Quick notes to help you grow your business in less time with less effort. . . starting next week.
In this issue:
- Thoughts on Continuation Motivation
- Being Human
- Random Stuff
Thoughts on Continuation Motivation
- What's more powerful than inspiration? Continuation. Intuitively we've experienced this. Hitting rock bottom may motivate us to start something new, but the desire to keep the streak going after 100 days is the kind of motivation that gets results. Start a new streak next week.
- Diaries, the Daily Examen, gratitude journaling, calendar check marks, and daily trackers are ways to build up to continuation momentum. The simpler the better. Just one question asked every day, "Did I do my best to _____?" generates progress.
- Inspiration relies on internal mechanisms. Continuation, in contrast, relies on environmental ones. Spending time on our environment leads to longer periods of success than trying to pump ourselves up to take action.
- We know what we should do, but when we don't do it, getting some inspiration motivation sounds like the answer. Next week, consider this: Ask what's keeping you from building momentum. What keeps the activity from happening? That consideration, although a small shift, drives long term results. I've experienced it myself!
Being Human – Conjecture
"It is a matter of degree. We have three writers here on this panel. We all three think we have something we want to say that people are going to want to hear. That's a bit sociopathic in a sense all by itself. The villain is the one who doesn't know when to stop." – Jim Starlin, writer of the Thanos series
This week I'm shoving my 500th note into your inbox. As Jim Starlin might say: that's a bit sociopathic, thinking you have that much to say, and that people want to hear it. Yes. Mm-hmm. It is.
At note number 100, someone I used to work with contacted me to help with LinkedIn. I shared what I was trying to accomplish and asked for her advice. The first thing she said was change the name of your email: no one uses the word newsletter anymore. It's terrible, she said. The second thing she said was to move it from the inbox to LinkedIn. Probably good advice. I treated it like some of my clients when I offer direction: I ignored it.
The question she didn't ask, the one that may have changed her advice or helped her convince me to change, is Greg, what are you trying to do? She offered a prescription to a problem I didn't think I had. A result I wasn't after.
My week has been full of such conjecture examples. The last one had me dragging out an old visual from my Amalgamate booklets.
This person, a marketing expert, ripped one of my client's website's up and down. In my head it sounded just like my old acquaintance because he basically said: this is terrible, embarrassing. You need to change it. Now.
He's not wrong. That site could use a makeover. The design is a little dated. The content doesn't match what he was hearing from the enterprise sales rep he talked to. What he's missing, however, is the strategy behind the website. #4 in the Venn diagram. He saw bad design, questionable content, but it didn't occur to him to ask what the site is supposed to do. He didn't ask if it fit the sales rep's sales cycle.
The sales rep listened to him, nodded in agreement, and said, I agree. But that's a different part of the business. It's not the site I use, and directed him to a different website. That one has a modern look and feel, better content, and better fits the story the rep is telling. The marketing guy backed off. I pulled out the Venn diagram to explain to the client what was happening.
That said, the "shaming sell" must work. My friend has lots of clients, and the marketing expert seems to have a lot of clients too. I won't argue with success. I teach a less aggressive sales process that avoids conjecture. It's hard not to jump to conclusions, especially when you're an expert on something and what you see makes you want to slap your head, but resist. Be patient. Get curious. Take a pause and ask, in a nice way, why do you do it like this?
Then listen. Get their strategy. You'll end up with more opportunities. Many of them larger than usual.
And that's all I have to say about that.
Random Stuff
Five Hundred. Big number.
Not only is this the 500th week for my weekly note, it's how many peaches the perfect peach tree we would have given in 2025 if I hadn't thinned 150 of the little ones this spring. Banner harvest.
The peach tree didn't show up in our lives until week #86 or so. I didn't talk about it until week #234, going in depth in #242.
Year one gave us one super sickly looking fruit that could be mistaken for a peach. Last summer the tree produced a single, perfect peach, which (to my surprise) tasted exactly like a peach. For about 12 months I mused about our one perfect peach, publicly expressing my skepticism about next summer's (2020) harvest.
Then this happened:
How many? 77. And the squirrels/birds/bugs ran off with what had to be another 20. Easily 100 peaches in year three. As the old joke goes, I exclaimed, "L-I-B!" and went on with my day.
Each July I've been referencing the tally. We went from 1 to 3 to 100 to 25 to 500 to 50 to . . .zero. 2024 was a bust. Some local people suggested a late freeze was the culprit, happening right when most peach trees were blossoming.
This spring I pruned the tree myself. My lovely bride bit her lip, but didn't say anything while eyeing the big pile of branches under our girl. Gone were dead, diseased, and damaged branches. The center was open and airy, anything less than horizontal gone, and the tops were trimmed. No late freeze. Lots of blossoms.
The attention worked. I thinned the fruits and instead of 500 we watched over 300 fruits grow to tennis ball size before the critters attacked, telling us, "these are delicious." The harvest took two days. We've had fruit cobbler, a peach sorbet, peach jam, and peach slices are canned. We gave 20-30 away.
Only 150 to go.
It's a lot. Overwhelming. Just like the number of these notes I've stuffed into your inbox over the last nine-and-a-half-years.
Thanks for reading!
I appreciate the notes of encouragement. Almost every time I've thought, is anyone besides my lovely bride reading this? one of you sends a note, or says something to me in the wild. Thanks.
"Cheers to you," he says, holding up his bubbling peach bellini. "Cheers to you."
