The Cheat Code

by Brian Wong

  If you can find a universal problem, you can usually get universal buy-in to fix it. It’s like if I say, “Oh, I’m going to fix traffic jams.” There’s not a human being in the world who would go, “Don’t bother—I like getting stuck in traffic.”

  So I went into sales meetings with these major companies with a genuine belief in what we were doing, and it helped generate the major advertisers’ initial buy-ins. I went in there with the total belief that our product could solve a problem they all had: Nobody wanted to click on their ads.

  I could have gone in there intimidated, but why? When I jump in over my head, I expect to be challenged. That’s why I do it.

  If you jump in over your head, before you know it, you’ll learn to swim.

  Then you can jump in again, where the water’s even deeper.

  The number-one thing I told myself before I started Kiip was, “I don’t want to have any regrets. Ever.” That’s why I go balls-to-the-wall on all the important things I do. Of course, I can’t completely control the outcome of everything, so sure, some things fail. But that’s okay! In fact, if you’re not failing on occasion, you’re not aiming high enough.

  When I fail after going all out, it doesn’t feel like failure at all. It feels like an education. Regret comes only when you don’t throw everything at your target. That’s when you hear the ugly little voice saying, “What went wrong?”

  Here’s what went wrong: you.

  You probably won’t get a do-over either, because if you did a half-assed job on something, whoever gave you the opportunity to do it probably won’t let you do it again. Or do anything else for them.

  As I’ve said: Projects fail, people don’t. More precisely, successful people don’t, even when their projects don’t pan out.

  This begs a question: How does somebody live a 24/7 balls-to-the-wall lifestyle?

  You don’t. If you try to blast through life 24/7 like a rat in heat, you’ll spontaneously combust so badly they’ll need dental records to find out who you were.

  I learned after my first couple of spontaneous combustions that I can’t be this ridiculous guy who’s on all the time, as everybody around me staggers to a halt and says, “Brian, how can you be so fucking energetic?” I learned (the hard way) that I can’t afford to be that way. It’s not sustainable.

  Nobody is Superman. Not even Superman, because he’s Clark Kent half the time. Think about it. If even Superman can’t fire on all cylinders all the time, we mere mortals sure as hell can’t.

  Even so, people in high-rolling companies want their leaders to be superhuman, to be on all the time. They think it ignites everybody’s confidence. That’s human nature. Of course, to be a great leader you need to be able to stand up and kill it in an auditorium, or in a boardroom, or in your own office with your team. You’ve got to give a great performance—and not just an act, because there’s a big difference between a performance and an act. A performance is when you’re totally on top of your game, and an act is when you’re pretending to be.

  You need to, as I’ve said elsewhere, intentionally aim for excellence in moments that truly matter.

  But then after your gig—and after the afterparty, and then after the after-afterparty, where the big things happen—you need to aim for moments of being a complete fucking sloth. A slacker. A slug. The kind of person who presses snooze—a couple of times, even—when the alarm goes off.

  My record to date for the longest successful stretch of full-sloth behavior is thirty straight hours of sleep. It was after a U.S./Asia crisscross trek where I bounced between the continents so fast I created my own time zone: Brian Daylight Time.

  But that zone crumbled when I finally stopped moving. Thank God.

  That’s just Mother Nature’s way of gently telling me: “Brian, honey, slow the fuck down, or I’ll give you what God calls a near-death experience. Turn it off, if you ever want to turn it back on again.”

  So I did, and found to my surprise that after those first few minutes of sleep, I actually began to quite enjoy it.

  The point is, it’s important to give your all when it matters, but it’s also very important to learn your limits. Honor them. Pay the piper. Feed the parking meter. Or do whatever cliché it takes to keep you ready to kill it when the right time comes. Then go beddy-bye to recharge your battery so you’re ready to kill it again when the right opportunity comes along.

  Don’t be seduced by the saying “Die young and leave a beautiful corpse.”

  Make it “Die old and leave a beautiful corpse.”

  Because the truth is that no one, not even Superman, can go balls-to-the-wall all the time. Wouldn’t you rather save your energy for those times when it really counts?

  At certain times, if you’re lucky, your office will be where the action is: the thinking, the deal making, and the getting things done. More often, though, the action will be somewhere else—and if you’re really lucky, you’ll have the kind of job that allows you to go there and find it.

  Or you could just go there anyway, and make your job into that kind of job.

  —

  Last week started with a trip to see my family in Vancouver. Seeing family is as important as anything to me. Companies and co-workers come and go, but your family is forever, and if you forget that, you’re nowhere, no matter where you are.

  However, Vancouver was not exactly where the action was. So after spending some good quality time with my family, I took the red-eye to New York—sleeping on the plane, as usual, to show up feeling sharp—and hopped through a productive round of meetings all day. There’s still not a city in the world that can beat New York for action. You can meet fifty of the most important one hundred people in advertising without walking more than twenty blocks, and just the sidewalks of that city have an energy of their own that seems to make action happen.

  On Tuesday, I dived face-first into Internet Week in New York, which is like Fashion Week for Nerds. Instead of fashion shows, they have these big events, conferences, and parties for Internet advertisers. It has a real-time, come-as-you-are agenda that shifts radically from year to year, covering everything from topics such as programmatic ads to cross-channeling to disrupting traditional commercial patterns. Attendees even got to ring the opening bell on Wall Street. Talk about action.

  Wednesday: new dawn, new destination. For most events, including Internet Week, you don’t have to spend the full five days there. After twenty-four hours, it’s usually been there, done that. The main thing is to go big, get noticed, and get going. If you create a splash with just one thing, people hear about it on social or traditional media, and it sends out concentric ripples of attention.

  On Wednesday afternoon I had a speaking gig in Toronto, and the director of the event was freaking out, because I was cutting things close. So I busted out of New York and grabbed a flight that touched down in Toronto with time to spare—presuming the high-speed water taxi they provided was waiting and ready to rock.

  It was. I jumped on and crashed through the waves with the wind in my hair—and if you’re getting images of me shooting across the water toward my waiting limo like James Bond, I have to admit we’re on the same wavelength right now.

  I killed it at the Toronto speaking engagement, got a little media and Twitter coverage that started to spread outward, and made it back to New York in time for a private event for advertising CEOs. That event was pure essence of action. It didn’t get coverage in the general media, but it did make waves with a smaller but better audience: better precisely because it was smaller, and exuded exclusivity and relevance to my industry.

  By this time, people were already coming up to me and going, “Brian, I saw you on this or that the other day—it seems like you’re everywhere!”

  Then I jumped on another late-night flight back to San Francisco, with the time zones working in my favor, and was fresh for my appearance at Ad Tech, a great event that’s exploded in recent years and is a hot nexus for global media, marketing, and tech
. It covers stuff we need to know about now, like glanceable content, the future of phones as full-service virtual reality devices, and wearable tech, which was what my speech was about. More coverage. More concentric ripples of awareness.

  Then back to Toronto. But this travelogue is getting a little insane—not quite on par with my actual life, but close enough—so I’ll presume that my point has been made: Find the white-hot center of the action, play your part, and get gone!

  When people think you’re everywhere, they’ll think you can do anything.

  And when they start to think that, it starts to be possible.

  I’ve always had an ability to know what irks people, and lots of the time I just go ahead and do it. Why? Not to be a jerk, but because sometimes pissing people off is simply the best way to get your point across.

  Of course, that doesn’t mean you should say mean things or stupid things, like insulting somebody’s race or gender, but if you passionately disagree with someone, it’s best just to blurt it out and let the cards fall where they may.

  A little shock value goes a long way in letting people know where you stand and that you care, and if you do it with a good heart it builds respect around you. You’re the guy who says stuff other people won’t. It can even make you lovable. Comedians have known that forever.

  The cheat becomes even more effective when you add a spoiler. By that I mean you sort of announce that you’re going to piss somebody off by saying something like, “No offense, but…” or “You may not want to hear this, but…,” then come out with the zinger. What can they do? If they get pissed, then they’re the asshole, because hey, you warned them. And if they’re an asshole, you probably don’t want to do business with them anyway, so you might as well say what’s on your mind.

  All you’ve got to do is make it clear you’re passionate about what you think, and that you’re saying it because you think it’s something somebody should hear. When people see how much I care about making advertising a choice instead of an invasion, I can get away with all kinds of critical remarks. People mostly remember that I’m sincere about giving them something of value, and they forgive me for saying all kinds of things they wouldn’t overlook if I was just some dude with a chip on his shoulder.

  The same thing carries over to brands. Apple, for example, is known to be a very passionate and authentic brand, so when they piss people off by making a mistake, people forgive them. If a company perceived as just being interested in taking your money, on the other hand, makes a mistake, they get crucified—because there’s no emotional connection to them.

  You might recall how a few years ago Apple made a major screw-up with the antennas of their iPhone 4, and it kicked off a global tidal wave of complaints. To make matters worse, they didn’t even acknowledge the glitch for a few weeks, and it came after a bunch of other problems with the new iOS.

  For some brands, this would have been a death sentence, but not for Apple. Instead, people were like, “No worries. It’s cool, we know you’ll sort it out.”

  Why was the public so forgiving? Partly because everybody was still in love with the legacy of Steve Jobs, who was never the world’s most diplomatic guy (in fact, he may have invented Cheat 5 about pissing people off) but was somebody who never got accused of not giving a shit. People knew he lived and breathed his products, and in a world of depersonalized, manipulative commerce, that was exactly what it took to build brand loyalty, and in turn create the most golden of opportunities: the second chance. When you get a do-over on your screw-ups, you can almost always find the fix.

  —

  All of this is part of the cheat of tying your business to a grand concept that will serve the greater good—the kind of thing Elon Musk does.

  It all starts with loving your idea and the business you build from it, and getting the idea in the first place because you love people and want to make your money doing something that’s good for them. On the other hand, if you’re just out for power or greed or to prop up a shaky ego and think you can get away with a mess-up by means of a quick “My bad”—good luck. So before you ask someone for a second chance, make sure you deserve it. If you put yourself in a position to deserve forgiveness, however, you’ll be amazed at how easy it can be to get away with speaking your mind or voicing an unpopular position—even when it means pissing people off.

  I’m always honest in business, and I’m always fair—not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it creates success. But there’s never a day I don’t want to win. And there’s never a day when somebody isn’t trying to make me lose.

  Business is competition. That’s a universal and eternal truth.

  It’s been said that the art of business often resembles the art of war, and that’s absolutely true. That may sound brutal on the surface, but there’s actually a Darwinian beauty to it. More often than not, in the battle for market share, only the strong survive, and only the good products sell. Over time this benefits not just companies but consumers too. Fortunately, capitalism is still mostly a meritocracy.

  The Cheat Code is filled with ways to get a leg up on your competition, but here’s a cheat geared specifically toward winning your most hard-fought battles: Know what your opponent fears most. That’s generally their primary point of vulnerability, and, in turn, your primary point of opportunity.

  Smelling the fear of your competitors is a difficult art, because people are good at concealing their weaknesses. So to win at this game you’ve got to learn how to read people as they really are, rather than as the personalities they project.

  Unfortunately, our digital world makes it even easier for your competitors to hide their fears and flaws. When you use a text or email to provoke a direct competitor into revealing their hidden vulnerabilities, you never really know how they reacted to it. You rarely get an immediate response to a provocative email, because people will take time to think it over. As a result, you just get a carefully considered response (sometimes crafted and vetted by their publicist), often with nothing more revealing than an emoticon. This is just one more reason to always deal with people as directly as possible: face-to-face, or via Skype, or at least on the phone. A lot of people are afraid to do that because it makes them uncomfortable. But remember, success is most often found far from your comfort zone. If it wasn’t, more people would be successful.

  So suck it up. Go on Skype, or hop on a plane, and get some personal, direct contact with the people who are blocking your goals.

  People say, “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” That’s because when your enemies are close, it’s much easier to find their weak spot. And believe me, they have one, no matter how successful they are or how confident they seem on the surface. Everyone on the planet has one or two things that they’re insecure about.

  The moment you find that chink in their armor, you begin to learn a lot about them and what drives them.

  You get a better sense of why they make certain decisions, including the ones that are interfering with your goals.

  If their insecurity is, say, that they’ve never held on to a major client for more than a year, it might mean that they’re now trying to do something that creates loyalty and sustainability. Or it could mean the opposite: that they’re inherently afraid to commit and unable to change. No matter what it is, you’ve got something to think about, as the puzzle pieces of their behavior begin to form a pattern that ultimately reveals what they want most, how they plan to get it, and what they’ll do next.

  The shortcut to their vulnerability is information. Try to get a feel for them, and then ask a hot-button question that sounds specific but is really pretty general, like, “Was business slow last year?” or “Are you having a hard time holding on to good talent right now?” Those things are true of at least half of all people, but if it’s really a sore spot for them, they’ll feel like you’re reading their mind. It may ruffle feathers (see Cheat 5 on pissing people off), but it is a way to instantly understand someone
on a potentially deeper level.

  If they just give you a straight, simple answer, it usually means it’s not a big issue for them. If so, drop it, and look for something else. But if they’re evasive or, at the other extreme, start giving you too much information, it tends to indicate they’re touchy about it.

  Touchy is good. It usually leads to the disclosure of other insecurities, since fears tend to cluster in certain areas. Insecurity about the lack of a college degree, for example, might be coupled with insecurity about intelligence or drive, and so on.

  As you learn what makes people tick, you know how to predict what to expect from them, defend yourself against them, and ultimately beat them.

  You absolutely do not do this to gratuitously hurt anybody, and you absolutely shouldn’t take it so far that you turn into an asshole. Once you know where their fear is, you don’t need to be an asshole. You can be kind and gentle, or you can just stop engaging. You know what you need to know.

  Your smartest competitors have probably been doing that to you for some time. They have no ill will. They just want to win.

  You should feel flattered. Winning feels best when you defeat a worthy opponent.

  Not only that, when they figure out your fears, it motivates you to do one of the most important things in life: conquer them.

  If you’re the only fearless person in a room, it’s almost like an automatic win. So go ahead and celebrate. You’ve earned it.

  One of the great Jedi mind tricks of business—and almost any situation—is to tell people you’re going to do something before you do it. Don’t ask their permission; just tell them. Then do it.