I Think I Need to Start Ramping Up Marketing Efforts Again

I’ve had a lot going on personally. Both in the last few weeks and even, more generally, in the last year.

But I’ve made tremendous progress and I feel that I am approaching the time when I can really start focusing on other things again.

I’ve lost a surprising number of clients in the last few months. Much of it seems to be just coincidence, as a shocking number are simply retiring and winding down operations. A handful are switching to another platform like Squarespace.

Very few simply left for competitors.

Much of this is to be expected. However, I have not added very many new clients in the same time frame. That portion has definitely died down.

I’ve also been getting less and less traffic to my website, which is discouraging.

But none of it should be surprising. I’m really not doing any marketing at all. I’m not advertising, I’m not networking, my blogging has fallen to almost zero, and I really haven’t been making changes to the website, either.

So obviously, those things will need to change.

I don’t need to go crazy all-at-once, but I’m thinking that focusing on some website work and other online marketing is a good place to start. Immediate goals and tasks are:

  • Start blogging regularly again (whether website-related stuff or hosting business stuff)
  • Systematically go through old blog posts and update them to make sure they are good and relevant
  • Make tweaks to website content
  • Add Jimmy and Maria to my team page
  • Fix my portfolio
  • Fix my proposal template
  • Send out a newsletter to all existing clients
  • Add clients added in the last year to my newsletter

Those things are basically all the low-hanging fruit. Most shouldn’t even be all that difficult.

Again, I don’t need to go crazy here. The goal is to just take a step forward at a time. Over time, I should be able to make some pretty major changes without having to put in that much effort. The key is progress.

I’m hoping that my motivation and enthusiasm and energy for these things will pick up as I start to gain momentum and have successes. It’s just a little bit hard right now, know that I’m losing clients faster than I’m gaining them.

Eventually, I may even consider some in-person networking and other efforts. But I don’t want to start with that just yet.

A Missing Factor: When Outcomes Aren’t Determined by Inputs

This post is pointless, in the sense that I don’t know that it will have a firm conclusion.

Instead, I just want to bring-to-light a concept I’ve been thinking about lately.

Essentially, that sometimes the outcome is not at all determined by the inputs that go into it.

Some obvious insights from this are more or less extensions of the post I wrote about being careful what lessons you learn from failures.

First, let me explain exactly what I mean with some examples.

What made me think of this is disc golf. There are tons of examples of this.

The most obvious ones are where your throw your disc and it ends up with a fluke roll that ends up far from where it landed.

Now, at the elite level, you are always considering the possibility of these types of outcomes and doing what you can to prevent them. But even then, they will happen sometimes.

So let’s say, as is often the case, that you’re playing a hole in which most of it is blind. You only see the early portion of the flight path.

You throw the disc, and you think it’s looking good. However, once you get down there, you realize that the disc actually ended up a good 100 feet beyond the pin.

“I guess I’ll just throw it way less hard next time,” you say to yourself. You’ve come to the conclusion that you threw it way too hard this time, and you need to compensate for this next time.

The problem is, you didn’t. You actually got a fluke roll, where the disc landed, popped and perfectly on to its side, and then proceeded another 100+ feet beyond.

But since you couldn’t see this happen, you only know your inputs (how you threw it) and the outcome (where it landed). You don’t have the full story of what happened in the middle.

This result is essentially noise. Using it as a learning experience will be actively detrimental to you. As you play more, you may start to sense better when things are flukes, and not learn from them. But in the short-term, they may actively hurt your ability to progress, as you test out different inputs and seemingly get random results.

As another example, I was playing with my friend Zac and, a couple times, he let loose what was actually a perfect throw. Form was great, release was great, and the disc was launched perfectly.

And it went terribly.

The disc just barely clipped a tree and bounced deep into the woods.

Now this case is actually a bit different, because he had far more control over the inputs and actually could fix this.

The problem in this case is that he’s likely to learn the wrong lesson. Despite throwing with perfect form, the feedback that he got is that he did a bad job. He is likely to change his throw going forward.

Now, there is probably a correct lesson to be learned in this case, and it’s that he should aim ever-so-slightly more to one side to avoid that tree. But instead, he may very well blame the other aspects of the throw.

So really these are two different – but related – concepts.

In the first example, the input really was almost completely disconnected from the output. In the second, they were connected but the wrong input was likely to be blamed.

In other areas in life and business, this is likely to happen almost constantly. It’s extremely difficult to identify exactly what makes you successful in most areas. And in both successes and failures, you are quite likely to blame the wrong input for them and proceed accordingly.

It’s like when a lottery winner outlines their “strategies” for success, when they obviously were totally irrelevant. The only factor that mattered was actually dumb luck.

If I had to come up with some kind of conclusion, I would just say that it’s incredibly important to:

  1. Recognize when the results of something are caused primarily by factors outside your control
  2. Be sure not incorrectly identify which of your efforts actually caused a success or failure

I think part of what makes experience so incredibly valuable is that these things start to come naturally to you. You’ve had enough data points that you know when something is a fluke, you know what should work, and you can start to pick up what you did wrong if it really was your fault.

I think about my own business and the work we do, and how I can approach almost any situation – including ones that I haven’t directly worked on before – with way more confidence. I have an intuitive sense of what will work and what won’t, and know that I can figure most things out without messing anything up too badly.

And that comes from experience. I’ve done it all before. I’ve done a new thing for the first time thousands of times, and so I know what the process is like.

I remember when I was first starting and I would often be forced to just try things blindly without having any sense of how they would go. But that’s how I learned and gained experience. And with that experience comes wisdom.

In disc golf, I’ve noticed the more I play (especially when replaying certain courses), that I am able to sense when things are a fluke. Sometimes my disc will end somewhere and I’ll conclude, “okay that definitely rolled there, because there’s no way it went that far on the fly”. And that helps me learn going forward.

Again, I don’t have a firm conclusion for this, it’s just a concept I wanted to formally write about because it may have big consequences in many areas of life and business.

Why am I More Emotional about Imagined Situations than Real Ones?

I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon, and it is that I tend to get more emotional about imagined scenarios than real ones.

So, for example, maybe I imagine ahead of time what it’s going to feel like to see a friend for the first time after being apart for a really long time. I may actually tear up imagining the situation.

But then, when it actually happens, I don’t feel that emotional.

What gives? Shouldn’t a real situation be more moving that an imagined scenario?

I think one obvious explanation is that almost as nothing is as enjoyable or moving as we think it’s going to be. It has been well-documented in studies that most experiences don’t live up to people’s expectations for them.

Funny enough, though, I believe their recollection of those events may actually be more consistent with their original expectations, even though their experience in the moment didn’t live up to them.

I don’t think that’s the full explanation, though. For one thing, just because you have high expectations for something, doesn’t really mean that you’ll feel the full effect simply imagining it.

I think a major component is probably that I’m a lot more inhibited when I’m with people. That may very well be everyone.

I’m realizing more and more, though, that specific people may also make you particularly inhibited. Especially if they have some negative influence on you. For example, I suspect that most of my experiences spent during bad stretches of failing relationships were probably not nearly as enjoyable as I had hoped, because I was emotionally numb as a result of the tension with that other person.

But like most people, I suspect I am more inhibited with anyone than I would be alone. I think that’s mostly normal.

It would be nice to be a lot less inhibited with people I trust, though. So that might be an area I can explore a bit more.

I don’t think that I’m necessarily all that inhibited in my words or actions, but I do think there’s a strong emotional inhibition. I’m not exactly sure why that is, but I think it’s something I will definitely explore in a future post.

I’ll think more about that and write about it!

Why I Get Anxious when I’m Alone

So this blog premise was marked down a while back – I suspect earlier this year. I don’t even feel like it’s that relevant anymore, but I thought it would be interesting to write about it in hindsight.

As established elsewhere, I have since determined that I’ve been depressed much of the time over the last handful of years. I’ve also determined that the primary cause of this depression was a deep-seated insecurity and feeling of inadequacy.

Increasingly, this had manifested as a sinking feeling in my stomach along with anxiety and other depressive symptoms.

I think it’s very common for these types of insecurities to be dealt with by simply repressing them. The more successfully you can repress them, the better you feel. Its temporary impact is lessened and you can more readily enjoy whatever you’re doing.

Clearly, this is not permanently sustainable and eventually results in things like full-blown depression and anhedonia.

In my case I think that when I was alone I was forced to confront it. I wasn’t able to repress it any longer and the feelings came up and manifested as anxiety, among other things.

This seems pretty obvious to me now. It definitely wasn’t then. It’s actually pretty amazing how effective it has been for me to just methodically work through all these things on my own. With the insights I’ve made, I feel like most of my behavior and feelings in the past can be easily explained.

I’m also excited to realize that most of this insecurity has pretty much gone away. I rarely feel like I used to.

It’s as if simply shining a light on the problem made it go away. It used to thrive in the shadows but now that I’m aware of it and can rationally determine that it doesn’t even make sense, it’s a lot easier to make it go away.

So I really just wanted to address this particular blog prompt because I think it’s just quite interesting how things have changed in a relatively short amount of time. It’s nice to feel like progress has been made.

It’s also just fun to realize that something that seemed super mysterious and perplexing just a few short months ago is now so obvious to me.

 

I Think I Need to Eliminate the Consumption of All Short-Form Content

Over the last few years, I’ve tried optimizing a number of things. I’ve identified tons of things that are “bad” and done everything I can to maximize productivity, happiness, and enjoyment.

I’ve had mixed results, and have often been left with things that just don’t quite line up with my understanding of how everything should work.

I’ve now come to the conclusion that short-form content of just about any kind is absolutely destroying my motivation, my energy, my focus, and even my enjoyment of, well, literally everything else.

I’m not going to claim to fully understand the interaction of dopamine and other neurotransmitters here. But I believe that whether you’re binge-watching YouTube videos, scrolling through any social media feed, or even clicking through news headlines, you are using up something that is difficult to replace.

After I’ve done any of that, I feel unmotivated, and it takes a ton of work to get anything done. I also seem to have a spike in anhedonia and don’t appreciate or enjoy most things all that much.

I like to think that I’ve pretty much avoided all of these things and shouldn’t be suffering from them. But YouTube has really been the last holdout.

Since I got rid of YouTube shorts, I figured that I could just watch the “longer” videos and I’d be fine.

But I find myself jonesing for more videos. And then it becomes hard to just sit and do nothing without constantly reaching for my phone to watch more. And by then it’s too late.

The last few days, I’ve avoided even watching YouTube, and I think I’m starting to feel a lot better. I’m feeling more motivated and starting to enjoy things more.

Granted, I just got back home to Minnesota and there are lots of additional factors. But I really think this one contributes greatly.

I’m going to continue strictly avoiding all short-form content and might even start avoiding really any shows or movies for a while (other than when I’m with a friend) just to see how I feel. I think it might make a huge difference.

If it goes well, I’ll implement these things long-term. I’m pretty hopeful it will.

And even if it doesn’t: what will I have lost? Nothing. Even if these things didn’t have longer-term impacts, I feel that they have negative value just in wasting your time.

I do not need more entertainment.