Category: Personal

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Here’s the Plan

I always feel the need to plan things out, yet I almost never do it. I love thinking through all the top-level things that need to happen or that I want to try, but I don’t necessarily follow-through and make an actual plan.

That needs to change!

So right here and now, I’m making a plan.

I’m re-reading “The One Thing” and it has a format that I like. Obviously, the “focusing question” from that book is something along the lines of:

“What’s the one thing I can do right now that will make everything else easier or unnecessary?”

But further than that, he breaks it down by time frame, so what’s the one thing I can do in 5 years, 1 year, etc. By starting at the end and then breaking things down, you can get to actionable items right now that, over time, will lead to that goal.

So what do I want?

I want to make enough from my business that I can essentially do whatever I want and retire early, but also be able to work entirely remotely and spend very little time on the business.

How can I get there?

Well, let’s try and figure out what that means. I could pluck a number out of the air, but I want to say that it means somewhere around $500,000 in personal income for the year, while working 10 or fewer hours per week.

I like the idea of continuing to use hosting, updates, and WordPress maintenance as the main source of income, because they are all scalable.

If I continue focusing on WordPress, I think that for each client I could expect something like $150/year in profit on hosting, $75 for updates, and perhaps $150 for maintenance.

So that’s $375 in profit per site, per year. To get to $500,000 then, I would need 1,333 and 1/3 clients.

That’s a lot of clients! But honestly, that’s totally doable.

I’ve got maybe 275 hosting clients now. They aren’t all WordPress and they won’t all bring in $375, but I’m working up to that. To be safe, let’s say I need 1500 clients in 5 years.

With the 275 I have now, I still need 1,225 more, or 245 new ones per year. With attrition, that number is going to need to be closer to 300, most likely.

Now, my goal for this year was 100 new hosting clients, and I still intend to exceed that goal. Obviously that won’t cut it if it’s all I can do each year.

However, this first year is going to be the most important one, because it’s where I’m going to figure out how to rapidly get new clients. I’m going to experiment and try things and hopefully accomplish something that’s repeatable.

So without further ado, here is my priority for each time range.

The one thing I can do in 5 years:

Service 1,500 website hosting clients

The one thing I can do in 1 year:

Figure out a scalable, repeatable method of acquiring new clients and investing heavily into it, resulting in 100 new hosting clients.

The one thing I can do in 1 month:

Test a variety of different methods for acquiring new clients and see what works.

The one thing I can do in a week:

Put a plan together for what I’m going to test and put concrete timelines on everything.

The one thing I can do right now:

This!

 

There, I did it! I’ll need to review and plan over time to see how things are going, but I think this is a great start.

In “The One Thing”, he recommends spending literally 4 hours per day on advancing your “one thing”, and that definitely makes sense. I think to start I might start blocking off 2 hour chunks and really hitting it hard.

I think it’s really, really important that I actually do this. If I think back to how my time has been spent historically, only a tiny fraction of it has been spent on improving the business and implementing actual plans that I’ve had.

That really needs to change! And it will only happen by actually blocking off time. I’m making a note to figure out all of that tomorrow!

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Focusing on Blog and Habits Works!

So over the past month or so I’ve made an effort to do more of these blog posts and also focus on improving some of my habits. And it works!

Lately I’ve been sleeping better, getting up way earlier, being way more productive, and just generally doing better.

I’ve said before that the blog is the most important thing I do. The reason for that is it’s the only place where I put down some introspective thoughts and then follow-up later to track everything.

Focusing on it helps be focus on growth and self-improvement and holds me to things that I’ve resolved to do. Without it, I feel like I don’t really improve at all, I kind of just limp along.

Specifically it leads me to trying out things that really help me improve. For instance, I’ve been working on establishing a new habit lately. I would say that I should always be trying to establish a new one at all times, and I really hadn’t in a while.

The one I’m working on now is to get up after the first alarm without snoozing at all. For many, this probably isn’t a challenge. But I’ve been doing it for like 20 years. Breaking that habit (which I think is basically the same as creating one) is extremely difficult.

But I’m like a month in now. It was extremely difficult at first, but it’s getting easier and easier. And only good things have come from it.

And a few days ago I did something that isn’t really a habit, but I should have done a long time ago. I tend to waste a long time on the site imgur.com, and I realized that I don’t even really enjoy it. So after years of wasted time, I installed an app on my phone and blocked the website.

Problem solved!

The interesting thing is that this one doesn’t even really require willpower because it’s blocked… There’s no choice there. That’s a good subject for another blog post, but it’s quite fascinating.

So now I instantly have a lot more time each day because I’m not on that site. I move on to other things right away instead of wasting my time.

I’ve even started doing Spanish studying on Anki again. When I’m twitching on my phone and bored, I don’t really have anything else to do now so I just do it! It’s great.

In conclusion, it’s really important to keep doing this. Keep it up.

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It’s Arrogance and Ignorance to be Too Idealistic About Yourself

I’ve only just started to realize as I get older how much of self-idealism is really just arrogance and ignorance.

When you’re young you think you’re always going to have perfect self-discipline in all areas and that where all other falter, you will succeed. And that was me for most of my life. And probably to a large extent still is.

But over time you see that you keep failing in the same ways. That you can’t just overcome all of your own natural instincts and desires and accomplish whatever you want whenever you want.

And finally you realize that you were just arrogant and ignorant. Arrogant because you thought you would succeed where everyone else repeatedly fails. Ignorant because you hadn’t learned the full extent to which we are all animals who, in many ways, are still just slaves to our biology.

You only have so much willpower. You can only push yourself so far. You will sometimes give in to temptations. You will fail yourself in countless ways that you haven’t even imagined yet.

To think anything else, and especially to plan for anything else, is to be like an arrogant and ignorant child.

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Plan the Work for your Future Self to Do

It’s simple enough, and it seems like you’re sort of tricking yourself… But it works!

I’ve realized that it’s much easier to plan your work and actions — and, by extension, actually do it — if you know you don’t have to do the work right away.

I think the reason for this is that, let’s say you know you have some large task you’re going to do. If you decide to come up with a quick plan to get it done, and then immediately do the work, it seems like a huge investment of effort. And I think that’s because you’re essentially committing a project that is unknown (because you haven’t planned it yet), and you kind of just assume that it’s going to end up being the worst-case scenario.

Whereas it’s super easy to just commit to planning. Especially for something where the planning isn’t going to be that complicated.

You just set aside a few minutes, write it down, and you’re done! There might be some tricky decisions in there but it doesn’t take much time, so you can commit to it easily.

And then when it comes time to actually do the work, you already have your plan and you know exactly what it’s going to consist of. It’s much easier to get started and just go and finish it.

So I think going forward, it’s important for me to create plans for most tasks ahead of time. If I plan it, and I have a set of steps to complete, I know that I’m going to do it.

And it’s almost always okay if it doesn’t happen the same day.

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Past the Hump for a New Habit

So I said I would update things here for new habits that I’m working on forming. So I am!

The habit I’m working on now is waking up without using the snooze button. The old habit was some 20 years in the making and is quite difficult to break.

But as discussed in the past, snooze sleep is terrible sleep, and I absolutely need to stop doing it.

For for the past maybe 3 weeks, I’ve been working on never hitting the snooze button. And so far I’ve kept to it! While I have physically hit the snooze button, I have not gone back to sleep a single time after my alarm has gone off.

It’s been hard. In particular, I think was hardest up until a few days ago. I’ve heard that new habits are harder and harder to keep up with right up until a certain point, and then they start getting easier. I’m happy to say I think I’m at that point!

I’ve been getting up way earlier, and it hasn’t been as much of a burden. Previously I’d have so much willpower depleted that I’d just sit on my phone, sometimes for literal hours. Obviously that’s not much better than sleeping through the snooze, but I was still building the habit.

Now I’ve gotten down to where I wake up easily and don’t even spend that much time on my phone. Work has been way more productive, which is amazing. I’ve had so much more time!

And this morning, mere moments before my alarm went off, I was half-awake, and I thought to myself, “I actually think I might be rested enough, I could probably wake up!” and I got up.

And weirdly, I don’t know that the sleep has even been incredible. I’ve been a little restless. But I’m not tired during the day. I’m thinking that maybe I actually don’t need nearly as much sleep anymore if I just don’t use the snooze. Maybe the reason I feel like I only am rested after like 10 hours, is because the snoozing has messed up my sleep cycle so much.

So I’m excited to see how this plays out. I’m hoping that within a month, it will start to be effortless, and I really won’t need to ever snooze again!

And once that habit is established, I can move on to another.

I’ll keep posting updates here.

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Resting Instead of Phone Use

I have a bit of a theory. What if our constant viewing of entertainment was actually robbing us of all our willpower?

In reading ‘The ONE Thing’ again, I’ve been thinking about the chapter on willpower. He basically calls it a finite resource that needs to be managed.

Studies have shown that taking a break and having a snack or meal or resting tends to restore blood sugar and also seems to increase levels of willpower.

But what do I (and everyone?) tend to do when I don’t feel like doing anything? Sit on my phone immediately, and find some entertainment. No, we’re not using up any willpower to do that, but what if we’re preventing it from replenishing and starting an endless loop?

I think I need to try literally just taking 20 minute breaks where I maybe have a quick snack and lay down to rest my eyes for a bit. Often times my phone binges last way longer than that anyway, and if I had new willpower, I could get back to doing whatever needed to be done!

For the moment, I think it’s at least worth a shot. So I plan on doing that, and reporting back results.

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How to Stay Motivated without Pain and Struggle

When I first started my business, I had a free one-hour consultation with a business coach. He asked me what the minimum amount of money I need to make each month is in order for me to sustain my life, and I told him, “$500”.

I’ll never forget what he said next. He told me, “If you want to make more money in your business, you’re going to have to raise that number way up”.

His advice was literally that if I wanted to make more money, I would need to increase my daily expenditure so that it would be a struggle if I didn’t make enough to cover it.

They say that pain and struggle are incredibly powerful motivators. When your next meal depends on making more, you tend to do it.

I don’t know that I agree fully with what he told me, but I think people absolutely get complacent. When you’re making plenty to get by how you’re living, you don’t feel the need to make more.

I think that’s actually why it’s such good advice to automate your finances and investments. Even buying a house makes sense, because it forces you to build that equity. You don’t have a choice not to make enough to cover it.

Without those things, people just tend to inflate their lifestyle. Nobody accumulates cash. Either they find a way to make sure that extra money gets invested (which is rare), or they just spend more every month. Usually in the form of costlier housing or a car.

In my case, I tend to just travel more but I have the luxury of that as an option.

But I don’t want to struggle. And I want to continue improving my business and making more. So how do I proceed?

The one option, as mentioned, is to automated investments, and force myself to always be struggling to have enough for everything. But again, I still have that struggle.

I guess my question to myself is whether the struggle is actually necessary. Is the human nature of complacency too strong for me to overcome?

I tend to be an idealist, and I think, “absolutely not!” But what if it is? What’s the pragmatic approach here?

What if I set rigid goals for myself? Are goals, in general, the key? Because I could say something like, “I want to cap my yearly spending at X, and I want to grow my business by Y each year” and then stick to that.

But is it really doable when I am otherwise comfortable?

I think part of the answer lies in the fact that “motivation” is fleeting, and is more or less a myth. Struggle is only supposed to be temporary. If it goes on too long you get worn out, and the motivation fades.

The solution, I think, lies in habits and an attitude where you just do things and don’t wait around for motivation. Set goals, develop a rigid plan to achieve them, and then implement.

Even if you’re comfortable financially, that time-tested course of action should work.

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Need to Focus on Things that Scale

It’s been a while since I’ve posted! Despite being “the most important thing” to do, this has fallen by the wayside behind more urgent matters like renovating my house and getting renters. Hopefully, once that is out of the way, I’ll be able to post much more regularly.

I’ve realized recently that I absolutely need to focus almost all of my time and energy on things that I can scale and efforts that tend to multiply. And the reason isn’t just because I believe those will lead to more success (though they will), but because I get bored and disinterested otherwise.

When I’m doing 1-for-1 client work, speaking directly with clients, or doing any kind of networking, I tend to get very bored. Because those things are very much even exchanges. I put in effort, I get something back. A little more time and effort means I’ll make a little more.

And when I do it, it’s just hard for to care. It feels like a slow march towards death. It doesn’t make me excited.

Instead, I really need to focus on things that can actually scale and multiply. Where my efforts may not only lead to immediate returns, but continue getting returns for me down the road without additional effort.

Things like blogging and other SEO efforts are great examples of this. If I build up my SEO profile enough, I can effortlessly get new clients without having to lift a finger. Then I can focus solely on running the business.

And I should focus on services that I can actually scale well. Managed WordPress website hosting is one of those services. We do a great job at it so there is very little headache, and every piece of that service, from migration to maintenance, can be made into a process that an employee could easily handle.

But I think it’s just key that I keep all of this in mind all of the time. All of my efforts need to be focused on moving towards this goal. Every day, I need to prioritize activities that have long-term consequences and promote scalable business practices.

Otherwise, I’m just going to burn out.

 

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Success in School (and Life) Probably has Almost Nothing to do with Intelligence

To properly explain my thoughts here, I have to explain the series of thoughts that came to that conclusion.

I’m currently in Colombia, trying very hard to learn Spanish. I took it in high school (and earlier) and even in college, but never really progressed. My first thought was to question why that was.

My immediate answer was that we didn’t utilize our time that efficiently. I remember just pounding away trying to learn grammar rules and would spend an entire class period (or week?) learning how to conjugate one verb in one tense, or learning some other concept that really shouldn’t take that long.

Part of it, too, is that they are teaching at the rate of the kids who need the most time to pick it up. Which, as I’ll get more into in a moment, probably isn’t the dumbest kids, it’s the kids who don’t care and aren’t paying attention.

So I thought: I’m doing about an hour of flashcards per day, which allows me to learn and retain about 40 new cards every single day. In my  case, that’s usually about 8 new verbs, with examples. It’s a fairly rapid rate.

And then, of course, any time spent actually speaking is extremely valuable in getting better.

But then my next thought was, “Well… You learn concepts and whatnot in class, and then you’re expected to actually study and review vocabulary and concepts at home, right?”

Which is fine, but let’s think about this now. Is everybody going to actually study at home? Absolutely not. The kids who consider themselves smart, and who think they are “good” at it probably will, because they feel good about it and believe they can succeed.

And who is not going to study? The kids who think they are dumb, and the kids who don’t care. And, as a side note, I would bet the kids who “don’t care” actually think they aren’t smart or are bad at the subject, and just “don’t care” as a defense mechanism. That’s a separate topic though.

So in a class where it’s expected that you need to study in order to succeed, what happens if one group actually does study, and the other doesn’t? Even if they are just as intelligent, the group that studied is clearly going to do much, much better.

So now the grades come out. The ones who studied scored highly, and they feel good about themselves. They think, “I’m smart, that’s why I succeeded.” Their parents praise them and tell them how smart they are and they truly start to believe it. They continue to take interest in their studies and continue to succeed, creating a virtuous cycle.

But what about the other kids? They get a bad grade. They know they didn’t study, but still… This must be evidence that they are dumb! Their parents punish them. In some households maybe they even call them stupid or had already been doing that.

It wouldn’t take too long before they would feel stupid. The next time, they might put in even less effort, because what’s the point? They believe they won’t succeed anyway so they aren’t going to bother doing everything the ‘smart’ kids are doing.

And in this way, it’s a cycle. The ‘smart’ get ‘smarter’ and the ‘dumb’ get ‘dumber’. And if you’ve been paying attention — to the extent that intelligence is, in any way an actual, quantifiable trait — the so-called ‘dumb’ kids are very likely the exact same intelligence as the rest.

And now they’re going to go through life thinking they are too dumb to succeed. And that seems like a tragedy.

Additionally, in a school-setting, concepts absolutely build off of one another. It’s much easier to grasp something new when you have all of the underlying concepts memorized. Someone who just “instantly gets” something may only do so because they understood all of the preceding material, not because they are “smarter”.

This might be more fit for a totally different conversation, but I think our emphasis on “intelligence” is also way off-base. It’s a terrible predictor of success (at least as measured by IQ), and I think our very focus on it actually leads to poorer results.

If people think that being “smart” leads to success, then they’ll start thinking that their successes are due to their intelligence, and their failures due to their lack thereof.

This is a terrible outcome for two reasons. Firstly, you can’t (really) do anything about your intelligence. It’s more or less inherent and unchanging. So focusing on it cannot possibly improve your life.

Secondly, it completely takes hard work and sacrifice out of the equation. Literally anything that someone has done to get where they are is overwritten by saying that they are just ‘smart’, or even ‘naturally talented’. Research says that ‘natural talent’ is almost entirely a myth, and I don’t think ‘intelligence’ is that far off in the context of explaining success.

So when it comes to school-age children, I think it’s much more important to tell them, “good job, you studied hard and earned that grade!” instead of saying, “you’re so smart!”

One of those things will help them deeply to understand how to succeed, and the other is only helpful as a confidence booster. If people think their success is due to one, inherent and unchanging metric, then they will not take any responsibility for their successes or failures. They won’t truly understand that the actions that they take lead to their outcomes.

Thinking back to when I was in school, I remember always being in the “honors” or “gifted” classes. I think we all genuinely believed that we were much smarter than the kids in the “regular” classes.

My two thoughts on that now are:

  1. We were foolish and wrong for thinking that.
  2. What does it matter? You can’t pay the mortgage with ‘intelligence’.

 

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What’s the Point of Traveling?

This is a question that I guess I’ve never really taken the time to think through. What is the point of traveling?

If you don’t put much thought into it, you may think you have the obvious answers. It’s fun. It exposes you to new things, new ideas, new people.

But if you think about it, you can get all of those same things without ever leaving your home state. You can certainly have fun, there are always new things to try and people to meet. And with the internet and books, there is never a shortage of new ideas.

So what exactly is it?

An obvious part of it is that it’s more likely to do well in those categories. You’re more likely to have fun, you’re more likely to meet new people, etc. But I don’t think that’s anywhere near the whole picture, and in fact, I don’t think it’s the right answer at all.

While I don’t claim to know the correct answer for sure (or even that there is one), I have an idea.

I believe it’s the depth and impact of the experiences that makes traveling so worthwhile.

Basically, I think you are very likely to have a variety of experience that are likely to have a lasting impact on you. When you think back to your favorite trips, you think of the ones that changed you. You probably had some incredible experiences, did fun things, saw something beautiful, met amazing people, and potentially faced some serious hardships. But after it all, you came out feeling like you bettered yourself, or at the very least, you’ve learned more about yourself.

And that’s hard to come by. You can’t just hand someone cash and have them improve your self-worth or understanding. It comes from genuine experiences and, usually, effort and hardship.

The right trip definitely changes you, and might even become part of your identity. There’s tremendous value in that.

So with that in mind, how can I improve my traveling?

A focus on depth of experiences is definitely critical. Try new things, get out there!

Generally going outside of my comfort zone I think is also necessary. I’ve talked about that quite a bit in the last couple posts but it really is true. If you aren’t a little scared, you probably aren’t growing.

I think I tend to do this naturally, but seeking out genuine experiences and human connection I think is way better than going for cheap thrills. I’m not a big fan of really touristy things (or places) and I think now I know why. They just aren’t that meaningful to me and don’t lead to life-altering experiences.

Those are my thoughts for the night. With almost the entire two months to go here in Colombia, I think it’s good to think about this ahead of time.