• If you sell a service, it’s advantageous that you keep your customers as sharp as they can be when they utilize it, it keeps your services valuable.
• Even if you’re selling something trivial, maybe tea or coffee or even gum, if you take the time to educate your customer on the process and the ingredients that it takes to make it, there’s a good chance they’ll appreciate it and come back for more, I know I would.
• The ability to empower your customers is sometimes more important than the product/service itself.

Not the craftsman that I'm talking about

I believe that if you don’t educate your customers with your products, the results can be disastrous. I know this based on previous experiences with poorly designed educational material in products. When I first bought my home, I had to buy a lawnmower, so I went to the nearest Home Depot and picked up a cheap Craftsman lawnmower. I took it home, un-boxed, assembled it, and put fuel in it. It wasn’t long after I just completed the first lap of mowing the lawn when it completely shut off on me, I was perplexed, I couldn’t believe it, a brand new lawnmower just died and I still have 90% of the yard to do! I attempted to fire it up again,… and again… no luck. It wouldn’t even spin. It was just clicking. I frantically ran back to the packaging to see what the warranty and return policies were and ended up re-reading the manual again. Assemble this, assemble that, OK I did everything it asked me to! I flipped back to the index of the manual in frustration and threw it back in the box, upon closing the lid to the box I discovered a picture of a old school oil can with a slash through it, kinda like a no smoking sign only this one had an oil can instead of a cigarette there were no words, no description, just a picture. It was like Craftsman hired the IKEA manual designer to do just that one part, and not just any part, the most important step of all, ADD OIL BEFORE YOU START UP THE LAWNMOWER! I attempted to return it, but Home Depot blamed it on user error and could not take it, so I was out a couple hundred dollars and feeling especially bitter. Needless to say, that was the first and last Craftsman product I buy, that to me is what the power of good education in your products or in this case poorly executed education in a product can do.

So next time you’re developing a product or service, think to yourself,.. “what would I want to know if someone was to introduce or sell me on this product?” With all the technology we are overwhelmed with now, it’s more important than ever to educate your customers on how to use what they receive from you.

Studies have shown that there is some sort of “Status Quo Bias” that is scientifically linked to our apprehension of making difficult decisions. That being said, I’m pretty sure that the part of the brain that makes decisions learns how to make those decisions based on the environment in which we are being raised in. It’s easy to make the default and safe decision, but if you can easily make the status quo, why not attempt to reach past it?

The most important thing to take away from the status quo is the statistics associated with them. Too often people read those statistics and they may think to themselves, “hmmm… I’m exactly where I need to be..” or maybe “wow…I can’t believe that’s the average!”, I hope we all aspire to say the latter. When you really think about it, it’s absurd to let the direction of our lives be controlled by numbers and charts, is that really what it’s come down to? All of sudden we have the statisticians, analysts, and economists of the world becoming psychics with crystal balls. It’s important to understand where those numbers come from and what purpose they serve, it simply conveys the current state of things, not predict it. People might argue that a scientific prediction based on current analysis has it’s place, but I feel that it has no place in dictating the lives and futures of us. Let’s not live up to the status quo, but look at it as a base for which we need to improve ourselves upon, let’s acknowledge it for what it is and not be fearful of it.

Now imagine if unemployment insurance meant something else altogether, imagine if instead of asking the government for money, you could capitalize on your hobbies and passions. It’s the kind of insurance where the strength of the policy is only limited by your mind and heart. You finally get to open up that cafe, run your own tech support company, start designing websites, help people get out of debt, whatever your passion is, there is always a way to turn that into a living. Some people even believe [that during] a recession proves to be the one of most opportunistic times for entrepreneurs to start a business.

A forewarning must be noted however, it’s extremely important to remember that running a business is not for the faint of heart. Years of training in a traditional school setting might’ve set you up to compete in the “job market”; it might be scary to find yourself actually competing in the real market. Look on the bright side though, the real market yields more profitable results than you can ever expect to achieve going the traditional route. If you are one of one of those unemployed… what are you waiting for?, find something that you’re good at and figure out how to turn it into a business, see how far you get, you might just surprise yourself. If you are not unemployed, why not start something on the side, make it a hobby, have fun with it. If you make money from it, realize that it’s a byproduct of you sharing something you love with other people. It’s about time we build an unemployment insurance policy that we put into every month instead of us paying into every month.