Author: brianjohnson

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Update on Fixing my Sleep Schedule – It’s Working?

I finally have some good news about my sleep schedule. I’m doing it!

I can’t remember exactly when I most recently decided, for the nth time, to try and fix my sleep schedule, but my gut says that’s been something like 4 months, maybe more. (Update: it was September 21st, so less than 3 months ago as outlined in this post)

My main enemy is the snooze button. And in that time, I think I’ve only gone back to sleep after my alarm went off a single time, and that was because I was sick and made a conscious choice to sleep more.

I’ve been consistently getting up early, often before the alarm goes off. I’m far more productive and things are going well.

I’ve found, though, that it’s very closely related to how much I drink, which has also been much lower in that same time frame. Making sure to avoid heavy drinking days entirely seems to be fairly important to the success of this effort.

But it’s been good. In total, I’m spending way less time in bed, which gives me an extra hour or more each day to be productive.

But I also have way more energy and am just generally more productive in every way.

I’m hoping I can just keep this up and never have to go back to the way things were. I sort of feel like this has been my biggest obstacle for a long time and now I’m finally making good progress on it.

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The Eccentric Part of the Lift is Everything

Some new research has come out which has confirmed what many have been saying a long time: that the eccentric part of the lift in weight training accounts for nearly all of the hypertrophy and strength gains.

Now, it’s possible that other research will come out and show that this isn’t quite true. But what’s there seems very convincing.

If true, it means that I’ve really been doing my training wrong. I really haven’t put any effort into the concentric portion, especially for bigger lifts like bench press.

On bench, I basically just drop it on myself and put all the focus into pushing it back up.

I could be much more productive with my lifting if I put all of my effort into the eccentric portion. So for bench press, that means a very slow, controlled descent. Which is what I’ve been told to do anyway, but I’ve just ignored it for some reason.

For other lifts, like overhead press for example, I maybe don’t even need to worry that much about form going back up. I just need to be able to maximize reps coming down, and specifically the quality of them.

It’s nice to have this kind of clarity, and thinking back, I think I’ve actually really been lacking in my lifts because I haven’t been doing them this way at all.

I’m looking forward to trying this out and will post back results.

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I Need to be Mindful of What Activities I Truly Value

This thought crossed my mind and it was a bit shocking to me that I had never really considered it before.

What activities do I actually value? How do I want to spend my time?

It’s easy to just assume that you are always considering this and that the manner in which you spend your time always reflects what you value.

But the more I think about it, the more I think that’s a foolish assumption that also happens to be incorrect.

It’s easy to get stuck in the same old routine and do things simply because it’s what you have done.

Without a plan in place and some conscious effort, you’re also way more likely to simply choose easy things versus good things. You may even subconsciously justify it by convincing yourself that the easier thing is what you really wanted.

In my own life, I think there are obvious examples of things that I do that I don’t actually value that much. While I’m certainly not bad at all compared to the average American, I still spend a fair amount of time watching movies and TV shows.

And I really don’t find any of that time fulfilling. Even simply reading a book is virtually always a better use of my time. So in most cases, I feel that I should be doing that.

I’ve had the thought lately, too, that something like disc golf is actually surprisingly rewarding, and something that I value a great deal. It’s outdoors, it’s active, it’s social, it’s fun, and I really enjoy an activity that I’m always trying to improve at.

I think it’s really important to be aware of things like that and to plan accordingly.

I think it’s also important to be mindful of specifically what it is about an activity that I enjoy, so I can focus on what’s important.

For example, as a 30-something that spends time with lots of other 30-somethings, activities like going to breweries are quite common.

But what is it I value about those activities? Is it trying new beer?

No.

While that can be mildly enjoyable, what I value is spending time with my friends. That’s it.

If I keep that in mind, I think I can focus a lot more on what’s important and simply enjoy that.

But also knowing that the brewery part of things simply isn’t important to me, I can suggest other social activities that I do find more rewarding.

Going on hikes, kayaking, and doing other outdoor group activities have always been great experiences for me, and I should continue to try to emphasize those and try to plan plenty of events to do those things with my friends.

As I’m writing this, I can’t help but feel like everything I’m saying is common sense and it should always be in the back of everyone’s mind at all times.

But I’m not sure that it actually is.

In this case, I think it’s far better to state these things explicitly and make a conscious effort to determine what’s important and then focus on that.

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The “Managed” Part of Our Hosting Really Is the Selling Point

It’s become abundantly clear to me within the last 6 months or so that what people value most about our website hosting is that it is “managed”.

Sure, they are happy to know that it’s fast and has all these features, but at the end of the day, they don’t really care about that. They just want someone to take care of it for them.

Maybe that doesn’t seem like a great insight to others, but right now it’s a big deal.

I have been a bit shocked to hear that, when offered a faster service for a bit more money, almost none of my clients have been interested at all.

They just don’t care.

What they want is for someone to handle all of this for them.

And I do! I do a good job, too, so they tend to stick around.

And while some are price-conscious, most are not. As long as it’s reasonable and we are doing a good job, they are happy to pay it.

Because they see the value.

Most have been in business a while and probably remember what it was like to work with non-managed hosting. That fear of being totally lost and having to sit on the phone with support drives them to work with us.

And I’m only just this moment realizing that I probably should try to control people’s domains, too. I’ve had some clients lately whose sites went down due to things within their hosting account that I could have easily dealt with.

So going forward, I should recommend that they transfer their domains to me.

I could even charge a premium for “managed domain registration”.

I don’t think much more needs to happen right now. I just need to always keep in mind why people work with me.

It’s not the speed. It’s not the features.

It’s our service.

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How I Work Best: Setting Goals and Making them Happen

I just read one of my very first blog posts I ever shared here. It’s private so only I can see it.

In it, I lament that I didn’t feel like a top performer, and then talk at length about my younger days and how I maybe did feel that way.

But the example was how I managed to end up ranked #1 in my high school class. Long story short, I had that goal, and I essentially took advantage of all the loopholes I could while doing the bare minimum to accomplish it.

In short, I got it done.

In that blog post, I think I maybe missed the point entirely.

I discussed how maybe I didn’t even deserve it and how it really wasn’t just brute intelligence or ability that allowed me to succeed.

Which is true… But largely irrelevant.

At the end of the day, I did it. I had a goal, and I did what was necessary to accomplish it.

I think to my more recent life. Sure, there’s nothing that makes me feel like I’m an elite performer at anything. There’s no specific talent or ability that I have that’s world-class.

But it wasn’t too long ago when I set out after a goal. I wanted to be able to travel the world. I wanted such complete freedom that I could totally set my own schedule and live abroad for half of the year while still running a successful business.

Ideally while still putting away for an early retirement and generally keeping my other goals and priorities in mind.

And you know what? I completely accomplished that goal within about a year.

It didn’t take any stroke of genius, unbelievable talent, or any other world-class ability to do.

What it did require was a great deal of self-sufficiency, problem solving, self-awareness, growth, determination, and goal-orientation.

Those are what I have.

Perhaps I even have those things to a quietly world-class extent.

Maybe not, but it’s possible!

At the end of the day, I’m making great progress and achieving my goals. I think the key from here is to really break things down into smaller, achievable goals that all build up to much larger goals.

I could start by saying that I’d like to do something I’ve never done yet: add 100 website hosting clients in 2023. I already know how to do it, I just have to work at that.

If I am constantly focusing on my goals and how I can achieve them, I honestly think I will.

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I Think I Should Try Eliminating Almost ALL Dopamine Hits

As I’ve become healthier recently through things such as drinking less, avoiding social media, and being more active, one of the most pleasant benefits has been that I tend to “feel” more.

I’m more likely to enjoy little moments and appreciate them deeply. I tend to be more receptive and affected by music or nature or beauty of any kind.

And it’s nice!

But it’s gotten me thinking… How can I really maximize that? Is there anything else in the way?

I’m naturally an extremely mellow person. My highs aren’t really that high but, in exchange, I don’t really have lows.

Which is… Good. It’s predictable and easy to manage.

But I think I’d like to feel more.

Attempting to do a Google search yields an intriguing discovery. It turns out, this is not a common question and, in fact, the opposite is an extremely common question.

Apparently people feel too much or just generally want to be able to get their emotions under control.

That certainly sounds more difficult than what I’m facing. But in this case doesn’t really help me.

The only things I could find suggested that people cut out all the dopamine hits they are getting on a regular basis. Alcohol, drugs, and social media are listed as the biggest offenders.

I feel that I’ve already gone about as far as I can with just cutting those things out.

And yet, I still feel like I crave – and give into – other things that really provide the same dopamine hit. Albeit much smaller, generally.

While they take way less time and provide much less stimulation than what I had been doing, I still find myself checking deal-hunter websites constantly and even Snapchat.

Generally, I check and am done within a minute. So the impact feels minimal.

But at the end of the day, I am still craving a distraction, and I’m giving into it every time. And that may be the very problem.

I noticed on my Patagonia trip that after spending days without internet or even simple things like music, when I did hear music, it was almost always amazing. I connected with it immediately no matter what it was and truly appreciated it.

I felt more.

It’s difficult to say what all went into that. Being in an incredible place and totally wearing yourself out physically each day may have played a part.

But I think the total lack of cheap distractions was probably the main cause.

And that’s something I could replicate in my day-to-day life.

So going forward, I really want to minimize my use of those websites and Snapchat, and more importantly: put a stop to all the times when I crave a distraction and go out and find it.

I think I’ll feel a whole lot better once I do that.

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The Job Placement Guy Screwed Me Over

I graduated quite early from college and then failed to land a job for something like 6+ months.

At the time, I had believed that the entire purpose of college was simply having that diploma that said I was qualified to work.

As it turns out, employers want workers with past experience. They are also willing to settle for graduation-bound students that have not yet graduated, because they can pay them low (or zero) wages in the form of an “internship”.

But if you have a degree and no experience, you’re out of luck.

I spent most of my time in college focusing on music instead of getting an internship. Like nearly all musicians, that got me nowhere professionally. Once I was out of college, I was in a tough spot. While all my friends who had had internships would soon (once graduated) get nice corporate jobs downtown, I got nothing.

I furiously pumped out resume after resume, hoping something would stick. It didn’t.

Then one day a man reached out, telling me he could get me a job. The way he explained it made it sound like he was interviewing me, like he was a recruiter for other companies.

I was too naïve to realize I was just a potential client to him.

But I was desperate and dumb, so I went with it. Before long, he had a couple of prospects lined up. One doing B2B sales with Ricoh, the printer company. The other was with Menards as a “Manager Trainee,” which he described as like an internship. He said I’d learn how to run a whole store, and then have my pick of any position after that, even potentially at corporate.

He pushed me hard to the Menards position and claimed that I would be a great fit there. I now realize that it was probably just the easiest one for him to place me in so he could get his payday.

I didn’t even understand how payment worked. The way he had originally explained things, it sounded like almost all positions had the same payment agreement, where a small portion of my paycheck would go to him for the first handful of months as long as I worked there.

That seemed reasonable.

I believe he touched on an alternate agreement which didn’t seem common, where you’d pay a large portion of your yearly salary up-front.

Of course, this turned out to be the latter.

In my first week of working, he questioned how I would be paying the $3000 I owed him, and I was totally blindsided.

After all, how could an unemployed kid fresh out of college and deep in debt possibly have $3000 on-hand?

I genuinely question how he can even make a living because he really didn’t make it clear that this is what would be happening until long after I was already working there.

I’m sure that was intentional. It would be hard to back out once you’ve already started working.

But how do most people pay him?

Obviously I didn’t have the money, and there’s no way a bank would have given me a loan. But I’m fortunate to have a strong family network, and I took out a loan from my brother to pay for it. A loan which I wouldn’t be able to fully pay off until just a couple years ago.

As it turns out, the job was not how he had described it. You basically are just being trained to manage a department in a Menards store, as the name implies. While he had said that you could just turn down offers to work at other stores as much as you wanted, that wasn’t quite true. If you turned down enough, you would lose your position.

And I should have exploited that, like he exploited me. He misrepresented the position. If I lost it prematurely due to his misrepresentation, I believe I would have been entitled to a refund.

Right before that happened, though, I got a job doing social media marketing at a small website design company, and the rest is history.

Obviously I learned a lot from all of this, namely that I never, ever want to work retail. And to understand the fee structure of any service.

But I only recently had the thought: what if I would have gone with the Ricoh position?

Since it’s a sales job that’s likely mostly commission, I imagine it is much less of a sure-thing than the Menards job. He probably wouldn’t be compensated nearly as highly, which is why he pushed me away from it.

And I had a bad taste in my mouth from a sales job I did in high school, so I wasn’t exactly eager to get back into doing that.

But ultimately, developing sales skills and working B2B would have been much more closely aligned with what I do now. It also would have enabled me to really work with a variety of different industries.

All else being equal, I think it would have been a much better opportunity for me. Whereas Menards is pretty much a dead-end for every single person that works there and doesn’t carry the name “Menard”, Ricoh probably would have had plenty of opportunities for advancement within the company, and even elsewhere.

So to that “job placement” guy: you should be ashamed. Preying on desperate college grads. Misrepresenting yourself and your services, pushing them towards your most profitable option, and then locking them into paying you without explaining how it works is a pretty shameful way to operate a “business”.

The only silver lining is that I accidentally forgot completely about our first meeting and completely blew you off. The fact that you still wanted to meet with me should have been a red flag.

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I Should Start Tracking Business/Tech Ideas

I had a conversation with a friend lately that met up with an old college buddy. He learned that this friend of his had basically started and sold two tech startups and is now functionally retired.

And it made me fairly envious.

I always envied those guys that build new things and are out there with endless possibilities. They grind away at something just for the chance that it pays off and they get a huge payout.

And for him, it worked.

Obviously we tend to romanticize these types of things and clearly it does not work out for everyone.

But I’ve established a company that will keep me employed and making money with plenty of time leftover to work on other projects, if I should choose them.

So I have the time, the income, and the job to work on something else without making any money on it for quite some time.

I also have ideas all the time. I’m constantly looking for ways in which technology has failed us so far, or could help us in seemingly obvious ways that haven’t been done yet.

So why not start tracking those ideas?

I think if I have an idea that’s decent, I should write it down and start putting some thought into it. If it’s a good enough idea, I should absolutely start doing some research into what it would take to bring it to life and whether or not it really has a future and/or market.

My main plan is certainly not to try to hit it big with something like this, but I’d certainly love to have it as a possibility. And since I’m ideally suited to actually act on one of these ideas, why wouldn’t I do it?

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The Goal isn’t to Live Outside Your Comfort Zone; The Goal is to Expand It

This seems really obvious to me now and also like something tons of other people have thought of, but I’ve never really heard it explained this way.

You hear about how going outside of your comfort zone leads to growth, or how pain is where you learn and grow.

Based on how people talk about it, you’d think that they are advocating going as far out of your comfort zone as possible, and staying there forever.

This is clearly not sustainable. And may actually explain the burnouts and crashes that many of these “high-performers” or extremists suffer.

I think the real goal is to regularly be going a bit outside of your comfort zone, and then having your comfort zone expand to meet you.

For example, the first couple times I traveled abroad, it was kind of terrifying. There are so many unknowns, both about the locations and about myself.

But as time passed, I became more comfortable in those places and in the knowledge that I’m always going to be able to figure things out for myself.

And that’s my comfort zone growing.

Traveling alone internationally and spending months living abroad no longer scares me much and isn’t outside of my comfort zone at all.

I think that if you consistently seek opportunities to go a bit outside your existing comfort zone, of the course of years you will find yourself with very little that scares you or makes you uncomfortable.

And for me, that’s a bit of the goal!

I want to learn about the world and myself. I want to experience new things all the time. And while my goal isn’t to eliminate anything that might make me uncomfortable, I do enjoy the idea that I could be totally comfortable with the vast majority of events and experiences that exist in the world.

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Social Media Sites are Designed to be Echo Chambers

I am certainly far from the first one to think of this, but it really is true. Social media sites are actually designed to be echo chambers.

It’s a problem that maybe was just never considered from the inception of social media, or perhaps if I were more cynical I’d say it was actually planned.

If you design a system that works hard to make people anxious and addicted to it, and then slowly show them more and more content that re-affirms their existing fears worst beliefs, you create an echo chamber.

The shocking part is just how vulnerable people are to this. All they need to do is simply be exposed to a stupid idea that resonates with them, and that’s all it takes. They click more and more of the same types of content that all peddle the same idiotic BS, and they only interact with other susceptible simpletons like themselves, and pretty soon they start getting more and more extreme in their views.

And there is no way to really shake them out of it. They are going to continue being presented with the same ridiculous views. And since those are the only views they encounter, they believe that they must be correct.

After all, everybody is saying it, and nobody is disputing it.

The pandemic likely made things much worse, since people were stuck at home on social media. It was just overall a bad situation.

I don’t use very many social media channels and of the ones I have, I don’t typically interact much, so I can’t truly say what they are doing about this or how things have changed.

From my limited time and experience on Facebook, it appears that what they’ve done to combat this effect is to mostly just show you niche hobby content or mindless entertainment.

I guess they figure that they are best off if their users maximize their time spent on the platform consuming pointless entertainment, rather than becoming extremists pushing for civil war and undermining the stability of the country in which the platform is based.

Which makes sense.

I just hope that these companies do enough to change things, and that they do it fast enough to avoid major problems in our country and in the world. It seems that people are getting dumber each day and the world order less stable, so time really is of the essence.