Baking bread this morning. I use paper towel to dry my hands when I wash them, so I’m not clogging up a dish towel (and subsequently the plumbing or someone’s laundry) with gooey glutinous flour. I use ‘em for wiping up the counter between loaves, too. Especially if my hands are still covered with gooey dough.

The kitchen trash is under the sink; not my favorite arrangement but it’s not my house. Went to pull the cupboard door open to toss the paper towel, and there’s no handle. No knob. It’s one of those cupboards where you have to grab the edge of the door to pull it open. I hate them. Invariably at some point during every meal prep, I slip and bend a fingernail on the edge or get a door open just far enough to bang when it slips shut. I hate sharp loud noises.

Why don’t the cupboards have handles or knobs?

My years in construction and architecture tell me it’s either for looks or to save money, or both. Bad reasons to make something that works poorly.

We all worry about appearances. Do you ever find yourself doing what looks good; what makes you look good, instead of doing what’s right?

If doing the right thing is gonna make you look bad, that’s a serious problem. But I’ll bet that the embarrassment you think you’re going to feel or the bad press you think you’ll be facing from saving face is all in your head. Putting on a front is time and effort wasted. Your true fans want to know the real you, flaws and all.

You can’t get away with incompetence, but you’d never do that. What you can get away with is being human, flawed, imperfect. In fact, your fans would much rather you were flawed like them than for you to be superwoman, never letting the cracks show.

If knobs make the cabinet work better but they don’t look as good . . . well, you know what to do.

I just took a shower. For most of you, this is not fascinating. Unfortunately, the shower itself was not that great.

A shower needs to be a great experience, especially since it’s already a poor substitute for a nice long soak in a tub big enough for such a soak. Instead, the makers of this shower’s plumbing made it one step worse by designing a faucet which inextricably links the water’s temperature with its pressure.

In order to get hot water, you simply turn the faucet farther. Of course, this results in more pressure. Turn it up high enough to have a nice hot shower, and needles tear at your flesh. Turn it down to a gently stimulating spray, and the frigid chill stimulates goosebumps.

How does it make sense to link water pressure with water temperature?

Do you provide any packaged services in your business which make as little sense?

Do you require a client to take Service B when they sign up for Service A? Do you place restrictions which make life easier for you, not your client? Are there ways you can let suspects, prospects and clients have more choice, more control, over the degree and kind of services you provide them?

A cold brisk shower might not be your thing; nor might a gentle hot shower. It’s not about you! Don’t suffer from BLM (Be Like Me.) Unless the packages you’ve assembled are required by your very best professional advice, don’t insist that the people who provide your livelihood think like you.

Shower the people you serve with choice.

Have I got an amazing special for you!

You just know those words are going to be followed by a pitch, don’t you?

First, I’ll get the rant off my chest: telling me that you have $10,000 worth of ‘products’ for only $297 is selling, period. It’s not special, it’s not a gift. In fact, if these are electronic products with zero cost to reproduce, there’s no such thing as a ‘special’ price because even if I only give you a nickel, your profit margin on that sale was 100%.

Folks looking for yet another tricky advertising gimmick (you can tell them a mile off because all their prices end in ’7′) are delighted to imply that they’re giving you a gift, some amazing mega deluxe special extra deal, in order to make a sale.

Let’s stop corrupting what the words ‘gift’ and ‘special’ mean. Don’t you dare imply you’re doing someone a favor, and then ask them for money. Making a smaller profit isn’t a favor, it’s business.

Remember when you used to be able to ask someone out for coffee in order to get to know their business better? Smart folks realised that by unselfishly learning about others in order to send them qualified prospects, our networks grew and in the long run, it came back around to us.

Selfish folks figured this out, and started asking networking victims out to coffee to ‘learn about your business.’ And then, as soon as they’d trudged through the formalities, the hard sell started. Pitch pitch pitch.

Try asking someone out for coffee so you can learn about their business. Watch the panic in their eyes, the scramble for an excuse. Selfish sellers have done their best to suck the juice out of an unselfish but brilliant method of organically, humanly, growing your business.

Promise me that you, yes you, reading right there, will never resort to deception, no matter how subtle, in your marketing or your business. Promise me that if you offer a gift, it is truly a gift, with no thought of return. Promise me that your ‘special’ price is actually less than what you’ve actually sold for in the past, and explain why you’re reducing the price (otherwise, it just looks like you couldn’t sell it for a hundred so you’ll try fifty.) Promise me that you’ll stop ending prices in the number 7 because even if it works, it’s psychological trickery and it’s unethical and immoral.

Find someone who’s corrupting the gift culture which has been fundamental to civilization for thousands of years, and send them a link to this post. Let’s make sure everyone everywhere knows that we’re not gonna take it anymore. At the very least, the lazy clowns will have to find something else to corrupt.

Rise above the garbage and noise. You’re better than that. You know that, of course, but you’re afraid. I get it.

Sometimes being a hero is hard.

Recently a personal interaction reminded me of an anecdote I read some years ago about tea. (I love tea, but this may be my first business lesson about it.)

When tea first arrived in England it was expensive. Not, a little bit pricey expensive, but prohibitive, only for the rich expensive. But it caught on quickly, because, well, it’s great.

One woman in the south took a full pound of her expensive cache and sent it to her sister in the north, telling her how marvelous it was. Her sister boiled it, dumped the black liquid off and served it like a vegetable. She wrote back about how terrible it was.

She’d prepared it like a vegetable, which she understood, instead of seeing it for what it was: something entirely new.

Some business folks hear about the ‘new marketing’ and assume it’s just more of the old marketing, except online. They still want instant results, measured in dollars return on dollars invested. They want ways to convince people to buy, no matter what they’re selling. They spend time and money bolting a website and blog and email autoresponders onto their old-school advertising.

They’re dumping the tea and eating the leaves, and then they wonder why it doesn’t work.

If you help your clients with their marketing efforts, you may, like the first woman in the story, assume that they’ll know how to brew a pot of social media marketing. Erm, tea. Whatever.

But, like the second woman, they don’t. They can’t. Because it’s so foreign to them, they have nothing to connect it to. Give information away, with no firm plan for monetising it? That don’t make no sense!

Had the first woman included some simple instructions along with her glowing praise, the story may have had a happier ending. Don’t leave anything to chance. Clients who are new to the new marketing will need a lot of hand-holding, a lot of encouragement and explanation and nudging.

Don’t assume they get it, unless you actually see them drinking the tea.

Mother and daughter team Barbara and Shannon Kelley write a fun and opinionated blog called ‘Undecided‘ in which they discuss challenges specific to women in business.

One point keeps nagging me, far in the back of my mind. Today’s post, about Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, nailed down what’s been niggling.

The Kelleys say “For generations, men’s roles have been predetermined, and unquestioned” and comment on the challenges of a woman who’s trying to find the balance of being herself while fitting into what was, until fairly recently, a man’s role.

Here’s the thing: I’ve been doing that my whole life. Well, switch the roles, but in a lot of ways, I’ve never been fully comfortable with what the stereotypical man is supposedly like. I couldn’t care less about sports. I’m much more interested in talking to a woman than staring at one. (I’m generally more interested in talking to a woman than to a man, too.)

My business model has always been focused on relationships, communication, emotional connections. I do not ‘close’ sales. I don’t go for the jugular in business deals. I tend far more toward kind and gentle than sharp and assertive.

I deeply appreciate the struggle women have had to achieve anything near equality in a seriously unfair world. I know, a little, how it feels.