I Used to Be Excited

It occurred to me the other day that I used to be really excited about my business, and now I’m not.

The thought came during a brief moment of excitement, and I realized it wasn’t something I had felt for a while.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am happy with my business and certainly with the flexibility it gives me in my life.

But there was a time in the past where the possibilities seemed endless and when it felt like I would achieve exponential growth forever.

After a few years of that failing to happen, I no longer feel that way. While I’m just as confident that growth is possible, it just hasn’t been exciting like it was at one point. I no longer have much hope that the growth will be extreme.

So the question is: what can I do about that?

First, I need to start growing again. I need to make a concerted effort to identify ways to grow, and possible more important: identify the obstacles I have to accomplishing it.

For instance, it’s likely that I will need to change how I’m managing many aspects of my business now, because they aren’t scalable. But I also simply need to actually do some of the growth initiatives I’ve been talking about doing for ages.

I like to think that once some of that growth happens, the excitement will come back and I’ll start feeling like anything is possible again. And that, in turn, while encourage me to do even more things to improve.

I just have to get the ball rolling now.

Feeling Successful and Productive Makes You More So

This last week I was working through my to-do list and I was quite productive and completed many important tasks, including some that had been delayed for quite a long time. I felt good about everything I was doing and the direction I was taking.

And then I felt excited about the future and the prospects for my business and even started to have new, profound ideas about how best to improve things going forward.

I feel like for the last couple years I’ve sort of gotten stuck in a cycle of “keeping up” with everything. I’m barely on top of things and the best I can hope for is generally just to complete the backlog of urgent tasks.

And when you do that, you don’t feel good or accomplished. You feel like you did the bare-minimum poorly.

Which is exactly how I feel quite often when I’m working. Almost all the time, actually.

Now, I’m probably doing a better job than I think and I certainly have high standards. I know I’m not burning my business to the ground and I have countless happy clients.

But I’ve felt like I’m doing the bare minimum and that’s what’s important because it affects all of my actions.

It’s also absolutely true that I haven’t done much beyond maintenance of my business. I’ve probably spent an average of maybe 10 minutes per week in the last two years “on my business”, working on new ideas and on ways to try to grow. That’s… Nothing.

As a result, I haven’t felt as excited as I should be about things and I’ve gotten stuck in somewhat of a vicious cycle where my lack of initiative and time spent on these critical functions has further hurt morale and initiative and results in me doing them even less.

But I feel that coming back.

As I’m finally starting to tackle these backlog items and projects that should help grow the business, I feel more invigorated and excited about the future. I’m exploring new ideas and genuinely putting effort into making things happen.

So I think it absolutely works both ways. Just like with most things, good behavior begets more good behavior. Or you can do a bad job and get more and more stuck over time.

Obviously this post can serve to simply encourage me to stay on top of things and focus on activities that grow the business, but I think it’s important to put a more-actionable suggestion in here as well.

Going forward, I think I need to make it a point to do something every day that feels like it will help grow the business or improve things significantly in some way. It can even be something tiny.

This is important to do even on days when I’m overwhelmed. It needs to feel like, every day, I am making important progress in my business and never that I’m simply keeping up with what I have.

That’s critical.

Not Working Out is an Emergency – And Perhaps Others

I was looking through my workout results from the week and had a realization today. Any time I’m not consistently working out, I should consider it an emergency in need of immediate remediation.

I only took off something like 5 weeks of working out. Partially due to having COVID and generally being constantly sick, and partially due to traveling and not being able to find a gym that would let me sign up.

Regardless of the reasons, the results were dire. In taking 5 weeks off, I lost something like 5 months of strength gain.

Now, to be fair, there are some confounding factors. I was sick a lot and that likely contributed to a greatly increased rate of muscle loss. I didn’t eat nearly as much and barely moved for a while.

Additionally, there are three factors which all currently have an unknown impact on my strength:

  1. I’m in Mexico City at something like 7500′ of elevation. Thinner air might affect me greatly
  2. I’m in Mexico City, along with its pollution
  3. I recently recovered from COVID, and it’s entirely possible that it left me weaker than before (decreased lung capacity, etc)

For the first two, I’ll soon find out if they have any real impact on me once I return home. For #3, I may never know. I do know I’m regularly out of breath even when I’m not doing anything, though all three together could play a part in that.

But ultimately, in just a very short amount of time, my inactivity undid a monumental effort I put in to build strength in the preceding months.

In 5 months I probably spent something like 150 hours working out to achieve a certain level of strength, but it was the missed 35 hours of workouts here that undid it all.

Using those numbers, the missed workouts were more than 4 times as influential in terms of my results. That’s insane.

So if I find myself in another position where I’m not working out, I need to treat it like the emergency that it is and fix it immediately.

But this also got me thinking… With my workouts, my results are tangible and, conveniently, numerical. There’s no guesswork and nothing subjective. I can see when I do better or worse, and by how much.

As a result, it was very easy for me to identify that this is a major issue and that I need to go to great lengths to avoid it happening again.

But what about… You know, everything else?

I have lots of goals and lots of things I’m learning and developing. I often take large breaks from those as well. Could it be that taking time off is just as damaging for those, if not more?

And I’m thinking that the answer is: definitely.

So when I’m home and I take 3 months off from really practicing Spanish, I think it’s pretty likely that I’m doing massive damage to my progress.

Now it’s true that I think knowledge is a bit more indelible than muscle. In a year you’d likely lose 100% of the muscle you’ve gained from weight training. But you’re never going to forgot 100% of something you’ve learned well.

But even so, I think consistency with all things is perhaps even more important than we’re told.

I need to focus more in my life on consistency over time in all pursuits. Always keep moving forward!

I Know How to Grow, I just Haven’t Done It

As I’m reading through old posts and considering my current position, I’m realizing that I probably know exactly how to grow my business and am just not doing it.

Case in point: working with one of my partner companies, they have a variety of websites they’d like us to host. Once they are over to us, we can begin billing for that hosting.

It’s up to me to make sure those sites get migrated. And I just haven’t been doing it.

This is the proverbial “low hanging fruit” and I just haven’t been pursuing it at all, despite the fact that I absolutely have.

Yes: it’s more exciting to talk to a new client and make a new sale. In this case, the sale is already done, and all that remains is the boring logistics of actually migrating the websites and setting up billing.

What this might be reflective of is the fact that I love the conceptual, the novel, and the big-picture. I don’t love details and implementation. But in this case, they are absolutely critical.

Reading through my posts, I also have countless ideas of how to expand my hosting operations. But I’ve barely implemented any of them.

Networking with owners of other website hosting companies would be a great start! So I think it’s time to finally get to that and other ideas.