Archive of posts from December 2022

Having ideas to blog about every day isn’t a byproduct of having lots of ideas, but of having the commitment to showing up every day to engage in the act of writing those ideas.

Having financial freedom isn’t a byproduct of striking gold or winning big, but of having the commitment to showing up for the work over time while not spending it all.

Having lots of high-income skills isn’t a byproduct of hiding away reading books all day every day, but of showing up in the market daily for over a decade and building hands-on experience across a plethora of disciplines, industries and skillsets.

What we want is a byproduct of putting in the work ahead of time.

Let’s go, we have work to do today.

Time goals are almost always wrong.

Your 10 year goal is a never goal. No one knows what the world will be like in 10 years. It’s the same as putting something on your bucket list.

Your 12 month goal is an aspirational goal. One that wishes for life to be different, carries with it a bit of anxiety, and is too far out to really do something about.

Your 6 week goal is rarely set. The 12 month and 10 year goals are far more popular, and sound far more exciting.

And yet 6 week goals, 6 weeks at a time, might just be the way to create the results you’re looking for.

Not all who like your tweet tap Like. Sometimes, people just like it inside. Think of how many profiles you’ve enjoyed but didn’t tap Like on.

Not all who love your product checkout their cart. Sometimes, it’s for later, or they forgot to login, or they’re sharing gift ideas to relatives. Think of how many times you didn’t checkout and bought later on.

Not all signals can be taken at face value. Tech May feed you information, but it’s for you to deploy insight.

No likes doesn’t mean no love.

Abandoned carts don’t mean lost desire.

The data doesn’t tell the full story.

Keep going.

We hear a lot about the importance of persuasion skills in sales.

The land of silver-tongues and slick objection handling tricks would have you believe it’s essential for effective sales and profitable business.

But what’s better than persuasion skills? Having an offer that requires no persuasion. An opportunity so compelling that no persuasion skills are required nullifies the need for such persuasion skills. Which is great, because most of them are difficult to train, exhausting to executive, and ethically questionable.

But what’s better than an offer like that? Having a product so compelling that it’s desirable regardless of the offer. Hermès don’t need to offer 30 day money-back guarantees on their Birkin bags because people want them so much they’ll buy them sight-unseen from a waiting list of six-twelve months.

If you want to hustle for some sales, consider persuasion skills.

If you want to make sales easier, consider a remarkable offer.

If you want to make sales effortless, consider a remarkable product.

Sometimes things don’t go quite to plan.

You lined up everything just right… triple-checked every variable… but…

Wham.

It goes sideways.

Maybe because of something you missed. Maybe because of something someone else did without telling you. Maybe you still don’t know quite what happened.

These are really challenging times: “This shouldn’t have happened!” we cry.

But it did happen. It does happen. And it might happen again.

And that has to be OK.

The longer we hold onto “what should have happened”, the less control we have over our lives, our emotions, and our ability to make the most of the situation for what comes next.

As Seneca the Younger wrote, “Fate leads the willing, and drags along the reluctant.”

Things that feel hard aren’t necessarily hard…

They might just feel hard because of the inner-dialog associated with them…

“I’ll never grow an audience, look I posted something and no one cared”. You knew one post wasn’t going to cut it, but 10k might, so keep going.

“I’ll never find the right person for me, look at how badly that date went.” You knew you were unlikely to meet the right person tonight, so keep going.

“I’ll never get enough customers for my new business to make it something to be proud of.” First, who says you need a certain number of customers to be proud of it? Second, luck aside, it can take many, many years to get a business moving. So keep going.

Just.

Keep.

Going.

This is our first Christmas with our baby boy.

And golly is it different (in a good way!)

We don’t sleep much right now, because he’s feeding every couple of hours. He’s growing strong, he’s fighting the obstacles he was born with, and the reward is more than worth the sacrifice.

We don’t leisurely eat our Christmas meals right now, because we have a precious little bundle who needs our constant attention. We get to enjoy our meals differently, and enjoy our boy at the same time, which is so much better than “mealtimes as usual”.

Change can be good or bad depending on whether or not we have our perspective in order. Most good things in life require change to bring them about. And change, as we’re told, is supposed to be uncomfortable. But y’know what? A little discomfort pales in comparison to the huge upside we receive for engaging it.

Change isn’t normally that uncomfortable.

Why not pursue change a little more often, then?

Happy Christmas, change maker.

Don’t decide to read more. Decide to read one page per day. Easy, sticky, and kind on yourself.

Don’t decide to ‘do social media’. Decide to engage 5 posts that interest you per day. Easy, sticky, and kind on yourself.

Don’t decide that you need to see results next month. Decide to stay the course for the next five years, taking small steps every day. Easy, sticky, and kind on yourself.

Don’t decide that you must act fast or things will be awful. Decide to take daily steps to make things better. Easy, sticky, and kind on yourself.

Don’t decide that things are terrible because you made a bad decision. Decide to learn from it and allow yourself to make better decisions from now on. Easy, sticky, and kind on yourself.

You got this, champ.

Ever had a digital detox?

They’ve become really popular over the past 24 months.

And they stink.

FOMO doesn’t get fixed by hiding from the signals that bring our the worst in you. Addressing your insecurities so that you don’t have those reactions is the solution.

Comparison anxiety doesn’t get fixed by being removed of the opportunity to compare yourself. Only finding peace in who you are and what you’re doing can fix that.

Your addictive personality doesn’t get fixed by forcing yourself away from your phone. Nurturing balance and the virtue of temperance in your life does a much better job.

Social media doesn’t make us bad. Neither do phones.

They simply reveal opportunities for us to work on ourselves.

And the deep work of self-improvement is much more potent than any digital detox.

When you feel like your project is too hard,

Or the competition is too fierce,

Or the rules aren’t fair,

Take a look at some photos of Earth taken from space.

Like these ones.

It’ll quickly remind you of how very small and insignificant our problems are.

We’re a spec on a spec for but a moment.

Live and create with that in mind.

I’ve done this many times.

Perhaps you have too.

Maybe it’s a product that promised to save you time or money, but saved you neither (and had a refund policy that didn’t quite extend to the very day you realised this).

Maybe it’s a professional service that promised to take some work off your shoulders and create certain results for you, but was instead a glorified course-in-disguise with an airtight contract that leaves you hanging.

These things happen. Tedious, expensive mistakes, fuelled by a cesspit of lies we colloquially call “marketing”.

We can ask for refunds and get what we’re granted. We can try to make the most of what we have when we have it. But there’s no point in kicking ourselves for not seeing precisely that which was deliberately hidden from us.

We can simply elect to be better than these people.

We can simply elect to protect those in our choice of market from similar charlatanry.

It’s down to us.

One of two things will happen:

Either this question can motivate the best version of yourself to show up each day…

Or it’ll haunt you about shortcomings you don’t feel like addressing in yourself just yet.

“Did you do your best?”

In your day, did you? In the project you just finished, did you? In your relationships this week, did you?

If you can look in the mirror and confidently say “Yes!” then be really proud of that, as this is very rare.

If the answer is “Yes, but” then move onto the next answer, which is the honest version of this answer.

If the answer is “No”, then now you have the opportunity to do something about that tomorrow, with the intention and specificity you need to achieve that change.

So. Regarding whatever is going on in work or in life right now…

Did you do your best

A quick reminder for everyone creating and building:

When you’re on your deathbed, very few things will matter to you anymore.

Create, build and live with that in mind.

When you ask AI a question, it gives you an answer.

Sometimes, we laugh at the answer.

“As if it could get that wrong! AI is so silly.”

Except it’s not silly.

It’s precisely what we asked for, in response to the level of precision and specificity we provided.

It’s not wrong or silly.

It’s simply lacking in direction from you.

If you’re a good leader and provide clear direction, humans and machines will know how to follow.

If you’re not, neither will help you go where you want to go.

It’s still all down to you.

I love making and selling things that people will love.

But I hate marketing.

Not because the act of connecting good people with great things that will benefit their lives for a fair price is a bad thing. It’s not.

And not because the desire to connect with good people and see their lives change positively is a bad thing, either. It’s not.

But because in my 17 years of marketing experience, I’ve resolved that most marketers tend to be interested in none of those things.

Meaningful work is downtrodden: Connecting and empathising with real people is something most marketers want to give to machines.

Interests are not aligned: Seeing progress in someone else’s life isn’t the goal of a marketer. Seeing their own close rates go up regardless of great alignment, is.

It’s not getting any better: Platforms are trying to encourage meaningful connection, marketers keep looking for loopholes to exploit.

So yes, I hate marketing.

And yes, I will continue to do marketing…

…Because we need SOME people out here doing the meaningful, aligned, honourable work of improving the lives of others, using our capitalist society as a force or good.

If you’re also involved in marketing, I hope you’ll join me on trying to be a good example of a better way.

I love winter.

It’s not just winter seasonally…

It’s very much winter in the markets today.

Many things die in winter…

This winter killed most volatile asset speculation. It killed moonboi strategies for those who wish to flip for quick profits on frenetic or inflated floors. It killed a huge amount of transactional activity. It brought floor prices of most assets way, way down.

Many of these things will never recover to their former states.

And this is not a bad thing.

Volatile speculation is a natural phenomenon in emerging mediums. ‘Moonboi’ strategies have existed for a long time in many markets, and don’t work out for most people or for very long. And the transactional game musical chairs where nobody wants to be the one “holding the bag” is an unhealthy game worthy of its winter correction, as is the inflated figures that fuels it.

So what remains, standing among all the death and destruction?

Winter didn’t kill innovation, such as the continued blockchain developments which remain a marvel from both an ‘open database’ perspective and a ‘social layer for transactions’ perspective.

Winter didn’t kill the ability to build meaningful brands, as this has been something creators have done for countless years through many other winters. From the Great Depression to the dot com bubble burst, brands have grown in the cold.

Winter didn’t kill the ability for good people to come together and build. Strong communities aren’t necessarily the biggest, loudest, or even the most committed. Strong communities are ones that meet for each other as well as for themselves, inviting only the right types of people one at a time, finding a natural and sustainable place for that community to fit into their lives.

Things that grow quickly in nature tend to die quickly too.

Even weeds — fast-growing and pervasive as they are — die in the winter.

Yet we decorate fir trees every winter with tinsel and lights, an icon of coming together in good spirits even when it’s cold outside.

The weather outside may be frightful… but it’s never a bad time to invest in building something delightful.

Enjoy the winter!

Our development team love ‘tidy’…

They produce methodical, precise code, collaboratively with spatial context using orderly project management tools.

Our animation team does not love ‘tidy’…

They produce emorphous, evolving ideas, collaboratively in the face of shifting plots and market trends.

Put the developers into the toolkit of the animators, and they’ll see only chaos standing between them and the methodical, lean production.

Put the animators into the toolkit of the developers, and they’ll see only needless layers of complexity standing between them and tehir execution.

Messy gets a bad rap.

But sometimes, messy is better.

If a project isn’t moving along in the way you’d like to think it should, consider trying throwing out all of the orderly comforts in favour of proactive, freeflowing, messy ideation and chatter.

You may be surprised with the results you see on the other side.

Projects and companies are starting to promise “a community” around their work…

…but community is an incredibly loaded word. And one that’s not often used properly.

Getting people to check by in your Discord server to clear their updates and check if they missed anything isn’t community. If it was, every app on your phone is a community.

Having a Facebook Group where you periodically broadcast your wares to an anxious crowd isn’t community. If it was, every Shopping Network product is also a community.

Community is more than those things.

It’s a group of people who choose to go out of their way to be together around a common cause or interest, often even when it’s inconvenient. There’s an investment of energy and care into the people by the people.

That takes time. That takes selective invitation. That takes the messy work of forging real relationships. That takes a long-term commitment to doing things right when the cheaters compel you to cut corners unduly.

That’s real community.

We can thank AI’s developments for a better market and better practitioners:

AI can write decent copy. Good: that means decent copy is no longer acceptable, and a deeper understanding of the art and the reader is necessary.

AI can design decent graphics. Good: that means basic images with no reverence for audience nor design is no longer acceptable.

AI can even write code. Good: that means the simple problems are solved faster, leaving room for solving new ones while challenging devs who rest on their laurels to step up.

Great is the benchmark, precisely as it should be.

Thanks, AI!

What do death and quick money have in common?

They both focus on the end, not the adventure.

And it’s not a real adventure if you spent the whole time wishing it was over.

Multi-tasking stinks.

We think it doesn’t because we watch our computers seemingly multi-task a great many things effectively…

…but computers don’t multi-task. They rapid single-task.

They’re digital, binary, either-or, one or the other. We’re not digital…we can attempt true multi-tasking in ways they can’t.

But we should take a leaf out of the book of machines:

Multi-tasking means constantly interrupting your focus between two or more activities, causing splintered attention and shallower thought.

Single-tasking means committing to resolving individual tasks with uncompromising focus, until they’re done (or the part we committed to is done) then treating the next task in the same manner.

Rapid single-tasking is the same as above, but with the benefit of allowing yourself to become really, really good at it. This way, the commit-execute-next rotations speed up, bringing your uncompromising focus and deep attention to a task, executing effectively, then moving onto the next… at speed.

To you, you’ll have a calm day and yet somehow get more done.

To others, you’ll seem like a multi-tasking workhorse.

Try giving a renewed commitment to single-tasking. Work on it until you can rapid single-task.

And watch what you can achieve.

Creative work suffers from woke thought.

Creative work also suffers from conservative thought.

Contradiction and creativity live in harmony:

When everything fits neatly together, you’re doing jigsaws, not art. Nothing wrong with jigsaws - they can be fun to do - but the creative work is already done. Putting pieces in places that they don’t belong isn’t how jigsaws work.

When everything doesn’t fit, and you make something totally different that somehow reconciles opposing ideas, now you have an opportunity to create something new.

“1,000 songs in your pocket” was contradictory until it wasn’t. And when it wasn’t, the iPod started.

“Stoicism but fun” was contradictory until it wasn’t. And when it wasn’t, the Mortiverse started.

Let contradictory ideas live in your mind together. Choose not to have an opinion, and instead dance with the ideas.

Who knows what you’ll create.

The skills required to acquire resources aren’t the same skills required to retain resources.

Acquisition requires engaging opportunities, making opportunities, taking some risks, and a lot of action.

Retention requires the opposite… not engaging every opportunity, protecting downside, and a lot of patience.

The former without the latter results in exertion without security or freedom. The latter without the former results in less security or freedom.

Neither deserves a bad reputation. Both are valuable. Find your own balance and be proud of it.

We used to worry a lot about rented land.

Customers who were on Facebook and not our email lists.

Websites powered by proprietary tools rather than open source ones.

Hey, I get it, I can spin up free open source sites and self-host email marketing platforms on cloud droplets too.

The thing is, this shouldn’t really be a consideration anymore.

People go where they want to go. Our decision should be whether or not we want to show up with them, not whether or not we want to judge the venue.

People recognise their friends wherever they go. Our decision to be a friend (as a brand or as a person) when we show up is what keeps the relationship alive, not the venue.

Decentralised futures don’t let you own everything anyway. People should have the choice where and how they interact with others. That means the power may move away from big tech, but it doesn’t move back to you.

Don’t worry about your brand being built on rented land.

Worry about your brand being something people will miss when its gone.

First, do it.

Doesn’t have to be perfect, but it has to be fast so you can get your feet wet, experience what it’s like, and acquire taste for what ‘great’ looks like.

Second, do it right.

This doesn’t have to be perfect either, but you have taste now, and so you can build something great while knowing what ‘great’ looks like.

Don’t feel bad for the first pass not being right. It’s the process of making things great.

And don’t shortchange the second pass from being great. You have taste now, so don’t hold back.

Our baby might arrive today.

Or it might be tomorrow. Or it might be a few days from now.

Some things we can plan for, other things happen in their own timing.

And while we wish we have more control in the moment, the timing we get is beautiful, and we’re thankful for it afterwards.

This is also true of the projects we pursue.

Maybe there are some unknowns. Maybe there are some areas where timing is tense.

And maybe, when it’s over, you’ll have something truly beautiful.

What do you optimise your work for?

Optimising for profit: This certainly has its benefits. But slashing salaries and sterilising the experience tends not to motivate people to do their best work.

Optimising for efficiency: This certainly has its benefits, too. But observing every colleague with a stopwatch in hand tends not to nurture exploration, discovery and breakthroughs.

Optimising for joy: This certainly gets forgotten. A lot. But it causes the very things that optimising for profit and efficiency are designed to create: better output per colleague, more remarkable customer experiences, market innovation and more business.

Plus you’ll enjoy your days.

Surely that counts for more than all of the others?

Creators and entrepreneurs do a lot of chasing.

Goals, dreams, freedom, shiny objects.

But what do we truly own as a result of all that chasing?

Not the goals: they usually promise more than they deliver.

Not dreams: they were often accessible all along if we only looked.

Not freedom: that comes from within our minds, not from external stuff.

Sure, shiny objects: but they don’t stay shiny, and are lousy aspirations.

So it turns out that the chasing doesn’t provide much at the end of the journey. Like a long walk in the woods, you tend to start and finish by your car, then drive home.

But like a long walk in the woods, the journey is the reward.

All that remains, then, is to walk places that you like, with people you love. Creators and entrepreneurs who do that are likely to find a lot more happiness in life.

When you can do many things… how do you decide which to delegate?

Kezi and I were talking about this one today.

We delegate many things… but where are the lines? What are the ‘rules’? How can we be sure we’re delegating the right things and keeping hold of the right things?

The answer was illuminating.

It wasn’t based on what we were best at; just because we’re good at something, it doesn’t mean we should do it. It wasn’t based on what was most efficient; just because something is efficient, it doesn’t make it effective.

We landed on something quite different… We do what is memory-book-worthy. We delegate the rest, where possible.

What’s “memory-book-worthy” mean? In years from now, when we look back across the time we’ve spent building our companies, working toward goals, and living life… which things would we like to stick in a book of memories?

For instance, Kezi loves to help people, so coaching certain types of people is memory-book-worthy for her. Same goes for telling stories - she loves doing that. Worth putting in the book. She could delegate those things, but she loves doing them, so she stays close to them, even if she can’t necessarily do all of them.

While building bodies of work that matter to us, it’s worth us all asking ourselves if we’re filling our days with things we’re proud of. There’s no point in being effective-and-miserable, any more than there’s a point in being efficient-and-miserable.

Life is short… Do things that are memory-book-worthy, and give your future-self wonderful memories to look back on.

Just because you’re good at something, it doesn’t mean you’re the only one who should do it. Marketers can hire marketers. Designers can hire designers. Parents can hire nannies. CEOs can hire CEOs.

Just because you’re bad at something, it doesn’t mean you should feel bad about it. Steve Jobs did alright for himself selling computers without knowing how to code. Steve Wozniak did alright for himself making computers he didn’t know how to sell.

Your skills don’t dictate your future unless you want them to.

You’re in control.

Does a car that accelerates faster than other cars really go faster?

After all, the speed limits are the same, and gas stations still need visiting along the way. Not to mention how all that acceleration may cause you more visits there.

Similarly, the people and teams that accelerate fast and make noise get all the praise.

But people aren’t cars…

The best car for collecting groceries and taking the kids bowling isn’t the same car that makes all that noise.

And the best car for traversing a rural landscape because you chose to leave the city behind makes quite a different noise indeed.

We can judge cars based on their ability to do the things they were designed to do…

So why can’t we judge our actions and our goals in the same way?

People aren’t cars: there’s no benefit to judging the paths and actions of others against your own, because you were designed to do different things.

Go at your speed.

It suits you.