There’s deep power in unpredictability.
Here’s the core problem with predictability: people get used to it. Even if you’re doing amazing—amaaaaazing—after 6 months, what was formerly “amazing” will just be “what is expected of you” and rather than be awed by your awesomeness, it will just become a mundane daily sort of routine. The sort of thing that no one gets excited about.
As disappointing as this thought might be, it is a common observation in psychology, known as Maslow’s Hierarchy. To be happy, you need food. But once you get enough food, you naturally get unhappy again. So, to maintain your previous level of happiness, you need food and to be safe at night. However, you soon get used to that, so you get unhappy and, to maintain your same level of happiness, you need food and to be safe at night and have close friends. And so on and so forth until, basically, you find God. We just get content with where we are, no matter how awesome it is, get restless and unhappy, so we need to always be getting greater and greater results to maintain the same level of happiness. It’s the dopamine view of human nature.
This applies just as much in a professional context, although this is a fact that is widely ignored. Your clients will get used to your awesome work and thus, subtly, devalue it over time.
The solution is: surprises, surprises, and more surprises.
In other words, there is a more mundane solution, just get better and better at the work itself. You should do that anyway, and how to improve at the work itself is out of scope for this chapter.
But even doing that alone isn’t enough. Even when the work is technically great, your emotions need to keep getting the ever-increasing dopamine highs.
And regularly giving unpredictable surprises is a great and semi-formulaic way to do so.
What if one day you just announce, “I couldn’t sleep, so last night, I created this new logo concept for you—even though we’re not looking for a new logo, I just have never liked our current one much, and here is an idea for a better one.”
What if another day you just announce, “I couldn’t sleep, so last night, I built out a concept for a completely new type of landing page. We were hoping to do this in 6 months, but I couldn’t stop myself last night!”
Put yourself in the shoes of the client who hears that: wouldn’t you think the person who did that would be worth his or her weight in gold?
The challenge with doing this is keeping it up on a long-term basis. But even doing so occasionally is much better than not doing so at all.
