Author: brianjohnson

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I Need to Focus on Hosting Problems and Write About Them in Blog

I realized that I really need to focus on problems people have with their hosting and just blog about those. It’s an excellent way to capture people who are very interested in leaving their website host.

I’ve been focusing hard on simply acquiring other businesses, but I actually think that it’s important to continue trying to get the low-hanging fruit of new clients.

After all, even after two acquisitions, the majority of my hosting clients still came to me as regular clients by themselves. It’s more work to acquire them on average, but if I just have these funnels in place, it could mean a steady stream of new clients.

Ultimately, it feels like if I’m just buying businesses, I’m simply profiting off of the hard work that they did in acquiring these clients. So it might feel kind of good to also be putting in the work on my end and acquiring clients in any way that I can.

Plus, having more clients makes my business more valuable, no matter where they came from. If I ever want to sell one day, I’ll want to have the maximum number of clients possible.

So going forward, I should really just be thinking constantly about what kinds of hosting issues people have and then blogging about them. I also need to pay attention to any issues my clients have. If anything ever comes up, I should blog about it!

One thing actually DID happen this week, and I should definitely blog about it. So that’s on the list for next week.

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I Really Have Come a Long Way in the last 10 Years

I was just thinking recently about past events and behaviors and how far I’ve come since them. Particularly just in the time span of the last 10 years.

I think about my interactions with business contacts and clients, and I just cringe. I cannot believe that that’s who I used to be.

I would regularly do things that I now consider to be either wildly unprofessional or just… Bizarre.

The point of this post isn’t really as a list of examples, but some might be worth giving.

I remember when I first branched out on my own, I struggled to get anything done. I had one single client at one point, and the website still took months to build. I’d just procrastinate constantly and not make any progress.

For many years, basically everything I did was just a massive amount of procrastination. Any recurring task, I would push off until the last moment or later.

I remember realizing, the night before a presentation at my BNI group, that I knew nothing about the AV setup. I had just assumed the projector was always there and available and that somebody would help me with it.

I decided maybe that was a bad assumption, and emailed the chapter member in charge of it at like midnight the night before. He would later tell me that he saw my message and decided, “this isn’t my problem” and didn’t respond or worry about it.

And that was an important lesson for me. Though it did work out in the end.

When it comes down to it, I just don’t think I would see any potential in my younger self if I met him. Everything was sloppy and I had no discipline whatsoever.

I also made almost no money, and it’s no surprise why.

I feel very fortunate that I somehow improved over the years and am now doing a ton better. I’m also a person I actually like and people trust to get things done.

Sometimes it’s just so hard to see the progress, and I get frustrated. It’s also easy to just focus on one metric, like income, and not see everything else that has improved.

Even if income was the most important thing, I feel like it’s actually a lagging indicator. Developing myself pays itself off in all areas of life, in addition to also being the primary method to increase future earning potential.

But overall, it’s just nice to take a step back and see the progress. I’m actually embarrassed thinking about what I was like just 10 years ago, both personally and professionally. I’m not perfect now clearly, but I’ve come so far in so many ways.

And I think that’s a good thing. If you’re not embarrassed by what you were like in the past, are you even improving?

None of the changes came overnight. Much of it has been described in this blog, which I believe I started in mid 2018.

I think it points to the power of gradual improvement, and always taking steps in the right direction. Improving just a little bit at a time compounds into huge changes over time.

It would be fun to actually ask some of my friends if they’ve noticed any of the change. If it’s obvious to me, I wonder if it’s obvious to them.

The point is: I think I’m going in the right direction. There are setbacks, of course, and lately I’ve felt fairly discouraged, but as long as I just keep progressing, it’s all good.

The hard times will pass, and I’ll be all that much better for having strived to keep making progress even when it was really hard.

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It Appears to be Sleep

I’m now something like 5 days into my efforts to sleep at least 9 hours per night, and it would appear that it probably was, in fact, the issue that was making me feel unmotivated and generally unhappy.

And it really shouldn’t be surprising. Sleep affects so much, and obviously can impact all of the things I brought up. The only reason I didn’t think of it right away was that I was generally sleeping more than 8 hours per night, and I didn’t think it could possibly make much of a difference beyond that.

But I was wrong! It seems that it can and it did.

I only even thought of it now because I had the thought, “if I’m starting to run a lot… Should I be sleeping more as a result?”

I outlined this in a previous post I think, but the answer is: yes. You should be sleeping a lot more.

So since I had this thought, I’ve been sleeping more than 9 hours each night, and the results do seem fairly impressive. Overall, I feel a lot better and in a better mood.

Motivation and focus are way up, as is productivity.

I also had an interesting result with my running. Usually once or twice a week, I run a very similar route that comes out to about 2.41 miles. Yesterday I completed this route in 20:07, which I didn’t think much of at the time, especially since it didn’t feel particularly challenging.

It wasn’t until I reviewed my other runs that I realized that this was way faster than my other runs. The previous record (for this year, anyway) was 20:53. I shaved off 47 seconds on a relatively short run. That’s huge.

I’ve also been struggling to improve my mile time (which is my ultimate goal), and set what I thought to be an ambitious goal for my run last week of 6:40. I ended up flying past that goal and finished in 6:33.

I now believe that lack of sufficient sleep has been significantly affecting my performance. I was starting to lose hope that I’d be able to get my mile down to below 6 minutes, but now I’m once again hopeful that I’ll be able to do it.

So one final thought I had today regarding my sleep is this: if all this time, I simply haven’t been sleeping enough, how does this pertain to drinking?

You see, in the past, after drinking, the next day I often felt unmotivated, generally bad, and just didn’t perform very well. I assumed this was just 100% directly caused by the alcohol.

But the symptoms were always almost identical to what I’ve been feeling recently due to a little bit less sleep (and to be clear: I’m not drinking at all right now).

To what extent did lack of sleep play?

Most times that I drank, I’d stay up later than I should. Given that I usually had commitments, I’d generally still get up at the same time, meaning I was sleep deprived.

Additionally, alcohol greatly impairs the quality of that sleep. Even if I slept “long enough”, it likely still affected me greatly.

So what do I do with this information?

I think that when/if I go back to drinking, it’s important to be especially careful around my sleep. I need to not stay up too late, and ideally I’d be totally sober by the time I went to bed. If not, I’m killing my productivity and mood.

This is great, too, because the whole point of me taking a year off is to gather insights like this. I’ll want to figure out if alcohol needs to be eliminated entirely. If I can figure out in which situations it is really damaging, I can reduce the incidences of them.

I’ll keep posting back here with the long-term results of my “increased sleep”. Currently, I’m struggling a little bit because it’s hard/impossible to keep up with all the sleep-related habits I’ve developed and still maintain 9 hours each night. So I may have to alter what is required as I go along.

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I’m Anxious and Low-Energy Right Now

So lately I’ve seemed to have no mental energy or motivation at all and have been considerably more anxious than usual.

So far, my working theory is that I’m actually too lean. In addition to weight training and eating very well, I’ve added quite a bit of cardio to my routine in the form of running. Since then, I’ve gotten quite lean and may now be below 10% body fat.

I was aware that at a certain point (that’s different for everyone), you start to feel some negative side-effects of being lean. And the symptoms seem to line up with what I’m experiencing, unfortunately.

It’s also possible that I’ve just burnt myself out doing so much every day and being so productive. Maybe I just need to relax for a bit.

I’ve also had a bit of tumult in my dating life that has certainly affected me in the last week, though it’s hard for me to imagine that it is the cause.

Finally, it’s always possible I’m fighting an illness, even though I don’t seem to have any other symptoms. It could be something behind the scenes.

I might just keep going exactly as I am for a bit and see if anything changes. If not, it may be time to start eating a lot more and getting my bodyfat percentage back up.

Because I really don’t want to continue like this. In times when I need to call on some extra motivation or self-control, it’s not there. And I’m not used to that.

Half the time I feel like just collapsing and not moving at all.

The funny thing is that it’s entirely mental. My body is just fine. I can go out in the morning and run 4 and a half miles at a good pace without issue. But getting myself to start anything or cook or do one last task feels like so much work.

There’s also just a general feeling that everything is pointless. I had believed that this was a side-effect of not dating at all, because I haven’t dated since I returned from my last trip a couple months ago. But it may be unrelated.

It’s also affecting my ability to stick with new habits. I’ve gotten up past 7:30 for the first time in a long time more than once lately, and also have been slow to get out of bed. Literally everything is harder.

I also haven’t been able to make any progress on my photos site or other initiatives and it has been frustrating.

So I figure I’ll just keep an eye on it and share more if things change. Hopefully they do soon.

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“Do What You Love” Is Good Advice for Most People Because they Couldn’t Excel Elsewhere

I’ve come to the understand that the vast majority of people sort of just do what they feel like all the time. They lack self-control and discipline and lots of other things that would be required to succeed in most areas.

In most cases, I think that when things get tough, people either lose interest, tune out, or just give up.

To get great or even good at most things requires a lot of effort and experience, and lots of of hardships.

I think most people end up finding something they are good at, and more often than not, it’s something that they are passionate about and enjoy doing.

But contrary to the popular wisdom, I think that they are only good at it because they are passionate about it.

I think that passion is what keeps them going even when things get hard. It’s the only way they can keep going, because they simply don’t have the level of self-discipline or self-awareness to continue progressing if they weren’t passionate.

I think of these guys who seem like total screw-ups in most of their life, but they have one thing they love and are actually really good at. Some of the more apparent examples are many mechanics, electricians, and other people in skilled trades.

Those things are not easy to do or to get good at, yet it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that someone that was at the bottom of my high school class had succeeded in that field.

I certainly don’t want to come off as elitist, conceited, or judgmental here. This is just one piece of my broader understanding lately that advice that is designed to be broadly applied to the population does not really feel relevant to me or many others.

I’ve worked hard over decades to improve my self-discipline, habits, and overall performance. And now it seems that I’m at a level where most advice doesn’t seem to apply to me.

And “do what you love” sort of just feels like one of those things. I now think that’s its actually a pragmatic suggestion for finding economic success and providing value to society for those who would otherwise struggle to do so, rather than a deep nugget of wisdom designed to bring about happiness and fulfilment.

Those things may, indeed, be related, but the happiness may actually just be a secondary side-effect.

That’s also not to say that this advice wouldn’t help others, as well. It would be easier for anyone to continue through adversity if they were doing something they loved.

But it is limiting to only do things you love. Almost nobody has a love for management, scaling operations, HR, accounting, and many other crucial pieces of a functional business. Perhaps one or 2 of those things, but not all of them.

Yet the reward is great for those that successfully navigate all of them into a successful business. And that generally requires a great deal of self-discipline that allows one to push through even when things are really hard or they don’t feel at all passionate about the matter at hand.

I’ll keep thinking about the idea of most advice not being applicable and will probably keep writing about it in the future.

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I Stopped Doing Grunt Work by Making it More Taxing, but it Comes With a Cost

There was a time when I did absolutely everything in my business. Most of the work I did consisted of coding, design, and configuration of websites. I learned fairly early that this would have to change if I wanted to grow and scale my business.

And it took a while to change. Obviously nothing happened overnight. But it did work eventually.

So how did I do it?

Basically, I started associating that type of work with a lack of success. Stagnation. Over time I started to really feel that every time I engaged in those activities, I was letting my dreams (and business) slowly die.

And it worked!

Such a visceral reaction to something really does work to make you go out of your way to avoid it. While I still occasionally dabble in very small (or sometimes just complicated) tasks of this nature, I try to keep it very brief and I start to get stressed out if it goes on too long.

That’s usually my cue to just give it to a dev.

Overall, that’s a good thing and it has, in fact, allowed me to grow and scale my business. Without it, I would be stuck doing all of those things and would be limited primarily by the hours in the day.

I also tend to just be bad at being proactive with work like that, too, but that’s a different conversation.

But my thought today is: what are the downsides of this method?

Because there are some. It’s not like I just handed those tasks off and there is nothing bad to come from it.

I think that essentially I built a huge barrier for myself to doing these tasks. Every minute I do engage with them, I am having to overcome a large mental and emotional barrier that is quite draining.

Therefor, in the times when I do end up having to do some of it, it leaves me more worn-out and with less energy to do other things once I’m done.

The exact same task is now considerably more difficult for me to do, essentially by design.

Of course it works out in the end since overall I’m still way more free to focus on more important tasks, but it’s still just interesting to consider these downsides.

I think it’s particularly important to acknowledge this concept because it probably applies to many other areas in my life and business, too.

Off the top of my head, scheduled meetings and phone calls seem to have the same barrier for me. I try to avoid them as much as possible, and as a result, they are actually much more difficult for me to actually do. I’ve create barriers to doing them – which has worked in terms of decreasing their frequency – but now when I’m required to do them, it’s much more draining on me.

I think this process is something that can be performed consciously, and knowing what I know now, I need to be careful about what tasks I apply it to. Some things are inevitable, and it is probably unwise to build large barriers to accomplishing them.

On the flip side, I now know that this process does work, and it might be smart to seek out other opportunities to using it.

The low-hanging fruit would be things that are unquestionably bad for me. I think I’ve already done it with mindless social media usage, but using it for drinking, junk food, and laziness could also work quite well.

I guess I’ll consider this an important tool in my toolkit and just make sure to be very careful about when I choose to use it.

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The Justification for a Course of Action Doesn’t Need to be True

This is sort of a difficult concept to articulate, but I’ll give it my best shot.

Someone’s explanation for why a course of action is the best one doesn’t necessarily need to be true for it to be the best course of action.

I’ll give some examples to explain.

I feel like cooking is rife with these types of situations. Chefs say a lot of things that sound true but probably aren’t at all. I think this owes to the fact that cooking is one of those rare categories where we don’t really need to understand (and therefor test) the science behind it, because the end result (the food/flavor) speaks for itself.

You can try two different ways of doing something, and you know which one is better because of the taste.

Why one worked better is another question.

I remember watching a video of Gordon Ramsay explaining how to make the best scrambled eggs. In it, he suggests that you need to take the eggs off long before they are done cooking, because they will “continue to cook on the plate”.

I’ve heard this same explanation many places, and I’ve always been incredulous.

The moment the food leaves the pan, it is no longer being heated and therefor will instantly begin cooling. In my experience, with eggs, that change is very rapid. In fact, in most cases, you can hear boiling/frying aggressively on the pan, and the moment the eggs leave, it is silent.

Now, of course it’s conceivable that there are chemical changes occurring within the food while it remains at a high – albeit dropping – temperature.

However, while the claim that it will “keep cooking on the plate” may be true in absolute terms, I have a sneaking suspicion that a single second in the pan and on the stove will account for more “cooking” than the entirety of the time after it’s on a plate.

Now, I feel as though lesser minds, at this point, will resort to one of, in my opinion, the dumbest arguments ever conceived: “well he’s an experienced chef so he’s obviously right and you’re obviously wrong”.

First of all: no. Chefs don’t always agree with each other, first of all.

And second: to my point, even if they are wrong, that doesn’t mean they aren’t following the best course of action to make the best food.

A chef doesn’t need to understand why something works. He just knows that it does. He has training and experience that tells him the right timing for things.

In this particular example, it may just be that eggs need to be less cooked than one would believe. If telling someone to take them off the stove before they are fully cooked since they’ll “cook the rest of the way on the plate” gets them to take them off at the right time: good job!

Chefs aren’t scientists and in the rare event that experiments are performed, the goal is generally to determine which method yields the best subjective results. The goal is never to determine the chemical changes in the food or what kind of scientific processes are happening behind the scenes.

And as such, you’re bound to run into tons of situations like this.

Another situation (and the one that made me think of this) that might be more relevant to people is picking stocks in the market.

The vast majority of people are terrible at it, and will consistently underperform the overall market.

Funny enough, my understanding is that trained stock brokers actually do even worse on average than the average layperson.

But consider this: they presumably understand market forces much better. They can value a company and justify the decision to buy or sell a given stock, and the justification is likely accurate.

And yet they do worse than someone who knows nothing.

Based on this, I would posit that someone’s reasoning for picking stocks really shouldn’t matter at all. Only their results matter.

If you were using a monkey to choose which stocks to buy, I would also follow the monkey’s advice if he was consistently right.

I’m being a little facetious there but the point stands. If I had a crazy cousin who had some nonsensical formula for picking stocks and he was consistently returning 30% returns with this formula: I’d follow his formula. Even if it didn’t seem to make any sense, it might tap into something that actually has predictive value, if only by accident.

I think the important lesson to learn here is that things might work – and work well – but still be completely wrong in their premise. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use them.

It doesn’t even necessarily mean you need to understand the real explanation. Sometimes you just gotta go with it.

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Update on Yearly Goals and New Habit Relating to Sleeping

I just reviewed my post about my goals for the year and wanted to give an update on my progress for that.

I’ve made lots of meaningful progress towards many of the goals and I would say that a lot of them are very much doable still. I don’t think any are impossible and few are unlikely. It’s nice to see that they are coming along.

Here is some specific progress relating to specific goals:

  • I haven’t initiated any deals to buy other companies yet, but I’ve had some nibbles, and I’ve made incredible progress towards attracting more of them
  • I haven’t reviewed business profit so far but I suspect we are more profitable than ever
  • I am well within my goal of limiting myself to 30 hours per week of work
  • My photos site is coming along nicely, and it’s entirely possible I’ll have 10 sales by the end of the year
  • Haven’t had any alcohol since I made the goals and shouldn’t have any trouble making it to next year
  • I need to make plans to camp overnight on a river island
  • I’ve been disc golfing a lot, though I haven’t come too close to an Ace yet
  • I may or may not join a rock climbing gym, we’ll see
  • I’ve biked a bit

So overall, good progress. Especially since I wrote that at the end of April and haven’t had that much time to actually get these things done. I finished tons of major projects at home here already. They weren’t “goals” for the year but they still had to get done, and now I should have more time to put towards other things.

Finally, I’d like to formally change the habit I’m working on. I’ve done an excellent job (100% success, I believe) of waking up at 7:30am and not snoozing my alarm.

However, I’m still struggling to develop my own circadian rhythm. And I think one of the biggest parts of that is that I’m doing lots of other things in bed, including not getting up right away and instead using my phone for quite a while.

For the most part, it’s to study, but I think it’s still probably a big problem.

To start with, I’m going to try to establish a new habit of physically getting up within 5 minutes of being awake, starting the day, and not returning to bed at all.

This will require studying elsewhere, which is fine.

I’m hoping that will help quite a bit. I want to generally not use my bed for anything else until I go to bed, but I don’t want to make that a hard rule until I’ve established the morning one first. I generally read in my bed and I think it would be better if I did that somewhere else.

Either way, we’ll start here and then move on once it’s established.

Down the road I could also consider mandating that I go outside and get some light first thing, never use my bed except for sleeping, and perhaps even establish a hard bed time.

But I’ve been getting closer and closer to fixing my sleep and I just need to continue one step at a time.

 

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Historically, Things like Hunger and Fear Moved us to Action, but not Anymore

During the vast majority of the time that humans were evolving, we were motivated to action by strong biological desires like hunger, fear, or sex.

But in modern society, we are generally comfortable. While sex may still be very motivating for people, hunger and fear rarely are feelings that cause us to act.

And I don’t mean: you feel hungry so you go to the refrigerator and grab something to eat.

I mean: you had concerns about your ability to secure food for yourself for the whole year, and that motivates you to work tirelessly, 365 days a year until you die, to do everything you can to secure food.

Nearly all of your actions were based around just a few basic needs.

And we simply don’t have that anymore. You barely have to do anything to survive and meet those needs.

So now we’re operating on a completely alien system of motivation. We’re forced to think about what we really want in life and make complicated decisions about how to meet long-term goals.

And, more to my original thought and point of this article: in the short term, there is almost nothing motivating you to action.

I have no intense biological needs that are in danger of not being met anytime soon.

So how exactly do I motivate myself to do… Anything?

Animals behave almost entirely on instinct and in response to their needs. Everything is very low-level and they basically do what feels right at every given moment.

But for us humans, we’ve created a world in which almost every action we take has to be guided by higher-level thinking that’s generally not tied to basic needs like food and safety.

To some degree, it’s wholly unnatural.

Sure, we do use stand-ins for our basic needs and let those motivate us. For example, sex appeal is used to sell everything from cars to vacations to kitchen appliances.

You can motivate people at a fundamental, animalistic level by tapping into their biological desire for sex. But of course you’re not giving them sex, you’re selling them a product.

Obviously money tends to be pretty motivating to people, too. And I think it tends to be a stand-in for basically all biological needs: hunger, safety, sex, shelter, everything.

It’s almost an avatar of our base needs that have guided our actions for millions of years. We’ve replaced those needs with a need for money.

While that’s motivating, I’m not sure it’s as motivating as a true need for food, for example.

And so it makes sense that for most people, once they’ve reached a level of stability and comfort in their lives, they essentially stop trying at anything.

Why would they? Our evolution hasn’t prepared us for that type of situation. Once you’re there, there is no script. You are not biologically motivated to do anything else.

And so they do nothing.

Obviously I could get deep into philosophy and psychology here, and there’s not going to be any concrete takeaways.

But I almost think that you have to somehow rewire your brain and treat your goals like needs, in the same way that food would be to a nomadic hunter-gatherer 2 million years ago.

I have noticed that compared to most people around my age, my level of motivation to improve and my general ambition and effort in accordance with that ambition is very high. And it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why that is.

If I could figure out the reason, maybe I could double-down on it and really supercharge it. Obviously I don’t want to become anxious, restless, or unsatisfied with my life, but I do want to maximize my motivation and energy which I can put towards advancing my goals.

I think I’m just going to have to keep pondering that until I come up with a satisfactory answer. Right now I’m not sure.

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The Right People Keep You On Track

I was going to give this post a much more descriptive and specific title, but I think this one actually captures the essence of what I’m about to say more clearly and, perhaps, accurately.

First, I’ll explain my initial thought.

I’ve come to believe that using any substance or activity that floods you with dopamine, whether that be alcohol, cannabis, TikTok, Instagram, or anything else, leaves you depleted of the dopamine you would otherwise need to pursue activities and objectives.

Specifically, I’ve been thinking about my times going up to lake cabins in the summer. I always go with hopes that I’ll have tons of energy and do every activity available to me like kayaking, swimming, tubing, whatever.

As I’ve outlined in other posts, I’ve noticed in recent years that the energy and enthusiasm I’ve had for those things has been dwindling. One thing that’s been consistent over time is that these types of activities tend to come with more overall drinking that normal. Perhaps not all at once, but having White Claws throughout the day is quite common.

However, to the point of this post: I feel like the right people will sort of force you to do things. Even if you don’t have the energy to suggest it and make it happen, as long as somebody does, they’ll often convince you to do it.

And so even at times when perhaps I had been drinking more than usual, I still did more activities because somebody else convinced me to do it.

But in the last several years, more often the people who would have done that for me were in the same boat (literally and figuratively). As a result, we kind of just… Don’t do anything.

And that’s a shame.

The solution is probably for at least one person, me for now, to be the one who’s not drinking or doing anything else and sort of lead everyone.

But that’s not the main point here.

Having the right people around who are going to motivate you and keep you on track with a schedule and moving towards some kind of goal is extremely beneficial.

In my examples, I’ve highlighted how this is the case for leisure activities when on vacation. But I suspect it applies to so much more.

They say that having a strong group of close friends is one of the greatest predictors of success in life.

One of the main reasons could be that when you are struggling (in any way), they’ll help you through it and keep you on track.

Maybe you’re having a tough time with something. Your friends may encourage you to take the steps needed to keep your life going and even get back on track.

If you’re totally alone, it would be much easier to simply give up and not do anything to improve.

So I guess the main conclusion here is to keep the right people around who are going to support you, motivate you, and keep you on track.