Some businesses have an unhappy existence

A self-absorbed and uncontrolled life is nearly always an unhappy existence. However, much like the Dunning-Kruger effect, the confidence of the self-absorbed person is inversely proportionate to their ability to understand why they have a miserable existence.

I’m more interested in the uncontrolled aspect of the “uncontrolled life.” I believe that the lack of order in your life or business leads to a lack of peace and stability.

In terms of business, the disorderly business owner spends his days putting out fire after fire. Everything is a reaction to the next crisis. The business owner who has systems and orderliness spends the majority of his time being proactive and avoiding problems before they become full-blown crises.

While orderliness and attention to detail might seem annoying at the moment, they give us peace and stability in the long term.

Dry, boring, and difficult work

Most work is dry, boring, and difficult. It’s difficult until you’ve done it for long enough. It’s boring until you know why you’re doing it. And it’s dry until you care about the process of doing it.

Bigger company, or more freedom and flexibility?

As you get better at the work you do, the demand for your skills will increase. There is a good problem that arises. How do you hire more people to make more money and build your business?

There is an alternative as well. This solution is to double what you charge per hour and only work half the hours.

When you hire more people, you scale your business and add pressure and expectations to your work. Maybe that is what you want. The payoff is great and you an on your way to building a bigger business.

However, there is a peaceful allure to the life of a successful freelancer who operates independently. Maybe that is what you prefer.

If so, the goal should be to leverage your skills and demand to prioritize gaining flexibility and freedom in your personal life rather than a simple quest for building a bigger and bigger company for the sake of having a bigger company and making more money.

By doubling your rates, you have the choice to work as many hours and make twice as much, or to scale back your working hours and live a more free and flexible life.

We should spend more time thinking about what we are trying to get out of our work and find a creative solution.

Building and selling highly valuable skills

We must develop and build valuable skills that society wants, but doesn’t have easy access to.

Building your highly valuable skills is more than just absorbing the zeitgeist of the given moment. Consuming social media and becoming an expert in all things pop culture, sports, and movies have little staying power because what society trains you for, can just as easily train someone else who can quickly replace you.

Deliberately practicing rare and valuable skills is the way to build them. These are not skills that any person can pick up by reading a book, they are skills that require practice and getting better. These hands-on skills that you develop are usually highly creative, technical, personality-driven, or non-automate-able things. This is part of what makes them so valuable when you are able to do them.

Identify skills that are valuable. Develop those rare and valuable skills by practicing them. Learn to build and sell valuable skills and there will always be a place in the market for you, no matter the interest rates, inflation, economic stability, etc…

You can’t skimp on it

Success is not all about hard work, but hard work is absolutely a requirement. But hard work that is pointed in the wrong direction is just a fast track to a destination you don’t want and maybe don’t even know exists.

My problem over the past three years is that I skimp on hard, focused work way too much. When I get this focus and hard work issue sorted out, it’s going to be awesome. I can’t skimp on the hard work part of the equation.

Your passion needs you to be constantly courageous

All of us have good ideas. All of us can make a viral moment. All of us can steal a few moments of attention here and there. Sustained success requires more. Our dreams don’t become reality when we don’t constantly do the work and get our business or brand out there.

Too often, we come up with reasons to not do something, rather than making up reasons why we should do something.

Our passion is always waiting for our courage to step up and make the dream a reality.

No matter what your business or job is, you have to deliver more finished work and get your name out there. Whether you’re washing dishes in a kitchen or creating content for Instagram, get out there and be courageous in delivering your work.

New baby today

I was up most of the night because my daughter was born overnight in the early hours of October 14th. We named her Collette Elizabeth. I don’t have much else to say. Words always fail me in moments like this and I’m envious of people who have the perfect things to say in times like these. She’s great and mom is great. I’m going to get some sleep.

Trap the problems of today within today

When you’re writing your to-do list for the day at 10:45pm you can probably chalk it up as a day that’s gone off the rails.

I usually write my daily blog post at 8am, but it’s 11:35pm right now and I’m writing what should have been written 15 hours ago.

Bad day in terms of productivity, but I see it and I’m feeling it, and it will not spread into tomorrow.

A slow day can’t be made up by working late into the right. That simply destroys the start of the next day and drags the problems of today into tomorrow.

Tell better stories and do more creative work with this trick

About ten years ago, I was close friends with a young guy who started a YouTube channel about tech. Every day he would find time to work on his channel and create content. He focused so much on getting better and the process of making his videos. He never cared about the numbers. Just the process and what he controlled. After a few years of grinding his audience grew incredibly and his business exploded. This caused him to become one of the most influential YouTubers in the tech and creative space and has allowed him to connect with an audience that loves him and loves his work.

This story is an exercise in story-writing with a form. Use forms for everything you can. They make things easy and they guide you when you feel lost.

The story guide I’ve stolen from Pixar writers goes like this: “Once upon a time, there was _________. Every day _________. One day, _________. Because of that, _________. Because of that _________. And because of that _________. Until finally _________.”

If you look, I used this form in the story at the top of this blog post.

I have guides, systems, and forms for email responses, social media content, video content, email newsletter ideas, and speeches or presentations I give. Guides aren’t cheating, they become your brand and they help you present your thoughts and ideas in clear, compelling, and professional ways. They also help smash creative block.

In upcoming blog posts, I hope to talk about some of the forms I use for content creation, logo design, photo shoot planning, and more of the creative work I do. Forms and systems are good!

95% is perfect

Trying to achieve 100% perfection is impossible. Trying to close the 3% gap from 95% to 98% takes as much effort as it took to get from 0% to 95%.

So the energy used to get to 98% is wasted energy that could have been used to create another 95% perfect product.

95% perfect IS perfect.

How to make money

Making money is pretty simple. You need to show up and do the job. Even if you’re not particularly good at it, you’ll make money and you’ll get better at it. You just have to show up. For you, for your family, for whatever your purpose is, you have to show up. That’s how you make money.

How to control pressure and be more creative

Pressure is the force that strangles many creative efforts before they ever get off the ground. The anxiety-inducing deadline and the tightness you feel in your chest. Sometimes it tingles, and sometimes it just flat-out hurts.

The most creative ideas and insights come when the pressure is gone and when you can trust your ability to come up with ideas and just fall into that beautiful comfort of creative confidence.

So how can we remove pressure? One of my favorite ways is by setting unrealistic expectations.

Imagine having a client that expects three logo concepts in the next week. That might sound scary. But then you decide to deliver 20 logo concepts. That is pretty much impossible, but the ridiculous nature of the goal means that you free yourself of the expectations and give yourself a bubble of freedom in which you have the capability of being much more brilliantly creative.

Insane expectations that you can’t possibly achieve make it easier to get the work done. Halfway to impossible is a really good place to be.

Sick today

Well, I’m feeling pretty sick today so I’m mailing in this blog post. It wouldn’t be a problem if I had a backlog of a few blog posts for when things like this happen. However, the goal of these posts is to have me write something every day, not just get a blog post up.

It’s boring and devoid of value, but it has me writing a few sentences before I lay back down, so that is a success. Hoping to feel better tomorrow.

This one cruel trick of nature

The more we give a human, the less happy they seem to be. This is, of course, a vast general statement that I have no way of proving, but I think most of us understand the type.

I believe that the misery that comes with abundance is because as we acquire more material stuff, our desire for more grows in proportion to our acquisitions.

However, the cruel trick of the geocentric world is that as we get more stuff, the pleasure we derive from that stuff diminishes.

Part of deep happiness comes from the ability to enjoy less and thrive where there is a lack. That contentment steadies an uneasy ship and quells the boisterous waves of misery. Be content, my friends.

Scholars and warriors

Read something interesting the other day.

"The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools."

I think the lesson is that it is vital for everyone’s good if you have skin in the game. If you spent all your time thinking, you can be brilliant in your own mind because your ideas never get tested by reality. If you thrash about without thinking, you’re an overly zealous idiot.

Be thoughtful, but make sure you have skin in the game if you expect people and society to take you seriously.

Consistency is better than intensity

Consistency is far more important than intensity. Intensity is the fast burn. It’s fun when we have the intensity, but when our energy fades, the season of drought is painful.

Imagine for a moment that you have a very intense day and you get 100% of your planned work done. Then you have a letdown and only get 5% of your desired work done for the remaining five days of that week. That is a completion rate of 20.83%. You’ve left nearly 80% of your work undone.

Now imagine that you have a casual and consistent series of days where you only get 50% of your desired work done, but you can maintain that pace for six days. Obviously, this means you get 50% of your weekly work finished.

Intensity is fun when it’s happening, but it’s all-or-nothing and it’s very exhausting. Consistency requires self-discipline, but you end up having easier days of work that result in much more productive weeks.

Spoiler: by targeting consistency, you also end up developing discipline and stamina. We can develop the skills to complete 80-100% of our desired work.

Consistency is better than intensity.

We have lots of average

We need to be honest and we need to put forth a good effort. Those are the minimum requirements.

It’s nice to continually find ways to improve your processes and your skill set.

It’s a bonus if you can have fun while doing all of that.

So we have the needs, the nice-to-haves, and the bonus of making it enjoyable.

To merely survive, you have to be honest and put forth a good effort. That’s an average life, making average things, having an average impact. For most of us, that’s the most we’ll ever do.

The world has lots of average, so if you want to be noticed, you’ve got to be special and you have to work to make yourself a master of something. Make the task of finding ways to improve as important as putting forth a good effort and being honest. That is the way to get noticed and build an above-average organization that makes a special impact.

What are your systems and how do you get things done?

What are your systems? The processes you do every day? Things like making your breakfast, stretching, showering, teeth-brushing routine, going for a walk, and how you organize your day. These are all personal systems.

Your business has them, too. How you plan projects, how you develop content for social media, how you keep in contact with clients, how you tackle problems, pay the bills, and handle the different tasks required.

We do the things we do in a certain way and the way we do these things is the “system” we’ve adopted to tackle those tasks.

Refining your systems and developing better ways to do things is one of the best and fastest ways to be more productive and less stressed out about your work. Refining your systems is the classic example of working “on” your business, not “in” your business.

Do you want to improve? Observe your current systems and find ways to make them better.

Make bad things and refine them

Step one is to make something that you know isn't very good. Step two is to turn that bad thing into an imperfect thing. Step three is to make that thing a little less imperfect. And step four is to make that imperfect thing pretty good.

That is the fastest and most sustainable way to make things. Make junk and refine it over the course of several passes. All of the sudden, you’ll have something that’s really quite good.