Smart.

Are you doing too much? Is all the effort you put into deciding if the brochures should be blue-gray or gray-blue worth it? Are your clients going to appreciate any of this anyway? The answer is…maybe. I don’t want to let you all down here but there will be a percentage of people who just couldn’t care less about all the effort you are putting in to making your company the best it can possibly be. There will be people who won’t even notice the changes to the website you spent eighty hours working on, nor will they care if your company is the only one who will give them a service which is twice as adapted as the competition.

But the good news is I will give you the real question you should be asking – do you want these bozos as clients anyway? The answer is of course – no.

Continue to create and innovate as hard as you can, striving for excellence because it is one of the rare values which knows no fashion. The clients you want will notice you and the clients you want will talk about you. The clients you want are the reason you went into business in the first place so aim high. The evergreen Seth Godin smacks the idea home if anyone is still in doubt.

“Our readers won’t understand this.”

“Our customers are too busy and won’t get this.”

“The people who come to our restaurant want red meat.”

“No one is going to want something this good…”

Think about the stuff you hear on the radio or read about in mass market publications. When they attempt to cover something you really know about, they seem pretty stupid, don’t they? Oversimplifying to the point of getting it completely wrong. They’re busy pandering to the masses, dumbing things down for the lowest common denominator.

You’re under pressure to do that with your restaurant and your spiritual advice and your stump speech and your non-profit pitch. There are gatekeepers pushing you to dumb it down for the average.

The thing is, when you dumb stuff down, you know what you get?

Dumb customers.

And (I’m generalizing here) dumb customers don’t spend as much, don’t talk as much, don’t blog as much, don’t vote as much and don’t evangelize as much. In other words, they’re the worst ones to end up with.

I’ll take the smart customers/readers/prospects every time, please.