Don’t just ask winning candidates for advice. Losing teaches lessons winners may never see.
Here’s today’s tip: Don’t just ask winning candidates for advice. Losing teaches lessons winners may never see.
I’ve interviewed and talked to more candidates than I can count. Each of them has unique lessons they’ve learned but some of the most valuable advice I’ve received has come from men and women who lost.
The biggest reason behind this is that most winners don’t spend time reflecting on what they did wrong. They won! So how bad could they have been?
When you lose, you spend a lot of time thinking about what you could have done differently and why you came up short. Even if it’s not a full-blown After Action Review (which I ALWAYS recommend), this time spent mulling over the defeat often leads to some rather poignant lessons.
When you’re seeking out advice, don’t just listen to the winners. If they haven’t done a strong campaign post-mortem, they may not even really know WHY they won or the things that nearly cost them the victory.
How to win: Work harder and smarter than your opponent.
Here’s today’s tip: You need to Work harder AND smarter than your opponent if you want to win.
A good plan is awesome and burning a combination of sweat and shoe leather is important but there’s a limit to how far you can get if you can’t combine the two.
When I talk about working smart AND hard, I mean that planning AND execution are important. A good plan that’s not executed is wasted time. So is activity that’s not thought out.
If you want to win, you need to constantly balance planning and activity. You should start planning at the polls closing on election day and work backwards through time. Give it as much detail as possible and then start identifying the inputs that you need in order to keep that machine fueled. Those will primarily be volunteer hours, dollars, endorsements and your focused time as a candidate. Planning is how you make sure that your activity is purposeful and will move the needle in your favor.
“What orators lack in depth, they make up for in length.” – Charles-Louis de Secondat
Here’s today’s tip: “What orators lack in depth, they make up for in length.” – Charles-Louis de Secondat
It’s hard to be concise with our words. It takes work. If you give me an hour to talk and a topic, I’ll have no problem filling the time and I probably won’t need to spend more than one or two times the alloted time to prepare. However, If you give me 5 minutes, I’m going to spend 10-20 times my speaking time to prepare.
With today’s shrinking attention spans, whether in person or on video, it’s important that we work hard on communicating within tight time constraints. We need to be concise and it takes significant effort to achieve that.
Never say or write anything you don’t want on Buzzfeed.
Here’s today’s tip: Never say or write anything you don’t want on Buzzfeed.
It’s incredible how social media and the internet have changed campaigns! While there are plenty of negatives associated with these evolutions, one of the things I like is that it makes it much easier to catch candidates in lies.
Even outside of campaigns, we see corporate HR departments reviewing applicants’ social media presence for liabilities. A quick google search will reveal plenty of examples of candidates, their families or staff saying things on social media, even private messages or texts, that hurt the campaign when they came out.