If you've been to the movies or watched cartoons, you've seen the word "Avatar" before. But, when we talk about building a career or company, it has a very special meaning.
Your avatar is the person you're looking to help. The one you want and need to serve and elevate. It's your potential customer, client, diner, patient, participant, camper or student.
If you want to build a successful career, experience or venture, you need to get to know your avatar on the most intimate level.
You need to know her name, where she lives, her age, fears, desires, hopes, struggles, and influences. You need to understand a day in her life, then a week, a month, a year and a decade. You have to understand the conversations going on in her head, the language she used to talk to herself and the pictures she paints with her mind.
It's hard work to get this detailed, but it's also make or break. It lets you serve, solve and build on a different level.
But, here's the thing. The two reasons most commonly offered to "know your avatar"—to solve her problem better and to communicate with her more effectively—they matter, BUT they're not actually the most important reason to do this work.
There's something bigger, more important. Something nobody talks about. Ignoring this reason is a huge miss.
And that's what we're talking about in this week's short and sweet GLP Riff.
