Author: brianjohnson

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Maybe we Should Learn Nothing from our Mistakes

This is something I think about so often, I’m shocked I’ve never written about it before.

While you constantly hear people talk about failures as opportunities and mistakes as opportunities to learn, you never hear anybody talk about the dangers of doing that.

What if the lessons you learn are actually detrimental to your progress?

If I were to ever put this in a book, I would cite plenty of studies to show that people learn more indelible lessons from very bad experiences than they do from good ones.

If you burn your hand on the stove as a kid, you might be afraid of the stove forever and never really use one.

But if you cook a really great stir-fry, you’re never going to swear off other forms of cooking and only use that.

And because of that, I honestly think better advice would be, “DON’T learn anything from your failures.” Even just saying that sounds so completely contradictory to everything I’ve ever been told that it sounds absurd. But seriously, I think it’s true.

Now, as a quick aside, I want to make it clear that what I’m referencing here is times when you’ve tried at task or job and been unsuccessful at it. I’m not really talking about moral or ethical failures which should almost universally be learned from. I am absolutely not suggesting that you should keep being a bad person because it might pay off one day. Okay, we can move on!

I think that rather than refining their strategy and constantly improving, most people “learn from their mistakes” and accumulate so many aversions and fears over the course of their life that they eventually reach a point where they don’t take any risks, never learn anything new, and just stay in their comfort zone.

From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense. In caveman days, you would have been in constant mortal peril, and it was more important for you to learn about all the dangers and avoid them than it was for you to innovate or master a valuable skill.

An inventor trying to perfect new weapons would have been more likely to get killed by an animal when it failed than actually succeed at creating something new.

I recently had an interaction with an older potential client that I found baffling. We were in the proposal stage of quite a small project. In that proposal, I described our billing schedule which was half of the fee up-front, and half when the project goes live. It is so ubiquitous within my industry that clients often just assume that’s what it will be, and are correct.

He balked at the notion and almost seemed offended. He told me that with that schedule, there’s no way to hold me accountable to doing a good job, and that he’d been burned in the past. He told me he wasn’t interested in working with me.

At first I just had to wonder what he had been through to develop that degree of cynicism. I’ll never know for sure, but it’s obvious that he learned some painful lessons, and I would argue that those lessons are extremely detrimental to his success.

Because if that’s his non-starter, how is he ever going to get this project done? That question is, of course, rhetorical: he won’t. His website has clearly been untouched for probably 15+ years, and at this point it’s never going to happen. He’s not going to find an agency that will perfectly meet all of his requirements without spooking him.

He’s just learned too many painful lessons and is now too afraid to take any kind of risk, even when that risk is minimal.

Now, I’m being partly facetious when I say that you shouldn’t learn anything from your mistakes or failures. If you really, truly mess up and especially when it is definitely your fault, you should definitely learn and not do that again in the future.

And even in other situations, you should of course try to learn lessons, but you have to be careful what those lessons are.

And more importantly: you need to learn to weight those lessons appropriately.

We tend to remember painful experiences much more vividly, and our bias towards avoiding similar situations is disproportionate to the actual risk. And that bias only increases as we grow older.

So I think it’s important to just see things for what they are. Sometimes bad things happen, and it’s not our fault. Sometimes it is our fault.

Sometimes there may be nothing to be learned. But other times it might just be a matter of knowing the risks and learning to watch out for them without becoming unreasonable.

We’ve all traveled with the neurotic family member who has tunnel vision for one specific problem and constantly talks about it despite it not being a big deal.

People do it with their careers, too, and even their lives. Your focus on what could go wrong should be commensurate with the true risk.

It can be extremely difficult to take a step back and determine whether you are letting the fear of something hold you back, but it’s absolutely worth the effort.

“Most men either compromise or drop their greatest talents and start running after, what they perceive to be, a more reasonable success, and somewhere in between they end up with a discontented settlement. Safety is indeed stability, but it is not progression.”
– Criss Jami

 

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Time to Reach out to IT Providers

I was talking with a business associate of mine the other day and that conversation led to some great insights.

I’ve long had the idea that IT companies would be likely to want to work with me and outsource their website hosting business to me. Generally, they hate providing the service and only do it to appease their clients.

I think what’s held me back from wanting to just go out and talk to a bunch of them is that I always felt like it wouldn’t be a two-way relationship. So often (especially in the BNI world), you go into a meeting thinking, “how can we refer business to each other?”

And in my case, I only have so many potential leads for IT companies, and all of those are going to go to the IT company I already have a strong relationship with.

But there are ways to help others besides just providing them referrals.

In this case, we can engage in a mutually-beneficial arrangement. If they don’t like hosting and are providing a bad service doing it, we can solve those problems. We can take all of those headaches away.

Obviously it’s good for us since it’s new business, but it’s also good for them because it solves a problem they’ve been having.

So I want to have at least a short-term plan for reaching out to these IT companies.

The obvious first-step is to ask if anybody knows the owners of IT companies, which I did this morning in BNI. And it worked! I got a referral and now have a meeting lined up for Friday with an IT company.

But what if I got more specific? I could start looking into all of the companies in the Twin Cities, and start asking people if they are connected with specific ones.

I could even target ones that have a mutual connection on Linkedin and then ask those people specifically for a connection!

I could also potentially start cold-calling down the road, but understandably, I’m not thrilled about that idea.

But I should have connections to plenty of these businesses, so for the time being, I should really explore those.

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When We Don’t Have Time, We Waste It. When We do, We Fill it.

This post is really just an observation of human nature, and I’m certain I’m not nearly the first person to point this out.

Basically, I think that when we have lots of extra time, we tend to fill it with things. Without even thinking about what the very BEST use of our time is, we just fill it all up.

Obviously it’s not all conscious. If you’ve got a lot of time, you’re bored, and somebody comes to you with a questionable opportunity, you think, “why not?” And then you commit to that opportunity without really figuring out if it makes sense for you to be doing it.

And things just stack on top of each other. Before long, you’re super busy with everything. But it’s possible none of those activities are very important.

I’m sure this problem is even more significant in corporate America where people will accept any task if they have the time and then never question its value from that point on. They just keep doing it, thinking they’re doing a good job.

And then once you don’t have time anymore, it’s so hard to engage in new, important activities. You don’t have time to take a step back and think about your priorities. You’re just trying to keep up.

I remember all sorts of lengthy descriptions of this in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and other similar books. They basically just say that most people spend their entire careers/lives putting out fires, when they should be spending way more time figuring out which activities yield the greatest results.

So knowing that this is how people are, how can I avoid these problems?

I think one obvious way is to literally set aside time every week or even day to do some planning and analysis. Take a look at what you’re spending your time doing and what’s working. Focus on your planning and see how you can be more effective.

Obviously there are a lot of things you could be doing with that time, but the important thing is to be deliberate with your time and put some thought and planning into it. When you’re young and inexperienced and don’t know what you’re doing, I think there is great value in saying “yes” to every opportunity that comes your way.

But I’m much further along in my career and I can’t afford to do that. I think I do a good job of picking my opportunities and staying focused, but I don’t do as good of a job at literally sitting down and planning my business and monitoring how everything is going.

So that’s something I definitely need to work on.

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Things are Slow but Might Take Off

I thought I would post a quick update of where things are at with the business.

In short, they are a bit slow.

Historically, we’ve been slow from usually the end of summer until mid-fall. After that things have almost always picked up.

We haven’t really picked up yet. We stayed a bit busier through summer but since then, there hasn’t been too much.

That’s not to say there isn’t anything. I have regular small tasks, and of course hosting and maintenance are constant. In fact, most of the renewals for hosting occur in December and January so I’ll have those coming.

But projects have been quite slow. We finished some big ones, and I’ve been in talks with many that might start “soon”, but so far none have. So I don’t really have any current projects underway.

There’s a good chance that will change, though. I have a new one that just confirmed they want to move forward today, and there are a few other larger ones that may begin any day.

I’ve also begun many marketing initiatives in earnest, and I may see those start to pay off soon.

I’m also thinking of doing things like visiting other BNI groups and seeing if that gets me new clients.

And in general, I should be focusing on ways to improve the business while things are slow so that I can continue growing.

But it will be interesting to look back and see how we did for the year, and also reflect in the future on the significance of the lull. I think we’re still on track to do well for the year despite COVID, but I’d still certainly like to do more!

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Where is the Line Between Narcissism and Self-Improvement?

This is a question that just popped into my head the other day, and I wanted to think through it: where is the line between narcissism and self-improvement?

I suppose I first need to justify why this is even a question.

First, I want to establish something I’ve talked about in other posts, that most human personality traits seem to be on a certain continuum. Often, if you slide too far one direction, you go from having a great trait to one that is loathed.

For instance, self-confidence: good. Arrogance: bad.

What’s the difference between them? In my mind, very little. Arrogance is just a little bit further along on the slider. Perhaps humility is a separate slider that also comes into play, but you see my point.

Likewise, while I don’t think that “self-improvement” is really a personality trait (though I suppose narcissism is), I think it still has an inextricable link with potential narcissism.

My thoughts aren’t totally settled on any of this yet, so I may not express myself clearly here. This post may be more of a stream of consciousness than one that actually makes a point.

First, let’s look at the common threads between them.

Both require a degree of self-focus, which isn’t inherently bad. Too much self-focus can lead to self-centeredness as a state.

It can also lead to selfishness, which I’m only now trying to define as being different from self-centeredness. I think being self-centered involves your thoughts and motivations which tend to be focused on yourself but are essentially entirely within your own head.

Selfishness, however, involves action. Specifically, action that harms others. I don’t think it’s selfish to be thinking of yourself, but it is selfish to make decisions that benefit you but harm others.

To illustrate, here’s an example. Let’s say that you were on a desert island with one other person. There are two coconuts to eat.

If you’re self-centered, you are thinking about your needs and how to meet them. You may not be thinking about the other person at all, even if you are thinking you’d like to eat both coconuts.

Once you’ve decided to actually eat both coconuts and leave the other person with nothing, that’s selfish. It’s actual behavior that hurts others.

This is all coming to me as I write this, so hopefully I’ll come to a point here!

So both narcissism and self-improvement come from a self-focus. But I think it’s clear that narcissism requires a much greater degree of self-focus than self-improvement.

It’s normal and healthy to want to improve yourself. Self-improvement leads to many practical benefits in life. I choose to focus on it to a great extent in my own life, both because I’d like the tangible benefits it can lead to, but also because improving myself feels like a good way to live my life. Meaning that it’s the process of self-improvement rather than what that improvement can do for me that is appealing.

For example, I enjoy reading history books and learning various things about the state of the world. This is knowledge that is unlikely to have a direct impact on my life, but I still feel improved in having learned it.

In contrast to self-improvement, I think narcissism requires a very unhealthy level of self-focus. It requires you to be focused on yourself constantly, and almost to be enamored with yourself. And just like when you’re enamored with somebody else, it blinds you to flaws.

Narcissists typically have massive blind spots where they don’t recognize their own flaws. That’s obviously quite problematic for any real self-improvement, but also just generally has very practical downsides.

One could argue that narcissists also tend to have a fairly fragile ego, and so perhaps they are willfully blind to their own flaws because they can’t accept that there are any. They can’t function unless they trick themselves into believing they are the best at everything.

It wasn’t until well into adulthood that I had an additional, related epiphany. This could be an entire other post by itself, but it’s still worth mentioning.

Insecurity, even (and perhaps especially) extreme insecurity, is often a form of self-centeredness. I didn’t realize it until witnessing with my own eyes people who were extremely insecure and sad later become happy but also completely selfish.

Again, it requires a degree of self-focus beyond what is healthy. If you are always looking inward, it’s easy to find and then focus on flaws. If you’re very self-centered but unhappy, it will be apparent to everyone around you that you are insecure.

But what they don’t realize is that the same self-focus won’t go away if you are happy. You’re still going to focus on yourself and be selfish to the detriment of those around you.

Back to the original question, I want to pose an example and use that to figure out some answers.

Take weight training / bodybuilding for example. This is an area where I think the line between narcissism and self-improvement can get very difficult to identify.

Building muscle is good for you. It keeps you healthy, it helps prevent injury especially in old age, it increases your metabolism, it makes you more attractive, and can certainly increase your self-confidence, too.

So is it a valid form of self-improvement? Of course!

But now picture somebody who has gotten into incredible shape, and spends an hour every day looking in the mirror, admiring his own body. That certainly doesn’t sound healthy, does it?

But now imagine a scenario where somebody used to be quite overweight and is now looking in the mirror and feeling proud of what they’ve accomplished. That can’t be narcissism, can it?

Now you see how thin the line is.

I don’t really know that I’m any closer to an answer on this than I was before.

I guess in general, degree is the most important thing. Having a bit of self-focus and working to make meaningful improvements in yourself and in your life while retaining a healthy perspective of yourself is just regular self-improvement.

If it becomes extreme to the point where you are sacrificing others or even other parts of yourself and causing problems in your pursuit of improvement, it might be narcissism. Especially if you have an inflated and unreasonable self-image.

I guess my conclusion is that there really is a “self-focus” slider for everyone’s personality. As long as you keep empathy and self-awareness high, you can have a relatively high degree of self-focus that will lead to positive growth.

Without high empathy and with low self-awareness, a high degree of self-focus can lead to narcissism.

Unfortunately, since it seems that most personality traits of this nature are relatively static, it might be hard to do much about it even if you find you have a problem. Which tracks with reality, since narcissism seems to be lifelong.

But still, you can always do your best to maximize empathy and also recognize these things in others.

And that’s it. This was quite the rant, but I still feel like I had some interesting thoughts there that might be worth exploring in future posts.

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Would I Go Back?

So the question today is: if I had the option to go back in time to, say, high school or college, would I do it? And if so, what would I do differently?

It’s something I’ve pondered many times. The answer to the first question is always, “yes”. But the second one is understandably harder to answer.

In essence, I feel that I’ve spent so much time since then on self-improvement. Successfully, I might add. I needed to grow so much to be able to get to where I am now.

Let’s assume that in this imagined scenario, all of the self-improvement I’ve done is lost, but I still remember everything so I know where I ended up, all of the improvement it took to get there, and what methods I used along the way.

In this case, the question then becomes: how can I fast-track the improvement in both myself and and my situation to get there more efficiently? And in the real, non-hypothetical world, how can I use those lessons to fast-track my current development?

I guess as a starting point, I should determine the positive things all of that development has led to. Upon self-reflection, I don’t think very much of it is really personality-based. Reading has taught me that personality-focused self-improvement efforts are generally not very effective and creating real change. I think it’s mostly because it’s difficult, if not impossible, to artificially alter your own personality.

The answer I keep coming back to is ‘habit’. I’ve developed good habits that have enabled any success I’ve had and generally explain all of the parts of myself that I feel are improved over what they were in my younger days.

Sure, my knowledge is greatly increased in a huge variety of areas. Some of that is just experience which comes no matter what. But perhaps an even larger portion has come from reading non-fiction books, which is a habit I’ve cultivated over the course of years.

Another large chunk comes from intentionally studying and practicing certain topics and fields.

And yes, I’m much more “mature”, but many elements of what make up maturity have been developed through intentional effort. It seems evident to me that not everyone develops much emotional intelligence beyond college.

While it’s hard to judge myself in terms of how I compare to others in this area, I can say without a doubt that my emotional intelligence is worlds better than it was in college. And that has come through habits like really listening to people, looking for subtle clues about how people are feeling, and generally putting effort towards real empathy.

I think the biggest thing I would do to improve more rapidly would be to immediately acknowledge that I had a long way to go and that immediate, deliberate, and constant improvement was necessary. I wouldn’t say that I thought I didn’t need any improvement, but I also wouldn’t say that I recognized the need to put a great deal of effort into improving either.

So that’s what I would do. Acknowledge what’s needed, recognize my own deficiencies, and then put consistent, deliberate effort in towards improving them.

Something tells me I can apply those same lessons to myself right now, too. I’m certainly more focused on improving myself now, which is great, but I’m sure more can be done.

It might be worth it to really dig deep and outline the areas in which I really want to focus now. It might even help to imagine what I’d like things to be like down the road, and try to figure out how I can get there.

Perhaps that’s a good topic for a future post.

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If I Won the Lottery: How Would I Grow the Business?

I decided to do a little thought experiment here. Let’s assume I won the lottery, and I decided that one of the ways I wanted to spend my time was to keep running the business, and to use that money to help it grow.

How would I go about it?

I figure that I might come out of this exercise thinking, “well… I could do many of those things now!”

So what would I do?

Money would be no object, so I’d probably focus on things that are expensive but might ultimately pay off greatly, even if it meant losing money in the short-term.

Hiring would probably make sense. I’d probably hire a team of people to grow the business quickly. That would likely include a marketing director, sales people, an operations person, and several web developers and designers. I would focus on sales and marketing first, and then once I had enough new clients coming in, I would hire the rest.

I would focus on putting systems in place to make sure everything is consistent across the organization. I would probably hire someone for that, too.

But what if I wanted to remain inconspicuous and instead focus on more organic growth that doesn’t require investing in a huge team?

I would probably just start spending a ton on advertising. I’d sink huge sums into Adwords and Facebook ads, possibly Linkedin. Those would be easy ways to turn large amounts of cash into clients.

Because I wouldn’t really care about the ROI, I wouldn’t need to put much effort into them. I could just create ads of minimal quality and spend so much on them that they work no matter what.

So what’s stopping me now?

Obviously I can’t afford to just throw unlimited money at ads and remain indifferent to the outcome. I would need to put much more thought into them and be more careful.

But still: I can certainly try them!

Again, I know that if my acquisition cost is under something like $250 per client, I should generally be profitable in the first year. And with that in mind, I should put large amounts of money into anything that ends up being more cost-effective than that.

At the very least, I feel like this exercise makes it clear to me that I need to go out and try some things. Maybe most of them don’t work at all, but it’s still worth it to try. If I find something that does work, I can focus heavily on that.

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I Need to Always Be Improving One Thing

So I just read a rather depressing but very honest and introspective post from myself from February this year. In it, I explained how I felt like I hadn’t really been trying all that hard. But I felt like I had rounded a corner, and that 2020 was going to be nothing but good things!

Putting the soul-crushing irony of that belief aside, while the post did bring up some great points and present a good overall picture of where I was (am) at, it didn’t really provide any real strategies for improvement.

As much as I wish it were, “start trying harder” is simply not an effective strategy, no matter what anybody tells you. And neither is anything dealing with “motivation”.

So what do I do?

I’ve talked a lot about the “One thing”, the thing I need to focus on most in my business (or life!) to improve at any one moment. While I’m not strictly saying that I should just, “do that”, but focusing on one area is, in fact, what I’m saying.

I need to always be focusing on improving in one area. I’ve written at length about habits, and how I want to be building one new habit at all times, etc.

As strange as it is to say, the one habit that I need to be building, more than any other is… Building new habits constantly.

So… I guess to start, I’ll need to be building two habits at a time!

But that seriously needs to be it. Even if I’m doing a bad job building whatever habit it is I’m working on, I just need to be doing it. I need to focus every single day on it, and aggressively enforce what I’m doing.

And the reason for this goes beyond “habits are good”.

If I want to get to where I feel like I’m “trying hard”, it’s going to take a lot of work building up the habits and resilience that it takes. It’s going to be improving things, one step at a time.

I’ve written about sleep habits extensively, and so far have just been plagued by failures with those. Maybe that’s a good place to start and just double down on fixing that.

I’m taking a month-long break from alcohol and so this seems like a good time for it. I’ve tried to do just one piece at a time, but maybe I need all of the following to be in sync for this to work:

  • Going to bed early
  • Waking up at the same early time every morning
  • Not using the snooze button
  • Not napping

I have so many years of bad habits with all of these lined up, I may just have to do it all. I might be exhausted initially, but that exhaustion will help me sleep earlier and get better sleep, which will then help with not needing to snooze or take naps, and over time I should even start waking up at the same time.

So… I just need to focus on this, and then the next thing, and then just keep improving.

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I’ve Gotten Comfortable Just Running the Business

Don’t let the title fool you: this is a post about something bad.

I just got done reading some of my posts from January and February, when I was excited to grow my business and really work through a ton of marketing things. And then, as you know, the world changed in March.

So for a long time I told myself that it was okay to just worry about keeping things going and not too much on working ON the business instead of IN it.

But it’s been 7 months now, and I’m still just working IN the business. I haven’t gotten around to doing… anything. I just work on the projects we have, as they come, and that’s it. I’ve done almost nothing to advance my company.

I am working with a marketing company now, and we are about to embark on a new campaign that may lead to many new clients (or at least I’m hoping!). And in that sense, maybe I’ll just fall over backwards into success without having to do all of the work.

Or maybe, if this works, the takeaway is that if I’m just not putting in the effort or having success in an area: outsource. Why make things difficult for myself? Just outsource and things will be fine.

But I don’t know that yet, so in the meantime, I should really focus on getting back into working on the business again. Even if it’s just for 15 minutes per day, I really need to do it. Things are a little slow right now and that scares me a bit! But it’s also an opportunity.

Take advantage of it.

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Light at the End of the Tunnel

For the first time since the pandemic started, it feels like we’re finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Pfizer today announced that they would likely be distributing vaccines to the public in December.

It’s been about six months since the lockdowns started. I feel like everyone has basically gotten used to all of the restrictions. But there’s still a constant longing for things to be normal again.

I may be one of the people least-impacted by the pandemic, and yet I still just want everything to be normal again. I want to be able to go to concerts, to bars, to just feel part of society and groups of people again.

You don’t really know what you’ve got until it’s gone. “Crowds” certainly wouldn’t be something I would have listed as among my favorite things pre-pandemic. But it’s amazing how isolated it makes you feel when you can’t interact with strangers anymore. Sometimes just being among large groups of people makes you feel… Part of something bigger I guess.

I think if we can go into 2021 with vaccines going out, the economy strong, and potentially fresh, new leadership for the country, it’s going to be incredible just how much things change.

Things have been pretty dark up until this point, but I’m hoping the night really is darkest before the dawn. With a little luck, we may just turn the corner within a few months.