He was born and raised until his teens in Communist Romania. After a delightful stretch as near homeless in Rome, with a great escape story to tell, his family settled in Woody Allen’s den of mediocre intellect, Los Angeles, where he still resides. Endurance made possible by hard-earned access to the rest of the world, courtesy of Boeing and Airbus aircraft, and well-used, beefy-limits credit cards backed by business success.
Large fingers notwithstanding, Steve has been pounding his keyboard for many years, right through a highly accomplished business life. He is credited with creating prominent creative and empirical concepts, strategies, and techniques widely used in marketing and advertising today.
Steve is a recognized expert in a number of fields including marketing, advertising, corporate governance, and conflict resolution. He is also a consultant to typically successful people and businesses on various matters, disciplines, challenges, and issues real and often imagined.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up writing a book?
I fancy myself an astute observer of people and life. Although oxygen is indispensable to life, it is observation that enriches it!
After an experience-rich life, millions of lives and real-miles-traveled, wanting to read everything in print, talking to everybody who will talk to me, I express my observations as a story-teller, satirist, and provocateur.
I have been writing for fun and profit for decades. I have written a truck-load of essays, satires, white-papers. Heck, a eulogy or two. Many anecdotes. Various of those have been shared around the world. And published.
I have ducked the “why have you not published ‘like’ a whole book yet?” one too many times. That, on an early Tuesday morning, a year ago, from a multi-bestseller author, world-renown uber-brain thinker, educator, and economist. He talks—and writes and writes and writes—to me because we are childhood friends…
So. Ten minutes after one not-particularly-relevant email later, I just sat down … and kinda got up 32 days later with a mostly finished manuscript.
What do you hope your readers take away from this book?
My precepts in life, always on my imaginary teleprompter:
Life Is Not A Dress Rehearsal
and
A Life Without Passion Is Not A Life Worth Living
What are the top three tools you currently use to write, publish, and promote your books?
- First and last is to write! The more, the better. In writing, as in speaking, do not confuse volume for reason; nor quality.
- My relentless—and hope and pray—bottomless passion is to seek independent thought. Then, express that to my readers.
- For me, although I avail myself of every marketing and advertising tool, and opportunity to promote my writing, there is no substitute for personal passion to share my observations. In other words, if I should be on an elevator ride with strangers for a couple minutes, if I don’t sell a book, well, time to ride that elevator again. And again…
That is what it takes this storyteller and satirist to be a provocateur…
What were the top three mistakes you made publishing your book what did you learn from them?
- Waited too long to write it!
- Waited too long to write it!
- Waited too long to write it!
You have to know that to a 100% degree of certainty, that there is no propitious time-certain to write a book.
If you wait for that Gatsbyesque muse to kiss you on your creative forehead, best park yourself on a beach in Pavuvu, and drink uber-sweet umbrella drinks.
However: there is absolutely a time-certain! You know its arrival in the pit of your stomach. Borrowing from my non-friends at Nike: Just do it!
When will you consider your book a success?
I did the moment I read the first 50 five-star reviews (they all were five-star), AND considered their authors! And then the personal emails from people I did not know, but reckoned as relevant, wanting to talk about my book. Yes: my email address is in my book and on the website that supports the book.
Can you share a snippet that isn’t in the blurb or excerpt?
That is a thinker. Particularly that it takes me more than 60 words to say “hello”.
How have the pandemic and Lockdown affected you or your new business?
Our core businesses are:
- Own and market our massive consumer database in the recently coined “big data” world.
- Provide enterprise safety and security solutions to schools and,
- Providing solutions to significant problems for people and businesses in many verticals. The latter gig, we affectionately refer to that as the “Oh S**T Business.” The most fun and rewarding, of course, is writing and public speaking.
In the data world, our major clients are banks. If you can tell me what banks have been thinking (marketing wise) for the past two years, please do. Schools? Just imagine the impact on our valuation when a client who has 750 campuses, shuts down on a Thursday morning.
The “Oh S**T” business? Conflict, insipid decisions and behavior, and consequences, therefore, make for a perennial growth industry.
Operating in the COVID tsunami: talk about the opportunity, no, the compelling need for the most creative among us to really shine. How to “do your thing” in that everything-downward vortex. That presents the most elegant intellectual Rubik’s cube: adapt or perish.
What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?
Confused: in re what? You do not mean being taller, better looking, being able to dunk a basketball again, and all that?
What is the one thing you wish you knew before publishing your book?
In retrospect, I wish I focused on all that I knew!
Had I done so, I would have realized how my experiences in all manner of disciplines would contribute to the publishing process.
To most authors, publishing a book presents as a really daunting trip. Not so, if you accept that publishing YOUR book, is just another marketing project. However elegant it might be!
Please share one thing new self-publish authors can do to gain more reviews on Amazon.
Shamelessly pitch your book and ask for reviews. Drive everybody you know, don’t know, your door-to-door ballet dance instructor, to read your reviews! Nothing motivates people to write a review more than imagining their own words and name in print.
Can you share some of the marketing techniques that have worked for you when promoting your book?
Bottom line: take every opportunity, in every scenario, in every vertical, all day, every day to promote your book. With some billions in revenues behind me, trust that I would have no problem standing outside a books-store, with a sandwich board, peddling books.
That said, be mindful: not everybody can pull off being entirely single minded, all the time. Certainly not without the risk of alienating people!
Develop and hone YOUR pitch. Do not be borrowing one. If you want to borrow one, get a gig in telemarketing. Try yours on everybody you know; make them dump on your pitch. Then hone it some more.
Then forge ahead.
If you had the chance to start your career over again, what would you do differently?
I would be more arrogant about what I can do.
I would be less arrogant about how to do it.
I would have been even more rapacious about pursuing opportunities. That means better homework and less, however thoughtful, risk-aversion!
Get better clarity on the relationship between potential benefit and liability, inherent or incurred. Dreams and reality. Lunacy and highly unlikely but potential brilliance.
And, evaluate better what are really the biggest “ideas” passing by me, through me, around me.
Less lamenting on the absolute dumb moves in my business life.
What’s a productivity tip you swear by?
None. Just live with the unsettling knowledge that the unhappiest person in any project at its successful conclusion is me. I always “know”, to a certainty, that I could have done better.
Try to out-think everybody. At least, out-work them.
What helps you stay driven and motivated to finish writing your book?
I did not need any artificial or external motivation! Nor do you!
If you are clear about why you are writing, and what in you makes writing an imperative, you cannot wait to dump the next words, sentences, paragraphs, and pages onto your manuscript! Sleep is for others.
Can you recommend one book, one podcast, and one online course for entrepreneurs and authors?
Too many to count. Really. You are left to do ALL THAT HOMEWORK yourself. A word to the wise: clichés are, well, clichés, for a good reason! They are so cliché!
Apropos… Here is one: Do not ignore the classics. Those are classics because they are … classic.
What are you learning now? Why is that important?
Everything and nothing specific. To be clear, consider the following:
– The only thing in life that is truly perishable is time. It is not evergreen. It is not like rotting apples; cannot buy fresh “time.”
– Knowledge is endless and ubiquitous. You are two clicks away from the incomprehensibly massive library that the Internet is.
So:
If at the end of any one day, when I am about to call it, I cannot identify two things that I learned that day—even if known to everybody else but me—I wasted the most precious commodity I have. Time.
If you only had $1000 dollars to promote a new book, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
In popular/busy restaurants, hawking my heart out.
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new authors?
Understand and get comfortable with the reality that writing is a very different kind of being naked. Unless writing advertising, you must write NOT focused on who might read your stuff. Write to be whatever “best” you think of at 2 AM when you cannot sleep.
What is your favorite quote?
LIVE IS NOT A DRESS REHEARSAL – Steven J. Manning
What is your definition of success?
Success defies a universal definition.
It is defined both qualitatively and quantitatively, and often unique to peoples/groups limited by choice or necessity. And certainly, can be defined for each individual.
On a macro basis, definitions of success differ among people in various populations, based on a lot of factors: societal, station and time in life, ethnic, geo-political, economics, and more.
Most often, success is defined in terms of accumulation of wealth, education beyond what was likely based on one’s roots and upbringing, social position, and both real and perceived accomplishments.
For many, perhaps hundreds of millions of people, success is in fact simple survival!
MY PILLARS OF SUCCESS?
There are four of them. In brief:
1. ADOPT AND LEVERAGE THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT WORD IN LIFE AND BUSINESS.
2. NEVER CONSIDER FAILURE AN OPTION.
3. HOMEWORK, HOMEWORK, EXHAUSTIVE HOMEWORK and
4. OUT-THINK EVERYBODY. OR, AT LEAST, OUT-WORK THEM.
If you want to share with me “where you are,” reach out by email. I might share more about MY PILLARS with you. Please be mercifully brief and focused.
The closest I get to defining success, FOR ME, it is having options in life. Being able to seek and find satisfaction in life in ways that I am able to and want to pursue.
How do you personally overcome fear?
Do not consider unreasonable and unfounded fears at all. Frame issues with knowledge and care. Then act.
How can readers get in touch with you?
You can drop an email to me at sjmanning@stevenjmanning.com … That email address serves the website for my book, Pimps Whores And Patrons Of Virtue.
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