Category: Mindset

Larry Wall, the originator of the Perl programming language, famously proclaimed that the three virtues of a great programmer where laziness, impatience, and hubris.

Lazy programmers write code to make things easier, impatience causes them to anticipate problems, and hubris makes them create programs of such quality that they’re difficult to criticize.

You can’t control fortune. Sometimes the market smiles upon you, sometimes everything breaks at the exact same time.

But a useful goal to pursue is to be able to be proud of your work.

For a developer, that might be an elegantly coded solution. For an entrepreneur, it’s a series of smart decisions. For a business manager, it’s a system that is squared away and a cohesive team to run it.

As an owner-operator, you’re part entrepreneur and part manager and it’s worth striving to be proud of your work in both dimensions.

Yesterday, I participated in a leadership meeting for my local Rotary Club. The club has faced several challenges post Covid and the meeting’s scope concerned how to navigate those challenges. One of the key issues identified was the cost of AV for the weekly lunches. It’s not clear why, but AV costs have escalated in the past year (a broad industry trend beyond our club).

One of the ideas to address this high fixed cost was to purchase AV equipment and have Rotary members run it each week. This would be fairly quick to implement and cost under $1000. The drawbacks were that we had to find a group within the club to learn and manage the equipment and we had to be able to store the equipment somewhere.

An alternative idea was to offer sponsorship to a local AV company, bring them on as members, and have them run the meeting at cost. The drawbacks to this were that the market dynamics make it so that AV companies probably don’t need marketing (pricing is up, their services are in demand) and it sets a precedent that some “volunteers” are paid.

The purpose of the meeting was to develop a plan to address issues, but it wasn’t clear which of these solutions we should pursue. This is a crossroads which is probably familiar to you. You have a clear goal, but not a route to achieve it, just a few ideas.

For example, you might want more leads so that you can grow your business. You have some ideas about how you might get more leads, but you don’t really know which one to execute on.

“Things seem to be getting harder. After ten years of experience things should be getting easier.”

This was a comment of an employee of mine when our team spent a weekly meeting discussing the problems in our business. I had been thinking the same thing just a few days prior.

As time passes, competition increases. Simultaneously, innovation erodes your competitive advantages.

The result of this is that your business is in a state of continual evolution. You’re always adapting to new challenges in the market and an ever-shifting environment.

How you manage this is through focus.

You concentrate focus to make it easier to get ahead in one important dimension or broaden it to create more options to navigate around dead ends.

If you look at the challenges you’ll face in the next three years, will narrower or wider focus serve you better?

I remember sitting in a tiny cold studio apartment ten years ago in Nagoya, Japan as the autumn made its transition to winter. I had cleared off a narrow space on the desk in front of my computer monitor and had a small blue Japanese notebook open in front of me. With a pen, I wrote the week down and then I set several objectives beneath it. This was the beginning of a deliberate and ongoing approach to work that I carry through to this day.

Since then, I’ve iterated, tweaked, and optimized how I approach achieving goals. Somewhere on this path, I worked with a business coach. When we ended the engagement, I asked him a few questions to improve my self-knowledge. One of them was, “What do I do well?” He told me that out of everyone he worked with, I was in the top 1% of being able to set and achieve objectives.

Self-knowledge is important when setting and working towards goals. The better you understand yourself, the smarter you are about framing objectives in a way that makes it more likely that they’ll be accomplished. In particular, I seek out how to apply my strengths to achieving goals. Leveraging strengths makes challenging objectives less challenging and enables you to raise the bar with what you seek to accomplish.

Last weekend, I joined a sailing flotilla traveling from Portland twenty nautical miles down the river and back on an overnight trip. Originally, I planned on taking a 22′ Catalina as the skipper with another sailor in my sailing club as crew. I’ve never sailed that far as the captain of a boat.

To prepare, I had to buy nautical charts of the route, a VHF radio, and create my first sail plan with three different options for different sail speeds. The sail plan lined out the hazards on the river and where we should be when. I checked the bridge heights for the bridges we would cross against the height of the boat’s mast and determined that I should be able to sail underneath them.

I was anxious about returning up river on day two. My experience sailing upriver, especially in the morning, has been that it can be so slow that you creep along at less than a nautical mile an hour. At that rate, we would have had to anchor an extra night and spend two days returning to the marina. Which was a terrible scenario because I had a deadline on Monday and still had work to complete to make it. I was also concerned about motoring on the river and, if there was no wind, how long our little outboard motor could push us before it sputtered out of gas.

Today, I’m going to draw out a history of my business as part of an accelerator program that I’m in with Entrepreneur’s Organization. I’ll sketch out a timeline of the business, with all the wonderful and terrible things that happened and when.

The first time I did an exercise like this was five years ago as part of 10,000 Small Businesses. What I noticed when I did it then was that it surfaced my, “story,” about the business.

We all tell stories about our lives. Why we are a certain way, why our circumstances are the way they are, and what it means.

When I drew out my original lifeline and surveyed my business events the first time, I noticed that I emphasized the trials and setbacks. My story wasn’t about what I achieved in the business, it was about surviving. It was about suffering losses and enduring.

I exercise on a near daily basis. The kettlebell is always challenging. If I’m feeling more energized, I offset it by working out a little harder. The weight increases every year or two, but the challenge remains constant.

Our experience tends to be uniform. Day-to-day, we overcome obstacles, apply lessons, figure things out. Eventually, we clock off and transition into evening rest.

This close to the medium, this far up the arc of development, it’s difficult to discern growth. Evolution advances in inches. Because of this, it’s important for the work to be redeeming. To feel the joy in fighting gravity to lift the weight over your head.

To see each repetition as its own opportunity.

Today, I received a few requests to un-subscribe from an email I sent yesterday as part of the email marketing we do. They were on an email list we had painfully and manually built, with no opt-ins. Sending the first email was hard. I envisioned hundreds of spam complaints and my inbox filled with angry responses. That didn’t happen, but every subsequent email has carried with it the same anxious concerns as the first one.

Many years ago, when I first started out, I was trying to drum up work as a freelancer. The closest thing to UpWork that existed was Craigslist and there was a limited supply of possible jobs, because it was just for one city. I decided to try and cold approach businesses to talk with them about their website and its role. I hoped that with this research oriented approach, that I would run into someone who needed help and would hire me. I spent the afternoon walking around a neighborhood in Portland going from one brick and mortar retail shop to the next.

My company is responding to a request for proposal (RFP) for a project that we don’t have a chance of getting. If you’re unfamiliar with the RFP process, the idea is for a client to gather a bunch of different supplier company proposals to complete a project and evaluate them methodically to choose the best one.

On the respondent side, our side, it’s a bad situation to be in, because the odds are against you. E.g. If there are ten respondents, you have a ten percent chance of winning the work.

Beyond this universal disadvantage, we’re at an experiential disadvantage. We don’t have a portfolio of work for the software integration that is a core component of the RFP. We do plenty custom programming and integration, but we haven’t worked with the specific system in the RFP. It’s likely that several competitors will have experience with it or with a close analog.

The RFP we’re responding to is being facilitated by a technology consultant. In my mind’s eye, I see them on a Zoom session sharing a spreadsheet with the client. The columns on the spreadsheet are labeled with a list of company names, ours being one of them. The rows are labeled with criteria for the project to score each company’s proposal with. Their intent is to make an apples-to-apples comparison of each company and methodically select the one best suited for the work (a great idea and also a fantasy.) In our column, they’re going to give us low scores for that key software integration.

To sum it up: it’s a failing proposition.