Or, more to the point, what is "awesome"? Well, something that fills one with awe. But what is "awe"? According to Dr. Dacher Keltner (Born to be Good), "awe" is a feeling of uplifting that one gets when he is looking on things from up high. It's a feeling we get when we suddenly see our world and ourselves in a much larger scope; when we come to some understanding of our place, our path, and our purpose in our universe. Since time immemorial, it's a feeling we've associated with divinity.
It's hard to say what fills others with awe, but to be awesome from your own perspective is to do something that would fill you with awe. To "be awesomer" then is to be do more of that thing which fills you with purpose and meaning and (since your time and resources are finite) to do it at the cost of all the other things that just grind away at your life yet you feel no purpose, meaning, or self-actualization from.
So, what does "be awesomer" mean when translated out of uncool-high-school-faggotnese (and, incidentally, into cult-of-TEDnish)? It means to take a risk, abandon the beaten and grinding path, and to live a life that feels meaningful to you. If you ask me, that's sound advice; possibly irresponsible if you're a parent with kids depending on you, but definitely solid otherwise.
However awesome you think you are you need to appear more awesome than that to get into Y.C. :-)
I do like fun, goofy language but I hard a hard time with it in this context. ..probably because I went into reading the article with a certain attitude that didn't match "awesomer".
oh well.. :)
- Be concise
- Don't bury the lede
What I'm attempting to get at in this piece is a bit more tactical. The applications I reviewed all knew they should "be concise." But, they kept running into situations where they became more verbose while believing they were still concise.
My hope was to point out a few of the mental traps that would add clauses to sentences and sentences to paragraphs.
irony
Any other tips you'd suggest?
I'll see if I can dig up a few more.
The Dropbox one is a fine example though and you'd still be served well by it even though it was originally submitted years ago.
The last tidbit I would add is that if you don't get in this round, apply again. And then again. And again (don't use the same application / idea/ company each time). A single application is not going to 'make' your company. Perseverance and applied intelligence will.
Is it not a red flag that someone applies consistently applies with a new idea and/or company each time? In my opinion that doesn't really show commitment to something.
Showing improvement in traction over time might be a better way.
Elevator pitch comes from the notion that you've just stepped onto an elevator along with some obviously wealthy person. Just to be polite she says "So what do you do?"
You have until she steps off at her floor to obtain financing for your company.
A tagline is typically used in written marketing materials - direct mail in my case, back in the day. Working Software's marketing director Mark Galvin and I were discussing taglines for QuickLetter 2.0. Mark is a brilliant marketing professional, rather shy, quiet and thoughtful, leading to my surprise when he emailed me:
"QuickLetter, only $49.95. C'mon - you'd spend more than that on dinner for two and a bottle of wine."
I'm working on some of my own projects right now. My complete inability to come up with appealing taglines and elevator pitches is definitely holding me back.
For reasons of Search Engine Optimization, it is advisable to compose an appealing tagline, then to place that tagline as the very first paragraph after your page's H1 element, also as the meta description element in the page's head element. Most of my own pages do that, with the result that I get a lot more search engine referrals. I discuss this in your detail at:
http://www.warplife.com/tips/webmaster/search-engine-optimiz...
