Hey First name / friend,
It sure is December, isn't it?
I was still processing how to sort out my hamster-wheel mash-up of the two when my (fully adult) “little” brother came to visit for a few days.
And so did a few new options:
STOP: I wasn't in motion or in action, work-wise, for large chunks of time. (Although—full disclosure—when he and my daughters turned on the Wii, I grabbed my laptop and dug into my work like it was a huge bowl of coffee-oreo ice cream.) Still: my mind didn't think about my business for stretches of actual time. That's big, people.
SEEK COUNSEL: One morning during his visit, Scott and I got a chance to “talk shop.” (He's been a graphic designer—in-house and freelance—for 15 years.) He offered a ton of laid-back, stellar advice, like this gem: “Do NOT evaluate your progress and tweak your approach every day. Or every week. Or every month. It's like the stock market: make the best plan you can, commit to it, and put the blinders on. Set a date for when you will evaluate and make changes. Once you set that date, if today is not that day, STICK TO THE PLAN. Give it a chance to work.” He also said I was doing really well. Gold.
SIMPLIFY: Stopping brought fresh air and open space to my psyche. Scott's counsel gave me tools, perspective, and confidence. And good stuff started flowing in. Some really helpful resources, matching some of the exact things I'd been trying to sort out the past few weeks, showed up in Facebook ads. A task that had been taking forever suddenly gelled and was…done! And, it occurred to me that I might be unnecessarily complicating pretty much everything. (Surprise.) So I've started trying to ask myself this question: “How could I make this (whatever I'm doing, work-wise) even 1% simpler??"
So, that's where I am today. Stopping turned out to be really helpful. Talking with Scott put tools in my hands and gave me a shot in the arm. And keeping simplicity in mind (even 1% of it) has helped me make a few small improvements to my business-related systems. (Bonus: I had my lightbulb simplicity moment before my buddy James started talking about it in his book…#winning)
How about you? How goes the action/motion balance? Have you discovered any other helpful options? Had any good conversations lately? When was the last time you spent any number of hours not thinking about that thing you always think about?
Here's the task that gelled this week—a totally new framing of who this email list is for:
