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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.

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I Need to Get My Act Together

It’s a bit of a perfect storm. I’ve been consistently uprooting myself to move somewhere new, I’m in a new city, I’m trying to meet lots of new people, and I’m possibly still recovering from COVID.

The results speak for themselves.

They are bad.

I’ve been incredibly unproductive in my time here in Mexico. When I first arrived I found out I had COVID. That completely wiped me out and drained me of all energy. Understandably, I didn’t get a lot done.

But I recovered. I picked up some bad habits of watching way too much YouTube and going on Facebook.

And now I feel like I’m barely working or accomplishing anything at all. I finally moved into a place that I’ll actually stay in for a while, and I love it. I have it all to myself and it’s a place that can actually feel stable for me. I’m hoping that helps.

It’s entirely possible that I have lingering effects from COVID still. Though I’ve been recovered for several weeks, I still feel like I have very little motivation to work or get anything done. And lately I’ve felt like it’s been sort of hard to “catch my breath” even though I’m not doing anything. Granted, as I write this I’m probably sitting at nearly 7500′, so the air actually is much thinner.

Regardless, I think I just need to focus on getting back on track. I need to get into a good routine where I’m productive. I need to stop watching YouTube videos and going on Facebook.

I’m in a great position where I can travel whenever I want while still doing okay financially, but I can’t get complacent. With just a little bit of effort I should be able to continue growing the business AND having fun.

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I’m Actually Way More Productive on the Treadmill

It’s maybe a little ridiculous, but I built a desk and mounted a monitor over my treadmill. It’s all wired in to my regular work desktop and I can easily switch between my regular desk and the treadmill.

You’d think that walking while working would be really distracting, but I think I’ve found the opposite. I tend to be much more focused and, more importantly, my focus stays on important things. I find I’m much less likely to drift into things like reading the news or wasting time elsewhere, and if I do, I don’t linger long.

My mom used to always say that when I was a kid, I always had to be doing two things at once. It was the only way I could effectively do anything. I probably should do some more research here, but two thoughts come to mind on this topic:

  1. That sounds like a likely ADHD symptom. I should probably investigate that.
  2. Studies have shown multitasking is actually not an effect method of productivity.

Given #2, I’m not really sure why this works. It’s possible that the studies investigated more of doing two difficult, cognitive tasks simultaneously vs. a low-level task like simply walking. Or perhaps I do have ADHD or something and the studies only apply to people who don’t.

I’m not really sure!

But if it works for me, I should keep doing it. And clearly the health benefits alone are worth it, so I should really focus on doing it consistently.

I just wanted to get my thoughts down and also leave this here as a reminder that I need to keep using it. Especially since I already have it and it’s all set up.

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We Fill Up Our Time Until We Have None

It’s an interesting dilemna. If we have extra time, we slowly fill it up until we no longer have time for anything that’s not critically important.

Worse still, if you don’t have any extra time then you probably are deeming lots of things as “unimportant” even though they are critical to your continued growth and development.

Case in point: I haven’t really read any books or studied much Spanish in a while. I’ve been “too busy”.

It’s so critical to be deliberate in the use of your time, and I think most people put so little effort into it. It’s no wonder why most people are constantly stressed and totally unproductive.

If you’re putting out fires all day, you’re going to be stressed.

I’ve definitely been guilty of this to a large extent lately, and I need to be really careful and intentional about everything so I can reclaim it.

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Update: A Totally New (But Familiar?) Place

Things have changed quite drastically since I last wrote.

A month and a half ago, we were very much in a slow period. I had no active projects and really not much going on.

And then, all at once, everything changed.

Several prospective clients finally pulled the trigger. Some major projects and opportunities started with two new business partners (one old, one new), leading to a huge amount of new work.

And lots of existing clients came at me with new tasks as well.

To handle all of this, I needed to take on some new contractors. I immediately posted some listings on Upwork.com and within about a week, hired three new developers in addition to the three I’ve been working with.

And I’ve been working with them for a few weeks now, and it’s actually going great. I’ve been assigning basically all work to a contractor now and having them handle things.

I feel like I’ve finally taken a step back and embraced the project manager role.

It’s weird because I sort of feel like I’ve been here before, yet it feels totally different. At the end of 2018 and very start of 2019, it felt like nothing could go wrong. We had been consistently and aggressively growing, we were booked for months out, I had a full time employee, and all was well.

And then it wasn’t.

I grossly underestimated the hours to complete a massive new project, which sucked all of my resources for what seemed like an eternity (and was literally like a year). It prevented me from finishing or starting other, paying projects and focusing on growing my business.

And then, likely as a direct result of that project, my employee resigned, followed shortly thereafter by one of my two contractors.

I was living abroad at the time and loving that experience while everything else sort of crashed down, as is well-documented in other posts. But from then on, I vowed to do things very differently.

And I have.

I’ve been growing my business in a more sustainable way that allows for me to live the life I want to live. But I’ve also focused more on the fundamentals of running the business and growing it properly.

Whereas at the end of 2018 it felt like I was venturing in to a mysterious new world without really having a sense of what’s happening, this time it feels like I’m sailing through familiar waters. The foundation of everything is much stronger and I’m armed with more experience and insight into where I want to go and how to get there.

I’m managing the existing projects effectively without feeling like I’m just putting out fires or jumping around all day. Back then I just felt like I was getting burnt out and constantly getting pulled one way or the other.

Now things are more relaxed and controlled, and even though we’re doing way more work than then and making more money, I feel like not nearly as much is required of me.

To be clear, I feel that my own personal output far exceeds what it was then. But it’s much more controlled and I’m doing the right things and as a result, I don’t need to spend as much time doing everything. And I’ve minimized the types of issues that require immediate and constant attention by simply doing things right and being proactive.

We’ll see what the future holds. Perhaps I learned nothing the first time I was in a similar situation. But I’m thinking things will be a lot better and that 2021 will be a banner year.

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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!