Author: brianjohnson

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It’s Better to Invite One Person than 10 – And Invite Them Early

I’ve only recently fully realized that in general, it’s much better to ask to spend time with one person than it is 10.

The thought occurred as I thought about my current (still relatively large) friend group in Minnesota. It’s often quite difficult to get any of them to come to something, let alone all of them.  We have an old group thread going at all times, and most invites are just broadcast in there to little response.

But if I message someone individually, I virtually always get a response. If I ask a friend, “hey, are you free next week to watch a movie?”, it’s near-certain that it will happen.

Unlike if I were to ask in the group thread, “anyone want to come over for a bonfire tonight?”, which typically results in nothing.

I think there are a number of reasons why this is the case which I’ll discuss, but I think the primary reason simply comes down to valuing people and making them feel special.

When you broadcast something out to a crowd, they’ll feel just like everyone else. You’re sending the message: “I’m lonely and bored” instead of the much better message, “I’d like to spend time with you.”

And that matters to people.

It feels good when someone goes out of their way to spend time with you. And you’re very likely to respond to such a request positively.

This isn’t to say that group settings aren’t fun or worth the effort, just making an observation. I enjoy very much my time even with a single friend at a time, so if my goal is to simply socialize and see my friends, I’m probably much better off reaching out personally.

I think in a lot of cases, it may even turn into hanging out with additional people even though you originally invited just one, and that’s great.

And then of course there’s the point of inviting people early.

Probably for much the same reason, people are way more likely to respond positively if you invite them early. Waiting until an evening and throwing a flyer to see if somebody wants to spend time with you sends the message that you’re just lonely and you don’t value them or their time enough to plan ahead.

But if you say, “hey, are you free next Wednesday?”, they are much more likely to respond positively and want to spend time with you.

And of course there’s the purely logistical reason that they are far less likely to already have plans if you ask ahead of time. Worst case, they could suggest a different time if they are already busy.

I definitely value my time with my friends and I think that, going forward, I’m going to try to plan at least 2-3 weekly social activities ahead of time for the entirety of the time that I’m home.

I think now I have a much better idea of how to do that.

 

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I Need to Eliminate or Heavily Throttle Harmful Distractions

I’ve decided that I need to completely eliminate harmful distractions like Imgur, aimless news scrolling, and mindless YouTubing.

When I engage in these activities, I just turn into a zombie. I keep going and going and it sucks all of my energy out, preventing me from getting anything else done.

I think this is what happens to most people when they use Instagram, TikTok, and other similar apps.

It just constantly hits you with dopamine until you’re completely immune to it. You can’t muster the energy to get anything useful done.

And for what? Is there any real value?

For the most part, I’d argue, “no”. It’s just a huge waste of time and life.

On days when I’ve done a lot of it, I get nothing done. On days when I don’t, I get a lot done and also feel much better.

That’s really all there is to it!

So as of now, I want to severely limit all of it, especially during the work day. I can still look at the news but I need to limit it to once or twice per day.

With that, I should be much more productive and happier.

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Lots of Things are Easy to Do After Sufficient Time is Spent on Them – But It’s Still Impressive that Someone Did It

I’m not sure how I can express that any more succinctly in the title, but here is what I mean.

For a long time, I always sort of wrote off certain video games because, “all you have to do is spend a bunch of time on it and you’ll beat everyone else”.

Generally, I was referring to MMORPGs where you literally just spend time and level-up. Once you’re at a sufficient level, you’ll be unstoppable except by others of a similar level.

Instead, I preferred games that reset every time. Where your past progress didn’t matter: only your current skill.

But what’s the difference?

If you spend time on anything, you’ll get better. Sure, some people might have pre-existing skills, or a better mindset that allows them to advance faster, but at the end of the day: the more time you spend on something, the better you get.

Period.

Not only that, but there are lots of things that essentially anyone can achieve, if they only spend the requisite time.

For example, learning a language. There’s really no big secret about it. If you spend enough time practicing, you’ll learn how to speak a language.

Again, some people might learn slightly faster, but nobody ever became proficient at a language without putting in a great deal of time.

In the past, maybe I was dismissive of things that simply required time because I believed in the erroneous idea of “innate talent” or simply the superiority of an individual, in all ways. Which are both just stupid.

“Natural talent” has been proven to be almost entirely a myth. Sure, to be a star athlete, you might need to be born with the right body type. But I guarantee you all of those super “athletic” individuals spent a ton of time to become skilled in those areas. Nobody is born knowing how to throw a perfect spiral.

To a large extent, any skill or talent is simply the accumulation of the time put into it.

And it’s only now that I’m realizing: that’s not any reason to dismiss it or to find it any less impressive.

Sure, anyone could achieve advanced proficiency in a language if they spent 1000-2000 hours practicing in it. So what’s the difference between someone who learned another language and someone who didn’t?

They actually did it.

They had the dedication, the perseverance, and the resolve to continue doing something that’s difficult until they mastered it. And that is impressive.

So ultimately, the most impressive thing about a person may not be their abilities or talents at all.

It may simply be their dedication to learning and improvement.

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I’ve Been Using News as Entertainment

Overall, I’ve been quite successful in wiping out the vast majority of mindless entertainment that I used to consume. And with it, I’ve found that I have much more energy (and time) to be productive and also focus on things that I actually care about.

But one of the remaining forms is maybe a little surprising: the news.

When I’m bored and need a distraction, I just go to Google News and scroll through and pick a couple articles to read. It seems like a good thing, right? Keeping up-to-date on what’s happening in the world.

I think there are two problems with this:

  1. I’m using it just to distract myself and to be entertained (also way too frequently)
  2. I would argue it’s a terrible way to truly learn about the world and current events in a meaningful, impactful way

I could go on about the second point for ages and probably will (or have?) at some point, but the first point is still equally relevant and the moment. I’m not going to the news in order to fulfill a need to be informed: I’m going to be entertained.

And that’s the problem.

I think it’s a huge problem that we all have this need to be constantly entertained now, and I want to be very intentional about how I spend my time and especially how I consume entertainment.

This is not an important one to me, and I need to start taking measures to ensure I don’t do this anymore.

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Emails Give Me a Nice Hit of Dopamine

I feel like I’ve been talking a lot about dopamine lately, but a thought I recently had was that going through emails seems to give me a nice hit of it.

Or, possibly more accurately: thinking about doing emails gives me the dopamine, and each time I move on to a new one, I get a little more.

And that’s part of why it has been one of the bedrocks of my productivity, I think. It’s not that hard for “going through emails” to compete with “messing around on my phone” because it triggers a similar neural pathway. Or something, I don’t know, I’m not a brain scientist.

I’ve discussed here in the past how my email habits are actually some of the most useful and consistent that I’ve developed. It does wonders for my productivity. I’m able to just blast through all emails without really needing any “willpower,” and it really isn’t very cognitively demanding.

I’m not totally sure why that is. Could it be that all established habits provide these same benefits?

Honestly, a life where I do everything productive with minimal effort and can coast through on “auto-pilot” for the difficult things sounds pretty good.

I guess I need to really start focusing on habits again in order to test this theory.

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Am I Mentally Lazy?

I feel like I almost never use all of my brain power.

At any given moment, it seems like I’m only 20% committed mentally to whatever it is I’m doing. As a result, I think that things tend to be done poorly or very slowly.

Take, for instance, my flashcard studying. I study a huge variety of topics via flashcards everyday, most notably (and most time-consumingly) Spanish vocabulary.

On a typical day, it’s a grind. I can barely focus, and it feels like I’m not activating my whole brain to be able to recall words and their meanings.

I know that I’m not using everything because every so often, I will be fully committed. I’ll just feel like I’m totally dialed-in, and I’m remembering everything perfectly and it just flies by.

But that’s not the norm.

And it applies to other areas, too.

Whether I’m working, or playing the guitar, or even writing a blog post, it sort of feels like I’m just barely there all the time.

Now, I’ve discussed in multiple blog posts (here and here; both private, sorry everyone else!) how I tend to hoard my attention span and use it very selectively. I think this is sort of the same thing.

Using brain power is exhausting, and it may be quite limited. So maybe I just hoard it all the time and that’s all that’s happening.

But I don’t think that’s the full story.

I’m pretty sure dopamine plays a big role. Try as I might, I often find myself constantly giving in to some form of technology addiction. Recently it has been YouTube videos and shorts.

It’s well-documented that these types of things (including and especially Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and others) give you constant hits of dopamine. While the amount of dopamine in your brain doesn’t necessarily change, your sensitivity to it does.

And if dopamine is no longer effectively getting me to do things or concentrate, the end result will be that I never fully can.

I also have more evidence about this in my own life. I recently spent 8 days hiking in Patagonia, and during that time I didn’t have any internet access. No internet meant no social media or mindless distractions.

And by the end of it, I was amazed at a number of things. One was that hearing music or other forms of entertainment was mesmerizing. It immediately captured my attention and I loved it.

And overall I definitely feel like I could concentrate better and generally felt better.

So that’s all the evidence I really need. I need to focus hard on avoiding all forms of mindless distractions and will see where that gets me.

To start, I’m removing the shortcut to YouTube from my phone.

 

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My Buying Power has a Massive Influence on how I Feel About a Place

In the last couple days I’ve discovered the existence of the “Blue Dollar”: a euphemism for the not-so-underground black market for US dollars here in Argentina. Due to government restrictions, the official exchange rate is kept low while a parallel market tracks closer to the true value.

If you have US currency, you can exchange it for pesos at the black market rate, which currently is more than double the official rate.

So what does this mean for me?

My buying power more than doubled overnight.

Things that previously seemed moderately priced or even a tad expensive are now very affordable. Things that were already cheap… Are basically free.

I can now get a decent bottle of Malbec for $1.50 USD. Unreal.

The really interesting thing, for me, didn’t occur until after I began walking away from Western Union with a massive stack of cash in my pack. I started thinking about all the things I could do now that I didn’t need to worry about the cost. A whole new world of opportunity was available to me, guilt-free.

Immediately I felt considerably more excited about the city and my general feelings towards it improved dramatically.

Don’t get me wrong: I already liked the city quite a bit. But where there was once a mindset of thrift and having to hold back in a lot of ways, there is now only opportunity. And that mindset shift is huge.

I thought back to some of my favorite cities and places in the world, and realized that a huge contributing factor (sometimes perhaps the main factor) was simply how affordable they were.

Cheap and great tacos in Mexico, cheap drinks at my favorite college bars, cheap… Everything in Colombia. When you don’t have to worry about what you’re spending, you simply have a better time.

And then I thought a little more.

As long as things are affordable to me, I could feel this way anywhere.

If I was making $500,000/year, I wouldn’t think twice about a $30 cocktail. Just about any restaurant or bar in the world would be so affordable to me that I could just go and have a great time without worrying about the cost at all.

This all just sort of taught me that “cheap” and “expensive” are relative, and more importantly: that things are a lot more enjoyable if you can afford them without any issues.

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I Don’t Feel Like I’m Great at Anything – But I Want to Be

I don’t feel like I’m great at anything. I always notice people who are, and it makes me feel like I need to be.

Don’t get me wrong: I do feel like there’s a lot I’m good at. Just not great.

But I’d really like to excel in at least one area.

Now, to some extent, maybe I’ll never feel great at anything. No matter how good I get at any one particular thing, there will always be people who are better than me.

I think this is especially true (and particularly damaging) for technical, artistic, or competitive skills, like playing an instrument, creating art, sports, or video games.

But there are other skills that I think tend to avoid that trap a bit more. For example, learning a foreign language. While there, of course, will still always be people who speak better than you, I think for me it doesn’t matter much. I have a sense that once I reach a certain level of proficiency, I will feel like I’m great at it and it won’t matter where anyone else is at.

For that reason, language learning may be an excellent choice for me if ‘being great at something’ is something that matters to me. And I think it is.

The other part of this discussion, I think, is that I should probably be focusing on the intrinsic joy that comes with learning something and improving. And I do! It is important to me and certainly keeps me going.

But I think that’s something entirely separate. I feel like this is more of an identity thing where I just need to feel like I am particularly talented at something.

And maybe that’s totally okay.

Assuming, of course, that I can actually achieve it.

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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.

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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.