Author: brianjohnson

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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.

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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!

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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.

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Pandemic Update

I’m pretty sure most of my most recent predictions have fallen completely flat. Unlike the infections curve…

The last time I wrote, I was confident that the vaccines would effectively end the pandemic, at least among highly-vaccinated populations.

I was completely wrong.

What I didn’t know was that the Delta variant was going to ruin everything. The anti-vax movement is also most likely much larger than I had believed.

As far as I can tell, everyone is going to get COVID. At one point or another, everyone is going to get it no matter what they do. Perhaps they won’t have symptoms, but vaccinated or not, they will get it.

At the moment I’m still a little frustrated with the CDC and their messaging guidelines. For a long time now, I think their one and only goal has been to increase the vaccination numbers at any cost.

That may seem like a reasonable strategy, but the problem is they are doing it at the expense of the already-vaccinated and also tarnishing their reputation while they are at it.

They are still maintaining that breakthrough infections among the vaccinated are exceptionally rare.

They aren’t.

I trusted them on that and I wasn’t careful, and I got COVID. As did many who were at the same event, all vaccinated.

The data is now showing that the vaccines aren’t very effective against the Delta variant. They are still better than nothing, and most importantly they are still very effective at preventing serious illness.

But they should be giving us all the relevant information and they currently aren’t. They are still maintaining that it’s unlikely you’ll get COVID if you’re vaccinated and that simply isn’t true. Besides my own anecdotal evidence, there is now a large body of evidence showing that it confers something like a 30-40% protection.

Good, but not great.

And now we have the Omicron variant looming. We don’t know yet whether it’s worse than Delta but it appears to be spreading rapidly.

I truly believed that for my own intents and purposes, the pandemic was going to be over by this fall. Instead, it’s now surging globally and shows no signs of slowing down. Our vaccines helped for a little while but now it is too far mutated and can barely be slowed.

With all these things in mind, predictions are quite difficult but I’ll try to make some:

  • The virus will keep mutating and being a problem for years to come
  • I don’t think it will ever go away, it will just become endemic like the Flu
  • I think that it will slowly get less and less bad until it’s not something we think about or talk about, but that won’t happen until probably late 2023
  • I think we’ll have updated vaccines in the US by Summer or possibly Fall 2022 which will more effectively combat the newer variants
  • By the time it’s done, I think some pretty stark economic divides will be revealed in the US between places that were highly vaccinated and took it seriously and those that didn’t
  • History will not be kind to anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers

I’m not sure I feel the least bit confident about anything else. Who knows what will happen.

I do think the country in general is going to go through a rough patch. People are going to get more and more angry and we’re going to have some pretty crazy events happen in the next several years.

I don’t quite believe civil war is possible for a number of reasons, but I think a reckoning of sorts is coming.

There’s never been a better time to learn another language and live abroad!

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My Productivity Has Multiplied Almost Overnight

I’m finally back on track.

I had a bit of a spell there were I was sick a bunch and got into some really bad habits of wasting time on social media and the internet and was generally overwhelmed and it sort of got a vicious cycle going.

And now I’m out of it!

It’s hard to say exactly to what extent I just forced myself to do better and to what extent I may just… Recovered. It’s possible I still had lingering effects from illness. It’s very difficult to say!

But I’ve just been focusing on improving a bit every day! And it’s worked.

The first thing I did was uninstall the Facebook app on my phone, which is something I’d strongly recommend everyone do and I keep up with in the future.

And then I just really focused on my to-do and knocking that out. I allowed small lapses were I lost focus but made sure to always go back to work soon.

Now I’ve completed all my pressing to-do items and am keeping up well with new tasks.

Additionally, I finally got around to joining a gym and have actually been going. I bought a guitar so I can practice here which is something I’ve been meaning to do since I got here.

I’m also reading again and rapidly improving my Spanish through social activity, watching Spanish media, and studying.

These are all things I wasn’t really doing at all two weeks ago (except speaking to people in person).

It could also simply be that I’ve gotten established and comfortable here. I have a routine, I know where everything is, I have a social circle, and just all around I am comfortable. That makes it easier to stay productive.

I’m not totally sure what the lesson here is yet. Maybe it’s that I need to develop a routine and get comfortable where I am. But I think more likely, I really just need to focus on productivity, eliminate pointless distractions, and generally just stick to my routines and habits despite being in a new place.

One last thought is that I tend to feel somewhat lost in a new city before I develop a social circle. Getting that social interaction starts to feel like a desperate need before long. That desperation can be quite motivating and succeeds in helping me actually meet people. But it also totally distracts me from everything else, which I need to be careful about.

That could probably be its own post so maybe I’ll expand on that another time.

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I’m Way Better at Revising Than Creating

I’ve known this for a long time, but I think that I’m way better at revising than I am at creating.

Or, at the very least, it is way less mentally and emotionally draining to revise than it is to create.

In context of work, this means that starting something from scratch is always super daunting to me. Whether it’s writing a proposal, researching and/or putting together something that I’ve never worked with before, or even building a website, it always feels like a massive burden to do the initial work.

However, once I’ve done that, it is usually very easy to tweak it or improve upon it. It doesn’t take much mental effort and it usually goes very quickly. What’s more, I am often much more able to take a step back and think critically about it and make required changes.

So what does this mean?

I think it means that I need to put a lot less pressure on myself when creating something new. It doesn’t need to be perfect. Heck, it doesn’t even need to be good!

I’ve found that usually it’s better for me to just start with something and then work with it until it’s usable.

It feels sort of like loosely molding a lump of clay into the general shape until proceeding to add detail and turn it into art. Not that I’ve worked with clay much in the last 20 years…

Even recently, I’ve found that I’ve just put off certain types of work and they become huge roadblocks to getting anything done. They make me stressed and totally unproductive. And it’s because I’m putting off the incredibly mentally-draining task of creation.

But if I focus more on simply “throwing something together”, I think that would take a lot of the pressure off and make things easier.

I’ve sort of done this in the past with proposals. I’ve broken the process up into several steps. The first one is just to basically just read my notes and break off any actionable items into another document. And it helps tremendously!

I still feel the pressure to ultimately make an entire, good proposal all at once, though. And I need to stop that because it’s slowing me down.

I’m sure this applies elsewhere, too. Creation is hard. But you can always work your creation into something usable, and sometimes that’s way easier.

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I Mostly Only Like Activities That Feel Like Growth

I had an epiphany today. I was using my flashcard app and learning new Spanish vocabulary. And while it’s not “fun” in the classical sense, I like doing it and it feels good.

Why?

Because it feels like I’m growing myself. I’m doing better. I’m creating a future that is better. And I really like that.

I tend to like anything that feels like an investment in myself, my life, or even in others. I enjoy activities that feel like they’ll lead to exponential growth.

As sort of a side note, I remember as a kid always really loving RTS games where you gather resources and grow exponentially. While I can’t help but think now that maybe those games served to subconsciously inure me to unregulated capitalism and the concomitant exploitation and exhaustion of the natural world (lol), it also maybe instilled in me the love of growth and scale.

So that’s all great, but why is this particularly relevant at the moment?

Because I don’t really feel like I have that in my business at the moment. I sort of feel like I’m just keeping up and managing what I have without any real possibility of growth.

There are lots of reasons for this, some of them more relevant than others. Since the pandemic began, I haven’t really spent any time “on the business”. I haven’t been planning how I can grow and acting on those things.

Despite that, I have continued to grow. It’s important that I acknowledge that because I think it will help me change my mindset here.

But even so, it hasn’t been MY focus. It has not been where my head is at when I’m working. And whether it’s true or not, it sort of feels like I’m at a peak.

I don’t really intend to come up with a solution in this post, but I do just want to acknowledge this problem and put it on my own radar so that I can figure out a way forward that fixes it.