Every once in awhile, someone asks me why I have pink hair.

(You ever notice that no one asks why anyone has blonde hair, or red hair? But pink, it seems, requires a good reason).

There are a lot of ways I could answer that question, but the simplest is probably that I don’t really buy into the standard set of rules about what “success” or “professionalism” look like.

As it turns out, there are a lot of things I don’t buy into.

I don’t buy into the idea that the best way for me to make a living is to work in a box from nine to five every day. Even a really nice box.

I notice that Brian didn’t buy the notion that being a lawyer (which he had put a lot of years and dollars into) was a wiser career choice than starting some blog about copywriting and social media.

And come to think of it, from hearing Darren Rowse’s story, I understand that his wife didn’t think that his notion to do that problogging stuff, whatever that was, would be anywhere near as logical as getting a nice steady job at a gas station.

If you spend enough time around entrepreneurs, you’ll quickly begin to realize that the vast majority are . . . (hm, searching for the polite word, here) eccentric in some way.

(OK, let’s tell the truth. A lot of us are basically nuts)

But even if you find one person who seems totally normal, you can bet that she made at least one giant, ridiculous decision in her past that seemed crazy at the time, but ended up getting her to the great place she is today.

I have pink hair because I like the way it looks, because it makes my kid smile, and because I happen to rather like tweaking ordinary expectations.

But here’s the important part: What I do with my hair doesn’t matter at all. But if I lived a mousy-brown life — where I did all the things we expect of a “normal” person — I wouldn’t be as successful or as happy as I am today.

Entrepreneurs question the rules

The nonconformist thing is on my mind because I’ve been trading email lately with one of our regular writers, Johnny B. Truant. You might have seen that Johnny has partnered with filmmaker and Huffington Post writer Lee Stranahan to create a course called Question the Rules.

Their tagline is: The nonconformist’s punk rock, DIY, nuts-and-bolts guide to creating the business and life you really want, starting with what you already have.

Basically, if you’re starting your own business, you’re breaking a rule. (That’s true whether or not you keep your day job.)

It’s a big rule, too — the one that says:

Other people should be in charge of how much money I make, how hard I work, and what I should work on.

When I went out on my own, everyone praised me for being such a risk-taker. Including all the people who were out of a job after an ugly round of layoffs, and who were answering those monster.com ads with an increasing sense of desperation.

I had a different rule:

No one will ever care as much about my financial security, or will work as hard to improve it, as I do.

To me, it was risky to stay with that day job. But to a lot of my more “normal” colleagues, my decision made me look like a downright daredevil.

All entrepreneurs are punk rock

That’s how Johnny puts it, anyway. I just use the word “nuts.”

Entrepreneurs are nonconformists, whether we’ve realized it and embraced it or not. We challenge a lot of rules and norms that are very deeply engrained in this culture.

The problem is that a lot of people who decide to start their own business just know that “normal” isn’t working for them.

They know what they’re not, but not really what they are. They don’t really own their punk rock nature (quite possibly because they have no interest at all in dyeing their hair pink).

So they end up feeling like fish out of water.

Which is not, of course, a nice feeling at all.

• They’re rule-questioners, but they live surrounded by rule-followers.
• They know what they don’t want, but can’t always translate it to what they do want.
• They don’t know who to ask for advice, because they don’t know any other people who are odd like this.
• They’re not “normal,” but they end up judging and measuring themselves by normal standards because those are the only standards available.

I took a sneak peek at Johnny and Lee’s course, and it really speaks to those punk rock entrepreneurs, including the ones who live in lovely four-bedroom houses in the suburbs.

They talk about the stuff to actually do, the tactics. They talk about how to get our heads in the right place – the mindset. (Which is, in my experience, the part you really do need to get right.)

And then just for giggles, they throw in fifteen or so meaty interviews with rock-and-roll entrepreneurs who owe their success to questioning rules. Folks like Chris Guillebeau, Naomi Dunford, and Jason Freid from 37 Signals. Our own Jon Morrow has an amazing interview where he talks about the power of working with a gun to your head.

Oh, and some pink-haired chick from Copyblogger is in there, too.

Here’s the link to check out the course.

(And yep, that’s our affiliate link. We think Johnny and Lee did a great job with this one, and we’re proud to recommend it.)

Johnny and Lee took a page from Brian’s playbook and they’re giving a really, really attractive price on this — but only for a really, really short time.

The punch line is that the price is going to quadruple on Saturday.

So if you want to check it out, don’t dawdle.

How about you?

Do you consider yourself a nonconformist? Do you think that it takes a certain measure of “punk rock” to get out on your own? And what does “punk” even mean for you?

Let us know in the comments.

About the Author: Sonia Simone is Senior Editor of Copyblogger and the founder of Remarkable Communication.

One of my favorite posts from around the web last week came from our own Associate Editor Jon Morrow. He recorded a 20-minute video post for Problogger about how he works with speech recognition software to do all of his blogging.

I do an awful lot of writing every week, and I’ve been thinking about trying speech recognition out in order to speed up the process. But like most people, I was afraid it was going to be more trouble than it was worth to get it working.

Jon’s video made me realize how simple (and inexpensive) it will be for me to make it happen.

Because it was a pretty content-rich video, a lot of folks took a quick look and bookmarked it, thinking to come back to it when they had a little more time. So what better way to spend the Friday-after-a-holiday than eating leftover turkey sandwiches and watching a great how-to post?

(If you’re not in the States, you can re-create the effect by overeating wildly today or tonight, drinking just a little too much, pounding down four desserts, having three arguments with your extended family, and then watching the video tomorrow.)

The highlights of the video for me were:

• The quick-to-install (and cheap) piece of hardware that lets the software actually understand what you’re saying.
• Jon on video! Jon and I have spent a lot of time on the phone, so I’ve gotten to know him fairly well. Getting to hang out with him for a few minutes via video was great, he’s a fascinating guy with a lot to say. (The guy can say more with his eyebrows than most people can with a 100-item list post.)
• The one-stop resource to find the right mic and hardware for your setup.
• The live demo showing exactly how Jon uses the software to manage his business and blogs.
• The comical notion that penny-pinching Jon will ever buy a Mac.

I recommend you check it out, I found it tremendously useful:

Speech Recognition for Bloggers: The Ultimate Guide

About the Author: Sonia Simone is Senior Editor of Copyblogger and the founder of Remarkable Communication.

You know that “inner child” we hear so much about — the one that’s supposedly deep inside of all of us?

Well, I live with it. As a matter of fact, I call him “Austin.”

In the five years I’ve been a parent, I’ve realized that the notion of the inner child is more than just a neat psychological construct. It’s very nearly a literal thing. As we grow up, we don’t change so much as drape layer after complicated layer of adult emotion on top of that inner child. The child doesn’t vanish; he just gets obscured and filtered.

You don’t get an evolved, new mature being. You get Austin with fifteen blankets over his head.

Because that kid always remains at our core (and if you’ve ever caught yourself playing kids’ games with genuine enjoyment, you know that it does), our base motivations remain as well. They just get a little harder to see.

Kids ask for love; adults have complicated passive-aggressive relationships. Kids eat what tastes good; adults want the cupcake, but worry about it going straight to their thighs.

So you want to learn about marketing? Well, despite the complicated models and terminology that some of the gurus use, it’s actually quite simple. To see what works and why, all you have to do is look to my boy.

Make the customer “want that”

When the TV is on in our house, there are sometimes twelve sequential minutes of relative quiet. Then, as the commercials come on, we get a loud play-by-play as Austin begins talking loudly to nobody:

“I want that.”

“I don’t want that.”

“I want that. That last thing. Not that; the thing before.”

It’s easy to dismiss this as incredibly annoying, but if you think about it, it’s actually really revealing.

(OK, it’s incredibly annoying too.)

Without all of those complex adult filters, kids are a conduit to something we don’t normally allow in the adult world: pure desire. There are none of the shoulds and should nots, no rationalizations and thoughts of what is proper or responsible.

That kid is still inside everyone. So the dead-simple lesson is this: Every sale starts with pure desire. Customers either “want that” or they don’t. The rest is just mental gymnastics to justify that core emotion.

Know what your customer really wants

Recently, Austin stormed through a six pack of kids’ yogurt so that we’d buy more, because each six pack had a tiny, ridiculous comic book inside. Yoplait could have filled those containers with shredded paper and they still would have gotten our dollars if Austin had his way.

Did he want the yogurt? Not so much. He wanted the comic book.

Similarly, we sometimes go to McDonald’s because of the dumb little toys they stick in Happy Meals. Or because of the giant playlands they have everywhere.

I have this experiment I keep meaning to try: I want to tell Austin that McDonald’s serves food, because I think he may be surprised to learn it. We don’t go to McDonald’s for the food. We go for the Batmobile that fires a small plastic stick at the back of my head while I’m driving.

Now . . . Wendy’s? We don’t go to Wendy’s. Their kids’ meal prizes are audiobooks on CD. Bleh. Same basic food, but none of what the boy really wants.

Interestingly, as I write this, I’m sitting at a Borders book store. There’s also a Barnes & Noble in town, but they don’t have as many big poofy chairs to sit in, and their ambient music is too loud. Apparently both stores have the same books, but I wouldn’t know that because I just come here to buy a latte and work in a comfortable chair.

Don’t lie to your customers

Cheers to McDonald’s for recognizing that small toys will get kids in the door. But jeers to our local managers for failing the “implied contract with the customer” test.

Recently, my wife and I were assaulted by a barrage of McDonald’s requests because the current pieces of plastic junk that the clerks were dropping into Happy Meals were Bakugan figures, which are Japanese balls that transform into things. (Don’t ask.)

My wife took Austin once and he returned angry, showing me a nondescript plastic Pancho Villa-like figure with a spinning sombrero. Later, I took him and despite the display for Bakugan, we again walked away with a bogus replacement — a miniature stuffed monkey.

Twice burned, Austin’s McDonald’s lust backed off significantly. And, seeing as our son had been lied to twice, my wife and I instituted a temporary boycott.

Associative conditioning works

We often buy SpongeBob SquarePants macaroni and cheese. It’s terrible. For some reason, a complicated spongelike lattice doesn’t present cheese and pasta in a pleasing ratio. And yet Austin eats it and requests it again and again because SpongeBob is on the box.

I tested the limits of this adoration yesterday over dinner. Austin hates lettuce more than anything in the world, so I asked him if he would eat lettuce that had SpongeBob printed on the leaves and came with a free coloring book. He was all over it.

Then he got mad at me when I told him that such lettuce didn’t exist.

Of course, this only works on small children. Only kids are dumb enough to fall for such a simple trick, right?

Um, not quite. Most advertising is based around associative conditioning, which is taking something that you already like and pairing it with something that they want you to like. Or with someone you already like, in the form of a celebrity (or sponge) endorsement.

You may not buy terrible macaroni because a cartoon tells you to, but you buy Nikes because LeBron James endorses them. Or you buy a phone you can’t actually talk on because it’s white with a silver Apple on it. And if you don’t do those things, then I’ll bet you were buying Pepsi because of Michael Jackson back before they lit his hair on fire.

You may be standing up and denying angrily that you do any of those things, but billions of advertiser dollars say either that you’re quite unique or that you’re mistaken. Maybe you don’t come out and say, “Ooh, Tiger Woods. I want that!” but it happens anyway — deep down, at the inner child level.

Like so many things, marketing can appear way more complicated than it is. But marketing is simple — not always easy, but simple. In fact, it’s so simple that you may be overlooking the reasons it works when it does, and why it doesn’t work when it fails.

If you have kids, look to them. See what they like, and why they like it. See what pushes their buttons, because it’ll tell you a ton. Kids aren’t dumb. They’re just adults without all of those complicated outer layers.

About the Author: Johnny B. Truant is giving a free teleclass called Attract Clients, Lose the Stress, and Do What You Love tomorrow (November 12, 2009) with his marketing veteran mother. She knows Johnny’s inner child better than he does, because she lived with it for eighteen years.

Would you like to be more creative in your copy and blogging? It’s really not as hard or mysterious as you might think.

One roadblock that prevents many people from boosting their creativity is the notion that creativity is linked to intelligence. Another roadblock is the idea that creative people are born that way.

So if you’re not super smart or born with the creative “gift,” the natural reaction is to shrug your shoulders and give up. That’s probably a bad move.

Research shows that once you get slightly above an average I.Q., intelligence and creativity are not related. So you could be a genius and display little creativity or have fairly average intelligence and wield amazing creative powers.

And to a large degree, creativity is a learned behavior. It’s a matter of how you approach things, how you act or react to new circumstances, your proclivity to look at things in different ways, your willingness to question, experiment, and take chances. In other words, creativity is not “what you are” as much as “what you do.”

Think of creativity as a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets. To increase your creativity, you simply need to “act” like a creative person. Not surprisingly, people recognized as creative tend to share common traits.

Highly creative people:

1. Have the COURAGE to try new things and risk failure. Every big breakthrough starts as a harebrained idea. This doesn’t mean you should constantly go off the deep end, just that you should balance your routine portfolio of solutions with an investment in the new and untried. Over time, the risk is usually worth the reward.
2. Use INTUITION as well as logic to make decisions and produce ideas. When Matt Drudge designed his Web site, he listened to his gut instead of the Internet gurus. He kept it simple, small, fast, and some would say ugly and primitive. But it works for him, making The Drudge Report one of the most recognizable and popular sites in the world.
3. Like to PLAY, since humor and fun are the ultimate creative act. Which is to say you just have to lighten up. We all have goals, and quotas, and deadlines, but it’s not life and death. When you enjoy yourself, your brain relaxes and is able to produce more and better ideas. One of those ideas may be just what you’re looking for.
4. Are EXPRESSIVE and willing to share what they feel and think, to be themselves. Blogging is the ideal arena for injecting your personality into your work. People are emotional creatures and respond better to people who appear real, honest, and open. Not only is it more interesting, it can also be more persuasive.
5. Can FIND ORDER in confusion and discover hidden meaning in information. Research and critical thinking are key tools for the creative person. Information is to the brain what food is to the stomach. So-called “writer’s block” or creative burnout almost always results from a lack of fresh information and having nothing meaningful to say.
6. Are MOTIVATED BY A TASK rather than by external rewards. You must like the challenge of writing, explaining, teaching, and persuading. Sure, you can make money along the way, but if you’re in it just for the money, you’re not going to be a fountain of new ideas.
7. Have a need to FIND SOLUTIONS to challenging problems. Even the most creative writers won’t have a solution for everything. If they claim to, they’ve stopped thinking. Highly creative people are those whose eyes light up at a question they can’t answer. That’s the opportunity to learn something new and produce remarkably creative content.
8. Will CHALLENGE ASSUMPTIONS and ask hard questions to discover what is real. Writing, blogging, or business rules aren’t really rules, only rules of thumb. If you want to wield true creative power, you will always take what others advise with a grain of salt. (That includes all of us gurus who love to don our pointy wizard hats and pontificate on the secrets of success.) If you don’t know something from personal knowledge or experience, you don’t know it at all.
9. Can MAKE CONNECTIONS between old ideas to produce new insights. Combine the little doodles you make on a white board with online video and you get CommonCraft, a new approach to explaining things to people in a way they can easily understand. Sometimes the best solutions are simply two old ideas jammed together.
10. Will PUSH THE ENVELOPE in order to expand the boundaries of what is possible. There was a time when no one thought you could make money on the Internet. Now it’s a huge, multi-national business platform. Instead of dividing the world into the possible and impossible, it’s better to merely divide it into the tried and the untried. What have you not tried yet?
11. Are willing to TEST new ideas and compete with others based on results. Isn’t that what they mean by the “market of ideas”? Isn’t that what business competition is about? If you’re afraid of being wrong or losing, your creativity will suffer.

These are certainly uncommon traits for most people. But they’re not difficult. Watch how the creative people you know solve problems and deal with projects. You may choose one particularly creative person you admire and, when faced with a problem, ask yourself, “What would so-and-so do in this situation?”

As you begin to “act” like a creative person, you’ll find yourself actually becoming more and more creative. And likely, more and more successful.

About the Author: Dean Rieck is a highly creative and successful direct marketing copywriter. For more copywriting and selling tips, sign up for Dean’s free direct response newsletter or visit the Direct Creative Blog.