one question can change your trajectory
Edition #063
Hey friends, happy Sunday!
I hope you're having a good weekend.
There are a couple things to share with you before we get into the good stuff:
Why pretty websites are not that important: I see a lot of companies think their website needs to re-invent the wheel. But effective websites don't need to look all that special. In this thread I breakdown what makes a good site.
I have a YouTube video coming out this week on how I went from having no skills to becoming a web designer / webflow developer in 6 months. Be sure to subscribe to my channel and keep your eyes peeled 👀
Let's get into the Filter.
One Lesson
Where are you sabotaging yourself?
Early this week I read an article from Jakob Greenfeld and it has been a game-changer for me.
In it Jakob talks about how he has a friend who blatantly sabotages themselves by not doing simple things that would have a huge impact on their success.
He then turns his attention to himself, "where am I sabotaging myself?".
This turned into a 3 step process for identifying and eliminating self-sabotage.
1. Write down your answers to the question "where am I sabotaging myself?"
It's likely there'll be multiple painful examples, I know there was for me.
2. Separate problems from symptoms
When you skim your list most of these items will be symptoms of something deeper.
As Jakob says "when you’re struggling with headaches and low energy, you can of course fight the symptoms by taking ibuprofen and drinking lots of caffeine. But eventually these temporary fixes will stop working and all kinds of unwanted secondary consequences (e.g. stomach cramps) start popping up."
Try find a common theme between your list, what's the root cause of these issues?
If there's no theme amongst them, you need to dig a little deeper.
Jakob did some digging to find the most common root causes of self sabotage and came across some common themes:
- fear of success
- fear of failure
- fear of rejection
- fear of loneliness
Which all seem valid but likely come from something a little deeper "The most likely root cause seems to be a lack of self-esteem/self-love".
Once you identify what that root cause is, it's time to tackle it.
3. Tackle the root cause
Identifying the issue will go a long way to helping solve the problem.
The act of writing about the issue will crystallize your ideas and let you objectively view the situation.
From here Jakob explores some potential solutions to his problem that will likely be useful to you:
Journaling - Consistently asking the question "how am I sabotaging myself" will allow you to actively identify situations where you might be holding yourself back.
Meditation - Will keep you in-tune with your mind and let you objectively review your actions.
Therapy - Might be useful to work through deeper rooted things that are holding you back.
Affirmations - May help build self-confidence and at worst will mean you've wasted a little bit of time.
Following this exercise myself has helped me step out of my own way and better understand where I'm holding myself back.
If you're feeling a little stuck I recommend reading the full post and working through this exercise yourself.
So what are you doing to stand in your own way of success?
Two Ideas
I.
No matter how driven you are, you can't compete with someone who is having fun.
Optimise for fun.
II.
Often what people refer to as "Luck" is the result of engineered serendipity.
It's the end result of thousands of small actions that increase your surface area to positive outcomes.
Three Favourite Finds
Unlearning: Beginners keep things simple. They make simple assumptions and come up with simple solutions.
But when you learn more you start to add in complexity. You discard the simple solutions in favour of your new found knowledge.
Finally when you start to become an expert in a topic, you shift back to simple solutions because you can see through the complexity.
This post from Fabrizio Rinaldi shares some interesting ideas on how experts unlearn complexity and distill knowledge with simplicity.
SaaS: Service as a Subscription??? Recurring monthly revenue is the holy grail. Everyone talks about their MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) but not in the service space.
Agencies and freelancers typically face the issue of large sums of money for 1 off projects but Brett at DesignJoy has been running on a recurring monthly revenue model for years.
He's currently doing over $100k MRR as a solo freelancer (which is insane 🤯). His model of offering 'unlimited' design (capped by only working on 1 task at a time for each client) is one that could have huge potential in other spaces.
For example let's say you're a startup with your site on Webflow, your marketing team are constantly needing to make adjustments, build landing pages and improve SEO. You could hire in-house but this would likely cost at least $6k p/m once you factor in all the cost of hiring full time employees.
Or you could hire an expert freelancer / agency to do it for $2k p/m. The freelancer only needs 5 clients to make $120k per year.
There are certainly downsides to this model, how do you service so many clients? What about when you want to take a break? What about demanding clients? But every business has challenges.
Do The Real Thing: Success comes down to one simple distinction, do the real thing, not the fake thing.
We distract ourselves with fake work because fake work is easy. Doing the real thing is difficult. When planning your week keep it simple. Focus on spending as much time as possible doing 'real' things.
End note
If you enjoyed this edition of the Sunday Filter then I’d love it if you could share it with a few friends. You can send them over here to sign up or share it on Twitter.
Have a great week!
- Stephen