesiologist named Virgnia Apgar) to the struggle to get doctors and nurses to wash their hands more carefully and consistently, Gawande shows how persistence, attention to detail, and a constant drive to measure and improve have led to tremendous improvements in medical care.

In addition to being a highly inspiring, at times shocking, read, I believe that Better includes takeaways we as internet marketers can use to improve and be better at what we do. While not doing something as important and life altering as fighting to eradicate polio from India or improve the care patients with cystic fibrosis receive, we all can and should be striving to be better at what we do, to go the extra mile, and to do our jobs with the utmost diligence, persistence, and ingenuity that we can muster.

In the last section of the book, Gawande highlights five takeaways he tries to impart to his medical students, and which I believe we can all use to improve and better ourselves in our jobs. To borrow a term from the book, these five traits can be cultivated so that we can become positive deviants, rising above the pack and setting ourselves as exemplary:

1- Ask an Unscripted Question

In terms of doctors, Gawande urges them to focus on their patients as people, full of hopes, dreams, and fears, and to get to know them for who they are and not just the symptoms of their illness and the suggested treatment plan. As marketers, I think we need to take this to heart as well. We need to truly understand the clients we work for and their business models and the sectors in which they operate, but we need to go beyond that. We need to develop relationships not only with our primary client contacts, but we need to develop relationships with the developers and other members of the team we directly interact with as well. As is highlighted in this great post by Andrew Norcross on Outspoken Media, the relationships between developers and SEO’s aren’t always rosy and full of hugs. Taking the extra few minutes to get to know one another on a bit of a more personal level, viewing each other as people as opposed to cogs in a machine simply meant to grind out results, can help one another excel and reach better solutions for the problems we mutually face.

2- Don’t Complain

We often have a tendency to start complaining about the seemingly ridiculous requests of a client, or a developer who configures the server to default to a 302 redirect, or the myriads of other issues we find on a daily basis. But complaining leads to bitterness, resentment, and inaction. Instead, focus on solutions and action. Instead of harping on issues you find, analyze them, identify the source/cause of the problem, and find a solution. While this is directly connected to GTD, it takes a major shift to fight one’s tendencies to complain and find issue, focusing instead on activity and what we can change and improve. This focus on positivity and possibility is a major element in our constantly striving to improve and be better.

3- Count Something

At first glance, this is more of an issue for doctors than Internet marketers, who feel the need to count and measure everything and are often presented with statistics and data that we can measure regularly. But Gawande is focusing more here on measuring performance, which means taking the extra time to monitor ourselves, and not just the sites we’re working on. This can mean tracking email open rates for a link building campaign, or the amount of time we use on a daily basis reading blogs/tweeting/lounging around on the web versus actual productive time spent working on clients. In order to improve and become better, we first need to track and count it, to quantify it, to give it something by which it can be measured, and then to ask ourselves how can we get better and improve our performance and our stats. While there are certainly tools out there that will assist us in this, such as this WordPress plugin to monitor your blogging ouput, this needs to be a mentality and attitude. Only after measuring performance and tracking the data can you really see opportunities for change and betterment.

4- Write Something

I don’t need to highlight the power of the internet marketing community, and how it’s imperative we all contribute, each of us in our own way, to the collective knowledge base. But simply in terms of betterment, writing forces us to organize our thoughts, to put them down in coherent (hopefully) sentences and paragraphs, and fosters discussion amongst the rest of the community. It helps us to become better at what we do, and helps the community to grow and improve as well.

5- Change

Gawande argues for doctors to become early adopters, to try new things, to experiment. While this is truly a matter of life and death when you’re dealing with doctors and surgeons, it’s essential we as SEOs and internet marketers adapt and change. Do new things because you think they’ll help, they’ll help your clients, they’ll help users, and they’ll help improve the web. Start using semantic markup because you think it will improve the internet and your client’s site, not because you want the added boost of schema in rankings and SERP CTR. As Gawande writes in the book,

“The choices a doctor makes are necessarily imperfect but they alter people’s lives. Because of that reality, it often seems safest to do what everyone else is doing — to be just another white-coated cog in the machine. But a doctor must not let that happen — nor should anyone who takes on risk and responsibility in society.” (emphasis added)

 

It’s easy to write about becoming better, about constantly striving to improve. It’s simple to talk about perseverance, diligence, and ingenuity. It’s easy to write about measurement and tenacious follow up on our everyday tasks with a goal to do things smarter and better. I hope we can rise to the challenge and succeed in the simple yet almost overwhelmingly difficult of Being Better, of actually doing what we write and preach.

If you have the time, Atul Gawande visited Google (who wouldn’t jump at the opportunity if they were invited?) and discussed the book at Authors @Google. You can watch the full presentation here as well – I highly recommend it!

 

Disclaimer: For transparency’s sake, the links to purchase the book are Amazon affiliate links. I have only linked to the book because I think anyone who purchases it, besides for being an entertaining read, will certainly benefit from the book. I’m not here to make a quick buck, and so will never use an affiliate link unless I fully stand behind the product I’m linking to.