Day to Day

Curing the Lie of the Big Win (and the Big Fail)

We’re surrounded by the stories — the mytharc, if you will — of The Big Win. (Also the Big Fail.) “Twitter succeeded because…” “I failed because…”

I’m here to tell you: That’s largely a load of crap.

If you want to know why — and if you want to know how I succeed at so many things people said would never work — you want to watch this video. It’s short (12 minutes) and it’s awesome.

It’s nominally about habits, but it’s really about the stories we tell ourselves, and why they make us fail.

(PS — this is a lesson straight outta the new 30×500. Why am I giving it away for free? Because everybody needs it.)

Did you recognize yourself in this video? Did you spot stories that you hear every day?

If so, you have three things to do right now:

Rush out and buy The Power of Habit. And actually read it. And take notes. Seriously. This book is worth every single penny and every single moment you will spend devouring it.
Drop your email in the box below, because I will be sending out the next video (and other awesome free content) and you really don’t want to miss out.
Try the assignment: dechunk 3 of your every day routines. Then leave your instructions for a day or two, and read them. Try to follow them. See all the stuff you left out. Oops! This is the stuff that habits growth is made out of.

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Biz Book Friday / Day to Day — 2 Comments
29
Mar 12

Building Habits: Respect Your Cues, & Listen to Your Organs When They Talk

Here’s that adorable habit loop diagram from The Power of Habit:

Last week, we established that I absolutely suck at habits.

But why?

Well, last week I had a theory: I suck at structure. This is undeniably true. I thought the next logical part of the explanation was:

And cues are what trigger routines. They’re the bottom part of the habit pyramid. And since I don’t have structure, I don’t have cues.

That makes sense, doesn’t it? I don’t brush my teeth because brushing my teeth is a routine waiting on a “Amy Is Going Out” cue, and I don’t always leave my apartment. No “Going Out” cue, no toothbrushing routine. Firm. Logical.

But over the past week, experience has shown me that, oh yes, I have cues. Lots and lots of cues.

And I’m absolutely fantastic at ignoring them.

My mother used to say that a bomb could go off while I was reading and I’d be none the wiser. Well, that’s not as true as it once was. But I do seem to have a remarkable and perverse ability to ignore cues… even the most biologically imperative ones.

Viz: I can’t tell you how many times, over the past week, I’ve caught myself resisting the cue to pee.

Even the Toilet Pictogram People are shocked.

Here I am, a grown woman, in an office full of friends, or in her own apartment — alone, even! my husband’s not even here! — resisting the urge to go to the clean, private, well-stocked, well-lit bathroom.

What the hell? Why!?

Because I’m doing something, natch.

Aside from the overall embarrassment of catching myself doing something so silly, this casts a shadow on my I Just Suck At Structure theory. A shadow in a Dick Tracy hat, who taps the ash off its cigar before asking me…

How can I expect to learn how to use cues to build a demanding new habit like daily exercise if I can’t even be trusted to empty my bladder when it asks me nicely?

Big fat (embarrassing) duh on that one, my friends. (Also, note to self: Shadows are dicks.)

I owe at least 90% [1] of this insight to my friend Colin, who riffed brilliantly on my rambling, incoherent post:

[Example]: if I walk into my room and cringe at the clothes on the floor, I should put some of them away. I don’t have to go on a cleaning spree, but I can at least hang one jacket up.

As for new habits I’m trying to create — I now start thinking about the cues I’ve set up for myself. An excellent example is invoicing. Normally I invoice twice a month, however my current client wants invoices only once a month and on a slightly different date than when I usually send them out. I do have a calendar event set up to remind me to send out invoices, but it’s not on the right dates.

Instead of training myself to take care of invoices promptly, I’m training myself to ignore my invoicing calendar event! That’s no good.

Indeed, Colin, training yourself to ignore cues — like calendar alarms — isn’t merely no good, it’s terrible. It’s a slippery slope that’ll end in tears. Just ask my bladder.

Colin even has a catchy name for his smart new rule, which I stole for this post title: Respect Your Cues. He says, “What that means is that if I encounter a cue — either a new one I’ve consciously chosen, or a natural one that bubbles up from my unconscious — I absolutely should not ignore it.” Hence the “at least hang one jacket up.”

This makes so much sense it hurts. Or maybe it’s not the sense of Colin’s statement that I’m feeling.

Pardon me while I go… somewhere.

[1] The remaining 10% goes partly to my mindfulness in noticing, my absurd willingness to admit it in public, and of course, a small hat tip to the hilarious fact that I am, in fact, a girl who refuses to go pee. Which would be tragic if it wasn’t so funny. I’d like to thank the Academy…

Biz Book Friday / Day to Day — 13 Comments
23
Mar 12

I Can’t Remember to Brush My Teeth… But I Can Run a Business

If you know me, you know I don’t really… do routine. Regular bed time? Ha! Regular wake time? Ha! Making my bed? Going to my office every day? Paying bills which aren’t automated? Regular grocery shopping day? Planning a week in advance? Umm… committing to a weekly blog post on a certain day, say Friday?

Ha ha ha ha. Not my forte.

Sadly, my teeth are just one part-time casualty in a long line of irresponsibilities.

Don’t worry, though. You don’t have to wear a gas mask when we hang out. You’ll never meet me with unbrushed teeth (or hair).

And now, thanks to The Power of Habit, I know why:

A habit isn’t a thing, it’s three things: a cue, a routine, and a reward. And it’s not three things, it’s a loop.

The routine is the practiced set of actions you take — the thing we all call “a habit.” The cue is the trigger on the gun of routine, the thing that says chop chop, brush brush. The reward is the nice thing you get at the end. Behaviorism aside, the human brain really does wire itself up to react to rewards.

Put these 3 things together, in a loop, and run it again & again, and you have the makings of an automatic habit.

Vis a vis toothbrushes, leaving my apartment is the cue. The reward is the opportunity to engage in polite society. The routine is the actual brushing itself, of which, I can assure you, I am capable.

So, aha, there’s the problem: When I stay at home, there’s no cue. “Brush Your teeth” is a subroutine in the “Amy Is Going Out” routine, which has the cue of “Hey, It’s Time To Go.”

If I don’t leave the house, chances are good that I’ll forget to perform the routine. Because I’m not really thinking about it, I’m waiting for the cue to trigger the loop.

Sadly, this problem isn’t limited to my (not so) fresh breath.

The “Amy Is Going Out” habit loop is based on one of a very few cues I have that actually work at all. There are other routines I use very effectively to get creative work done (funnel process, review process, mind mapping, brainstorming, outlining, planning, weighing, analyzing, researching, composting). They help me kick ass.

The thing is, they aren’t hooked explicitly to any cues. I only remember to use them some of the time:

Now, it’s terribly twee to complain about how disorganized and overwhelmed I am, yadda yadda. Obviously I manage to function pretty well. My business is profitable (and growing). I’ve got a great life. My customers are happy.

But, I can’t help but think: How much more profitable could my business be? How much better could my life be? How much happier could I make my customers? If only I could get my shit together a higher percentage of the time.

So, why do I suck so bad at habits? Am I just incorrigibly mercurial? Or lazy?

I’ve wondered this for a while. And til now, this is where my introspection ended.

I knew that I could work predictably inside a structure (“Amy Is Going Out”), but I’ve also always sucked at creating that structure in the first place. Impasse.

This is the most powerful thing I’ve learned from The Power of Habit so far (half-way through):

One paper published by a Duke University researcher in 2006 found that more than 40 percent of the actions people performed each day weren’t actual decisions, but habits.

More than 40% of what we do isn’t due to conscious thought, but habitual. Aka habits:

This is how new habits are created: by putting together a cue, a routine, and a reward, and then cultivating a craving that drives the loop.

And: habits are a skill. (Duh, this part’s obvious.) Not only is deploying a habit a skill, but research has shown that creating habits is a skill, too. And research shows how to go about learning the skill of creating habits. (This part is new!)

Now I’ve got research at my disposal to teach me how I can consciously and systematically set out to whip myself into something more resembling a Human Who Has It Together. How you can, too.

And there’s no good reason it can’t work:

Habits aren’t destiny… habits can be ignored, changed, or replaced.

But the reason the discovery of the habit loop is so important is that it reveals a basic truth: When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit— unless you find new routines— the pattern will unfold automatically.

So here’s to making what we want unfold automatically, instead of what we don’t want.

Day to Day / Getting Started / Hard Work — 7 Comments
1
Mar 12

Letter to My Struggling Baby Business – Feb, 2009

The date: February 2009. Two months after the (unglorified) launch of Freckle Time Tracking, one month after the surprisingly not bad launch of the JavaScript Performance Rocks! beta. What with all that, the consulting, and the traveling, and the drama with our flakey partners in Freckle, and being newly married and in a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language, and and and… I was having a really, really tough time. So I sat right down and wrote myself a letter. And signed it “with love” the way you do. Wait, that’s a song. Anywayz…

Dear new business,

I know you feel like you’re having a rough time these past couple months. Things seem really swell, and you’re up up up, until suddenly a needle appears, and bursts your little bubble, and crash! Back down to earth again.

Or lower.

Because after the impact—smack!—you realize that while things were feeling so wonderfully amazing and fresh and new, that was probably because you were selectively forgetting about less happy-fun things that “have” to get done.

It’s like hitting the ground all over again. Smack! Smack! Ow!

I know that when this happens—and it’s happened several times—you feel guilty as well as deluded. You end up wondering if the happy stuff can only ever come out of denial.

New Business, I want to tell you something important: Change can be really hard.

I know you’ve experienced a couple of overnight life-changing epiphanies, which seemed effortless at the time, and were just totally awesome.

But that’s not usually how things work. And those lucky, beautiful, awesome breaks have made it unfairly difficult for all the ordinary, long-term slugging-it-out change that has to happen most of the time.

With ordinary, long-term, slugging-it-out change, sometimes there are “casualties.” Sometimes things don’t get done. Sometimes people don’t like you any more. That sucks, but not changing sucks more.

And I think that sometimes you forget that those beautiful overnight changes came from years of not changing at all. They were unacted-upon but desperately needed change, bottled up for years. The change champagne cork just finally exploded, and thank god for that.

Speaking of champagne, don’t forget to celebrate the victories you’ve already won… just because you find yourself looking around and what you see is a lot of stuff you’ve still got to do before you’re really free.

Think about it… you’re already ahead of schedule. You wanted to be in place by January 2010, and yet you’ll be in nearly full force by April 2009, instead.

That’s pretty awesome! And yet you are all angsty and morose that it’s not now, dammit.

I don’t want to say you SHOULD still be high on that, but it’s worth thinking about when you’re feeling in the dumps because not everything is done and perfect yet, and leftover bits of Old Business are still hanging about in in the corners, glaring at you and making you feel tremendously guilty.

I know you feel stressed out, and harried, and overcommitted, and totally overwhelmed right now and pissed at everyone.

But remember: you’re still in transition. You’re fucking up. You’re also kicking ass. At the same time. That is possible, and yes it’s awkward, but that’s where the value lies, doesn’t it? If it were too easy, that’d make you mopey too. I know it would—I know you.

Butterflies look great a couple days after they come out of their cocoon. They really look neat inside the cocoon, too. It’s the bit in the middle, with the squeezing, and the wrenching, and tearing, and wrinkled wings, all damp with cocoon goo, that we don’t tend to think about. It’s amazing and miraculous, but also tough and uncomfortable and really quite gross.

But you can’t have the before & after without the in-between.

As long as you can survive my redonkulous butterfly metaphors, you’ll be all right.

Love and admiration,

February 25, 2009

Horrifying butterfly metaphors aside, I was right. Now, it’s 3 years and one week later. I quit consulting in January 2010 as planned, even though our product income wasn’t quite there yet. It was hard, again. I should have written another letter. But I made it through, and our business is going awesome. All our dreams are coming true.

I am so thankful to the Me of Yesteryear who, for once in my life, broke out of her cycle of short-termism, who for once didn’t give up, and stuck it out through all the hard shit. It was worth it.

What would you put in YOUR letter to yourself?

Day to Day / Lifestyle / Relaxation / Travel — 24 Comments
5
Feb 12

How to (REALLY) Travel the World, Run Your Biz & Not Go Broke or Crazy

If you follow me on Twitter, then you know where I am right now: New Zealand. For a month.

(Yep, that’s me, obnoxiously tweeting pictures of the creamy white sand and dreamy turquoise ocean. And the regrettable novelty taxidermy.)

It all sounds pretty exotic (and it is). But for me & my partner in crime (and biz), it’s a kind of normal. We travel a lot.

There have been years where we literally spent half the year abroad. At this point, it’s old hat.

This isn’t even our longest trip — no, that honor goes to a 2.5-month around-the-world “workcation,” a genuine circumnavigation of the globe including one 36-hour travel day with two back-to-back 12-hour flights, over 12 domestic and 4 international flights, 6 weeks of road tripping, 5 major cities on 2 continents, 2 conferences we worked (1 training/presenting, 1 running an exhibit), 1 major new project from scratch, and 3 seasons.

(Ahh, the trip that nearly killed us!)

So I think it’s safe to say that I’ve learned just about everything there is to know about traveling while running a business. The hard way, of course.

And it’s not what you think.

The Heartbreaking Myth of the Workcation

I do so love a good portmanteau and “workcation” is a great one. It means a “working vacation” — also known as the juicy dream of enjoying the beach while working on it, Piña Colada in hand, complete with umbrella.

Also known as “rarer than unicorn tears and twice as hard to come by.”

The problem is this: working requires great attention. So does being present on that beautiful beach.

If you’re any good at what you do — and you are, right?? — then you know what it’s like to really get shit done. You sit at the computer, and it sucks you in. You may nominally exist in your physical body, but your brain and your senses are somewhere else… in The Land Inside the Screen. Workland.

And when you’re in Workland, you can’t truly be in Beachland. You can work in Workland and commute to Beachland at night, but you can’t bi-locate. Physical impossibility and all that. Sorry.

The good news, such as it is? Working on the beach actually sucks. Even before you consider the sand-in-the-keys-underwear-and-nostrils factor.

The net result is this:

when you’re focused on working, you might as well be in a room with no view, and
when you’re not working (and you are enjoying that beach), there’s that little nagging thought in the back of your head that you should be working

It’s actually a subtle form of torture. Whatever joy you might have extracted from working on the beach was always, and would ever be, a fantasy.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Try it yourself, and you’ll find that that:

You’ll return from your trip feeling like you never were really, 100% there.

Or you’ll have achieved just barely a fraction of what you planned to, with all the guilt & self-recrimination that comes with.

Take your pick. Which will it be?

Take the Green Pill: the Hidden Option C

Or choose the hidden option C: dump Fantasy by the roadside for being incorporeal and utterly unreasonable… and beg Reality to come home and bitchslap you with her wisdom, the harsh but steady mistress she is.

Without further ado, here’s how to best long-term travel instead of allowing it to best you:

Travel Like a Snail: Stay Put for Several Days

Stay in a location least 3 days if you want to get solid work done. Yes, really. Three days minimum.

Constant moving around is a huge drain on your mental & physical resources. It’s also the dread enemy of routine (and routine is necessary for flow).

“But I’ve gone on vacation and slept in a different bed every night and that didn’t tire me out!” I hear you cry.

Yes, of course you did. So had I. Long, around-the-world trips aren’t just short trips plus extra days… they’re different. Long-term travel has a lot of emergent properties, and the exhaustion of constant motion is one of them.

Travel for 3+ weeks while trying to get shit done, and you’ll soon find out for yourself. You need that time to catch your breath, adjust, to create what little routine and ritual you can.

So give up whirlwind tours and adopt a more stately pace.

When you stay in a place for a while, you also get the benefit of enjoying it when you’re not trying to work. You don’t end up feeling like you missed out because you had to do some email. (And you get to develop a deeper understanding & enjoyment of it, which is the stuff long-term travel is made of.)

Segregate Work / Fun Times with an Iron Fist

You probably love your work. That’s why you started your own business in the first place, right? Me, I’m a workaholic. There’s little I’d rather think about or do. I love my work.

But even so, I love a good vacation. And so do you.

There’s a very special frisson you get from saying “fuck it, I’m on the beach!” Deactivate global roaming, forget what’s on Twitter, leave your inbox to handle itself for a few days, and get gone. “Fuck it!” is the alluring bumpersticker of freedom.

This is the irresistible urge you have to conquer if you want to have a successful work-around-the-world experience.

It’s great to let loose and take a break for a few days. But if you plan to work, and you say “fuck it, I’m on the beach!” — where will your business be?

Then again, if you never get to say “fuck it, I’m on the beach!” — what’s the point of going on a trip in the first place?

The trick is to give yourself both experiences:

Plan to work every 2nd, 3rd or 4th day. Then work all day. You know as well as I that when you work for just an hour or two, you can’t even escape the gravitational pull of Shit That Piled Up, much less Do New Stuff.

The solution is to work all day. But not every day. Otherwise, where’s the fun?

On the days you don’t plan to work… don’t work. Don’t check your email just for 5 minutes. Don’t do any “fun” internet stuff that resembles or leads to work coughTwittercough.

You may think there are alternatives. I ask you: are you, in fact, superhuman? No? Then there really aren’t alternatives.

Here are two strategies which I’ve tried, and which I’ve seen others try. They always fail:

Myth: I’ll just do a little work in the morning and then we’ll enjoy the rest of the day!

Reality: It’s 1pm and you’re still doing email.

Myth: I ought to get that done… but it’s sunny out and the beach / markets / mountains / 4×4 adventure is calling. I’ll do it when we get back. Before/after dinner.

Reality: You have fun. You end up going to a bar or restaurant with your friends/loved ones/new acquaintances you picked up on the side of the road. You tell yourself, “I WILL get that work done later.” But when you get back to your hotel/motel/yurt, you don’t want your yay-I’m-on-vacation feelings to end. You want to bask. Or you’re exhausted in that very special, luxuriating-in-a-day’s-adventure way. Either way, shit does not get done. Then you feel guilty. Which sucks the enjoyment out of, well, your enjoyment.

You could, of course, maintain regular working hours and only “vacate” in the evenings. Like you had a job. But where’s the fun in that? You’re the boss. With great power comes a great ability to say “fuck it!” (Sorry, Peter Parker.)

Much better to keep your work/fun totally separate — since they can’t really be together, anyway — and to devote a full day to each, to wring the last drop of enjoyment, or last drop of focus, out of each and every day.

Hoard Executive Function As If Your Life Depended On It

Because it does.

Every little decision you make drains your Executive Function, that part of your brain that helps you make good choices and exert self-control. Research shows that simply walking down a city street with lots of visual stimuli cuts your self-control to pieces.

Executive Function is the thing you rely on to help you crack open your laptop when you’d much rather be dirt-biking or learning all the different ways to say “I’m drunk” in the local language. And the thing that prevents you from telling an irritating customer “fuck it, I’m on the beach!”

In short: You need spare Executive Function. Badly. And traveling is the equivalent of pouring your Executive Function out onto the street and lighting it on fire.

How many decisions to you have to make when you travel? Let’s see…

Where do we go next? When do we have to leave to get there in time? Should we trust the GPS or break out the map? Should we take the cheaper room in the nicer motel, or the less fancy more expensive room with the jacuzzi tub? Should we take the scenic route or the direct route? Which suitcase should I put this in? Where should we eat for dinner? Should I have the burger with the egg, beet root, onion rings, hash brown, and pickles, or without the pickles? Is this taxi safe? How much do I tip? What do I enter as the code in the motel room safe? Should we buy tickets just for the Liliputbahn, or the combo ticket with the beer garden museum? How many Mai Tais can I drink before walking back becomes a hazard? And where exactly are we staying, again?

Shit, just writing that paragraph made me unable to resist the urge to eat a donut. Luckily there aren’t any in arm’s reach.

Since Executive Function is so critical, and long-term travel seems designed to piss it away, you have to take action.

Save Executive Function by streamlining, simplifying, and deciding in advance.

Eat & live simply. Give up the idea that you have to eat at a different restaurant every time you go out. Rent rooms with kitchenettes, shop at the grocery store, and cook and eat at “home.” (This also saves gobs of money and is infinitely healthier.) (Plus you get to experience things ‘like a local’ which is always fun and illuminating.)

Stay in the one place for a while. (Gee, that sounds familiar.)

Book attractions and places to stay in advance — or if you prefer to live fast & loose, settle on a max 2 or 3 possibilities in most places you will visit. Front-load your Rough Guide-reading, Tripadvisor-surfing and motel-benefit-weighing to save yourself hours of thinking and sheer buckets of Executive Function on the day of.

Drive a car instead of taking trains and buses everywhere. Again with the saving buckets of Executive Function by avoiding all the repacking, shuffling, stations, tickets, time tables.

Develop a system for rolling in & out: Always pack things in the same bag, in the same place. Have separate zipper or velcro bags for things like “all electronics cables” and “all bathroom products” and “all receipts/paperwork”. Have a checklist for things you can’t stand to lose. For things you are likely to lose because they blend into the room (e.g. a pillow), choose a bright color or otherwise make them stand out. When you travel with a companion, divvy up responsibilities so there’s no “Did I pack it? I thought YOU packed it” fiascos.

Plan your next bit of work in advance, so you’re always ready to dive in. This will save you “set up and break down” time when it comes to starting work, and will help you make the most of surprise grey, nasty days when you don’t particularly want to be outside.

Pay out the nose, if necessary, for a prepaid wireless cellular modem instead of always hunting around for a cafe, restaurant, or motel with decent wifi. In some countries, this time-consuming hunt can waste days of your trip in total.

Always arrive in the city the day before your flight/train/bus/llama caravan. Even if your departure is late in the evening. This will guard you against so much last-minute panic.

Finally: Enjoy the Hell Out of Your Trip

Yes, that’s a step!

I know that right about now, the romantic in you is screaming, “But… where’s the magic?!” A lot of these fixes, habits, and tips are, well… not romantic or magical at all.

Staying in one place? Working all day? Eating at home? Cutting your decisions? Driving a car?

Are these the ingredients for a rip roaring good time??

In a very real way, yes.

I’m not giving you this advice because I’m a boring old dried up travel-hater who loves to stab dreams in the eye til they bleed rainbows and glitter. (I love travel! And hate being bled on by dreams. Glitter is so hard to wash out.)

No, I’m simply telling you what I wish someone had told me before I thoroughly botched several very expensive, could-have-been-lifechangingly-awesome trips. And futzed up my business while doing so.

The ideal case is to not work at all on a long trip. That’s more achievable than you might think, but not always possible. (And that’s another essay in the works.)

But if you have to work, my advice will help you get good work done and enjoy your trip.

Follow my prescription, and you won’t find yourself home once more, saddled with that pitiful feeling that “you were never really there.” Nor will your business fall apart while you’re gone because you can’t seem to get anything done.

And… that’s it for now. Travel well!

Want more unicorn-free advice about traveling’ around the world while running your biz? Get my future posts by email (for free!) and follow me on Twitter, cuz I’ve got more posts planned: how to prepare your biz for your trip, what to buy, sign up for, or cancel before you go, and how to deal with the whole “money” situation (traveling around the world gets expensive!). Seeya on the flip side!