All posts by Nathan

digital nomads, entrepreneurship

When Your Business Breaks

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If you’re doing all the right things with your business, then it’s going to grow.  And if it grows, things will break.  To make things even more fun, sometimes everything breaks at once.

Eventually it’s necessary to stop what you’re doing, scrap an old system or systems, and rebuild or redesign them for the new reality.  Doing so is a lot of work, and it can be difficult for entrepreneurs to sacrifice what they think is forward motion in order to rebuild.

Some signs that it’s time for a rebuild/redesign are:

  • You find yourself fixing the same damned issues over and over again
  • People that formerly were on top of things are now struggling
  • Tasks that used to be completed on time are now regularly late
  • Communication now feels sloppy
  • Managers are doing more technical work than managing, and you’re doing more managing than vision work

…to name a few.

Notice that the customer isn’t mentioned anywhere above.  If the customer’s experience is affected that means your systems need to be redesigned yesterday.

Pay attention to your business and suck it up when something needs to be rebuilt or replaced.  Otherwise your customers will replace you.

personal development

The Agony of Defeat

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Let’s talk about disappointment.  Not the kind you experience when you’re late to the movie theater and find you’re going to be stuck in the very front row feeling like an open PEZ dispenser.

The other kind.

The kind of disappointment that is so crushing that it forces you to reevaluate everything you think you know about your life.  The kind of disappointment that makes you want to quit.

Einstein was disappointed after realizing his first few proofs of E=MC2 were garbage.

Sara Blakely, the billionaire founder of Spanx, was once an aspiring law student until she failed the LSAT.

Michael Jordan was so devastated when he didn’t make the cut for his high school varsity team that he shut himself in his room and cried.

Edison must have experienced terrible disappointment multiple times while he was failing his way through 1,000+ filament materials for his new electric light.

In 2011, Venus Williams was knocked out of competition and down to 105th in the world after a bout with Sjogren’s Syndrome.

The list is endless.  All of the people above could have ended their stories by quitting after their first bruising bout with disappointment.

But they didn’t.  They used the bitter taste of it to drive them through one failure after another until they succeeded.

Disappointed?  Good.  Now get back up and get moving.  Your story isn’t over yet.

discipline, personal development

The Right Kind of Pressure

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In the vacuum of our solitary lives, when faced with an extremely difficult or scary task we usually quit partway through or don’t even bother starting.

Diets are abandoned.  Gym memberships go unused.  Projects languish.

The dropout rate for online classes is around 96%.  That’s not a typo.  Only 4% of people who start an online course from their cozy, quiet living room go on to complete the course.

However, that changes when everyone’s watching you.  It’s much harder to quit.  Social pressure can be powerful fuel for surmounting the difficult and scary.

So use it to your advantage.  Commit publicly to a new task or goal and be sure that friends and family who will keep you accountable know about it.

Give a friend $100 and tell her she can keep it if you don’t drop 5% of your body fat in eight weeks.

Announce a new project on your favorite social network and give your friends permission to get on your case if you don’t post weekly updates.

If you’re unable to finish difficult things, perhaps the pressure you put on yourself isn’t enough.  The pressure your networks can put on you may be just the thing.

personal development

Blackout

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I used to sleep in a room with a skylight.  The natural light was wonderful and it was always nice to have a view of the sky, but being unable to keep the room dark for sleeping was a bit of a drag.

The quality of my sleep was just a bit better in hotel rooms, which tended to have blackout shades.  Sleeping in an utterly dark room until you wake up on your own is a little bit of heaven.

Blackout shades – or the metaphor, anyway – are also incredibly useful against those people in your life who drag you down.

If you’re around someone that is constantly criticizing or complaining and you can’t simply walk away, pull the shades on them.  Shut them out and shut them down.

personal development

How to Do Amazing Things

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The gap between you and The People Who Do Amazing Things may not be as wide as you think.

Sure, there are people out there that are way smarter, fitter, richer, etc than the rest of us.  But they are a tiny minority.  And many of them accomplish nothing.

For the vast majority of people that accomplish enviable things there is just one major difference between them and you.

They believe.

Your beliefs limit your capabilities.  If you don’t believe something is possible you probably won’t even try it, let alone succeed at it.

Belief will carry you past pain, adversity, negativity, and failure.  Find a way to believe and the Vegas line on your chances of success just shot through the roof.

personal development

The Confidence Game

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Where does confidence come from?

You know, that annoying-as-hell guy or girl that seems to be able to walk into any situation with swagger, with a “Hey, I got this” attitude, brimming with self-assurance.

You might think for a bit and exclaim, “I know!  The more competent you are, the more confident you are!”

And you would be right.  But not in the way you might think.

Sure, if you’re a proficient negotiator walking into a negotiation you’re going to feel like Celine Dion auditioning for “American Idol”.  You won’t even break a sweat.

But it’s possible to be confident tackling something you’ve never done before.

How?

By being competent in handling failure.  If you can walk into a situation believing that you’ll do your best and, if your best isn’t good enough, that you’ll recover the better for it, you’ll be confident under just about any circumstances.

So get to it.  Take on those scary tasks, because even if you fail, you’re going to grow.

You won’t be afraid of falling down if you know you can easily get back up.

discipline, personal development

Feed Your Brain

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The last time you stood in line at the grocery store checkout, did you struggle to avoid reading the headlines of the various trashy magazines racked in front of you?  If you haven’t noticed how difficult it is, give it a try the next time you’re in the store.

It’s the same with billboards on the side of the road, or advertisements on a city bus or taxi.

Humans (at least those that are literate) are drawn to reading stuff.  Why?

It turns out our brains are voracious learning machines.  They have evolved to consume and process information, and when it’s offered the brain will gobble it up like a greedy kid stuffing his face with candy after a successful trick-or-treating expedition.

That’s why it’s so difficult to resist reading all those tabloid headlines:  our brain is itching to learn more about why Brad and Angelina are choosing family over fame, and what went on inside Beyonce’s wedding.

[Well, that and the fact that our brains love stories, but that’s a tale for another time.]

Marketers know this and exploit it.  Take a spin through any city or mid-sized town and you’ll be barraged with words, images, and symbols designed for the dual purpose of:

  1. Satisfying your brain’s craving for more information, and
  2. Getting you to buy endless quantities of stuff

But there’s no reason why you can’t exploit it as well.

Social media is addictive for the very same reason.  Your brain loves to chow down for countless hours on pictures, stories, and memes about your friends, friends of friends, and people you don’t even know.  It’s all new information, and your brain luuurves new information.

It’s not terribly useful information, of course, and in that way social media is more like M&M’s for the brain than it is protein and veggies.

So provide your mind with a little discipline.  When you find yourself craving some Facebook or Instagram, instead try consuming something both new and useful.

A few M&M’s once in awhile won’t kill you.  But filling up on them day after day will leave you restless and unfulfilled.

 

 

personal development

Overwhelm the Ugliness

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Don’t get discouraged when the world suddenly seems full of ugliness:  evil people, nasty things, and hateful actions.

The news media lives on profit, and the best way to make that profit is to focus on awful, scary, outrageous things.

Ignore them.

The ugliness is a blade of grass bloated to the size of a mountain by people who gain from your fear and outrage.

The world is overflowing with fantastic people, beautiful things, and thoughtful actions.

Let them, and they will overwhelm the ugliness.

 

discipline, learning, personal development

Always in Motion

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If you’re like most people, just about every major accomplishment in your life was achieved in small steps over a long period of time.

Sure, there may have been the occasional cataclysmic breakthrough, but for the most part big changes happen slowly and consistently over time.

[Here’s where you might expect to see a tired reference to the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon.  I’m not going there.  That sucker is so threadbare you could use it as a fishing net.]

Do you have a daily practice?  Do you do something every day to make yourself better?  Do you do yoga?  Meditate?  Solve a crossword?  Dig into math puzzles?  Work out?  Study chess?  Paint?  Draw?  Work on logic problems?

If you haven’t had a daily practice in awhile, take a couple of days to think about what you want to improve (balance, endurance, mindfulness, patience, writing ability, creativity, strength, analytical skills, computer literacy, etc) and how you can spend 10-30 minutes doing every day improving it.  Then commit to doing it for at least three months.

A week or two or four isn’t enough to experience real change.  Three months, however, will be enough for you to start to see the beginning of a shift, and you’ll get a taste of what’s possible.

Don’t wait.  The world is a wonderful place, but it’s always in motion.  You have some catching up to do.

entrepreneurship

Investment Tip

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If you’re a business owner or manager you have probably at one time or another wished for the ability to clone yourself.  “If I could just have 10 more of me,” you think, “this business would grow like crazy.”

Once employees are trained (also an important task, but not very difficult) it’s critical to keep them motivated to run the business with the same level of attention and energy that you do.  A few well-trained employees who treat your business like their own are an army capable of building something great.

So how do you motivate an employee?  Money only works for so long, and fear quickly backfires.

Instead, invest in them.

Take the time to find out what makes them tick.  Ask them what they need to get better at their jobs and give it to them.  Support them, nurture them, help them become better at their jobs and at life.

If you take an interest in people and help them grow, not only will they be more valuable to your business, but they will adopt your vision as their own and work their asses off for you.

Better yet, investing in people makes you a better person and your little corner of the world a better place.

Sappy?  Yeah, a bit.

Truth?  Absofreakinlutely.