Regrouping on Growing the Business

I’ve sort of trailed off recently when it comes to working on the business and growing it. For a while, I was really hitting the SEO stuff hard and totally revising my site, and it was working! But then I stopped, and now my traffic and results are dropping again.

Right now, I want to circle back on doing two things in particular.

First, I think it’s time that I actually write a newsletter and send it out to my clients. This will involve a few steps:

  1. Finding out when I last sent out a newsletter, then finding out which new clients I’ve added since then and adding them to the newsletter list
  2. Figuring out what big changes have happened in the industry to include in the newsletter (chatGPT?)
  3. Compiling maybe some of my recent posts if they are helpful
  4. Actually writing the newsletter and sending it out
  5. Coming up with a schedule to send these out quarterly

I think that it’s key to keep in touch with all my clients. They need to know I’m around and I need to be top-of-mind for them. They want to know I’m active and working on their best interests. This is the best way to do that.

I’ve made a note to prepare for this tomorrow and proceed with next steps.

The second thing I want to do, is to start producing content again. I need to be posting regularly in my blog if I want to rank highly. I’ve really been slacking here. I’m not sure when my last blog post was.

But if I can keep posting regular content, it should greatly improve my results for all posts. Maybe I should come up with a schedule where I write a new post every couple weeks, and maybe revise an old one every two weeks, too. Something like that.

That’s it for today! I think it’s really important I focus on growing, since I haven’t been the last couple years and that has been a problem.

In All My Hobbies I’ve Opted to Nominally Do One Hard Thing – At the Expense of Fundamentals

I always hated “fundamentals”. I always wanted to just jump to doing the really difficult, impressive stuff so that I could prove I was good at something.

I remember with skateboarding, I always struggled with some core stuff, and instead of just perfecting each thing one at a time, I would spend all of my time trying to land – for example, a 360 flip. It’s a very difficult trick, and every so often – only from a standstill – I could land it.

It looked bad and I could never really get the hang of doing it consistently, but sometimes I could do it. And that made me feel like I was good at the sport.

I wasn’t though. I was just ignoring all the small pieces that were required to get good.

Or on the trampoline. I did get good at basic flips, but then I started doing backflips with a full 360 in them. Once again, it wasn’t pretty. But I could do it. And it impressed people and made me feel like I was really good at it.

And then guitar. I never practiced with a metronome, I didn’t learn any music theory, my rhythm was bad, and just so many of the fundamentals were totally foreign to me.

But I could play one of the more complicated Stevie Ray Vaughan licks. Not very well, obviously, but I could play the notes and I could do it quickly.

I think with all these things, there has been sort of a desperate thread to prove (to myself?) that I’m good at something. I skip steps to just get to the hard stuff because otherwise I feel like I’m just not that great.

And I also just get bogged down in the details of things and it feels overwhelming. I’d rather just go to something cooler and more showy.

I never put any of this together until just recently. The irony is that, in my quest to prove I was good at things, I neglected the very fundamentals which would have enabled my actual success.

It’s sort of frustrating looking back now and seeing how counter-productive it was. I should have drilled in the fundamentals and mastered them so that I could proceed from there with a good base.

Even now, I’m just realizing I do it with weight training, too. I’ve neglected all stretching and all core stability exercises. Instead, I’ve focused hard on obvious measures of success like my bench press numbers.

And then just the other day I injured my back again, ostensibly as a result of not building up core strength. In this case, I got burned by not building up a literal base of stability from which to expand my strength.

In work, I’d much rather take on major acquisitions than slowly build up my client base with strong business fundamentals.

So the question is: what do I do now?

The first step is obviously what I’m doing here: acknowledging the issue. Now that I’m actually aware of it, I can watch out for it going forward. I can pay attention and notice where it might be counter-productive.

I’m really going hard at the guitar again, and it’s important that I do things differently this time. I actually have been focusing a lot more on the fundamentals this time around, so perhaps I have already started to improve. But I do really need to dial that in and realize that being rock-solid on the basics will make the harder stuff way easier.

And I should obviously apply that elsewhere, to. Particularly with my business. I need to look for all the ways in which I’m neglecting some of the basics and really start to work on them. I already sense that there are tons of areas in which I need to improve.

I Need to Totally Recalibrate How I View and Experience Things – Especially Being Alone

I’ve often mentioned here how I’d like to sort of get away from all social media and all silly entertainment, and I finally feel now like I’ve pretty much done that. YouTube had long since been the holdout, but I’ve been using the Screen Zen app and it has successfully gotten rid of the habit.

It’s not that I don’t ever use YouTube now, but the app basically just bugs me to get off it, and I do. So I went from averaging probably almost 2 hours per day on YouTube down to maybe 10 minutes per day. Which is great!

But I feel like a lot of wiring in my brain is being reworked.

I’ve been practicing a ton of guitar and reading a lot. And… Not much else, beyond work and normal, in-person socializing.

What I spend my time on has seen a massive shift away from mindless entertainment and far more onto productive practicing and reading in other languages. Both are things I’ve wanted to prioritize, and now I am.

But I think it necessitates a recalibration of many things. Some of this will happen naturally, and some I probably need to put some thought into.

Historically, almost any time I found myself home alone on a weekday (or worse: weekend), I found myself feeling very lonely and itching for some kind of distraction.

And I always found that distraction: mostly in mindless entertainment.

Over the years, any time I felt that tinge of restlessness or loneliness, I would just turn to YouTube or just watching movies or shows, and I could successfully ignore it.

But now I’m not doing that. The feeling is still there, but I’m channeling that energy into practicing things and reading.

Whereas in the past I never saw those as pleasurable activities, I feel like they are slowly becoming so as more and more time goes by and I get away from any social media or entertainment addiction.

I’ve heard a lot about “dopamine resets,” which may be largely nonsense as a concept. But while there may be no way to “reset” things in one go, I think that if I can avoid all of the mindless entertainment as an ongoing state that it will greatly increase my enjoyment of good, healthy things.

Since it’s all still kind of new, I don’t know for sure, but that certainly feels like how things are going.

So I’ll keep paying attention to that and see where it gets me.

I’ll also work on avoiding giving into any temptation when I feel that boredom or loneliness or… Whatever.

I think being bored is a gift. Maybe nothing productive or healthy sounds fun in a moment, and that’s okay. Maybe I should just be bored for once.

I don’t need to be stimulated every second of every day.

We’ll see how things go in the future, but I’m hopeful they will keep improving in this area.

It’s Been Bothering Me that I’ve Been Too Focused on Entertainment Rather Than Anything Deeper

I feel like I’ve become increasingly restless in my life, (figuratively) and I’m starting to realize it’s because I feel I’ve focused almost everything in my life on enjoyment of entertainment and experiences.

Recently I’ve been very torn because I’ve sort of been planning a long Mexico trip and have been trying to work out logistics.

But I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not excited about doing a long trip like that. And it took me a while to figure out why.

I’ve spent so much of my life simply trying to experience things, hoping that it would make me happy. But it hasn’t, and I think it’s because it’s just… Not that deep. It doesn’t provide meaning or progression.

I’ve had some great experiences, don’t get me wrong. But that’s not enough by itself.

For travel: I feel like I’ve gotten away from my initial goal of travel, which was to connect with other people, cultures, and places. But lately I’ve felt more like a tourist; traveling around just for hedonistic pursuits like adventure-seeking, food, etc.

Lately I’ve gotten really into improving my guitar playing and also focusing on consistency with my weight training. The latter has been more successful then ever thanks to my CPAP therapy.

So it feels like I finally have things that are deeper and worth pursuing, and that’s really where I want to focus my time.

If I go travel for three months, both of those things will fall by the wayside. Not to mention the fact that I’ll need to spend a lot of extra money.

Before CPAP, I sort of felt like I had no energy after working to put towards any pursuits other than just entertainment, basically. But now I have way more energy. Plus I think I finally broke my last social media vice (YouTube) and now find myself far more focused and motivated to actually do things.

I may still travel, but at this point I am thinking it will be just one or two shorter trips. I’d rather stay home and focus over the winter.