If I’ve got a lot of tasks on my plate in a work day, I can feel stressed.

The best way to make those tasks seem like no big deal is to go bigger.

When I move my focus from lower level tasks to higher level strategic decisions, suddenly the lower level stuff gets easy. I can just breeze through it with little trouble.

It’s like there’s a minimum level of stress and it will always be filled. It gets filled by whatever the biggest task is on my plate.

So if I have a small task, it will feel the full stress. If I have a big task, it will absorb that stress, freeing all smaller tasks beneath it.

Every time I experience this, I wonder how I forgot. The solution to activities that are stressing me out is to find bigger, higher level activities and decisions to focus on.

It’s amazing how much time and energy you can take to hammer out, say, an article when it’s the biggest thing on your plate.

It’s also amazing how quickly and easily you can hammer out the same article when you suddenly have something much bigger on your plate.

Hunt bigger prey.

Your stress level will probably be the same either way, so why not?

I’ve spent a lot of time swimming against the current. Pushing through how my mind and body feel in a given day in order to get stuff done.

I still do, but not as much as I used to. I’ve found I have better net outcomes if I ride the waves a bit more. Let a slow day be slow. Let’s a hyped day be hyped. Ride the ups to the max and accept the downs.

Momentum is everything. You can work to create it, but mostly you’ve gotta be sure to ride it when it comes. If you’re too tired out from paddling against the waves, you’ll have nothing left when a good one comes by to ride.

The Detroit Lions

Somehow make me excited

Will get fooled again

One of the benefits of writing is that it helps check the tendency to impose the present on the past.

What you’re going through right now can start to feel pervasive, eternal. Your memories slowly morph to the mold of your mood.

When you go back and read your writings from the past, it breaks the spell. You get a reminder of your previous headspace, and often discover fun things you forgot.

I’m surprised by the extent to which some of my older posts feel entirely new to me. They’re introducing me to a person I barely know anymore.

Most businesses have tons of bullshit splattered across their websites, emails, and social media accounts.

Some cynical people think that businesses have to bullshit; that bullshitting and sales/marketing are the same. This is completely untrue.

In fact, when companies are talking about their own product or area of expertise, they tend to bullshit the least.

The bullshit comes in primarily by doing one thing:

Pretending to care about things your customers pretend to care about.

If you make really good chocolate or really good task management software, tell me about who I will become and what problems I will solve and benefits I will gain from your product. Tell me about the stuff you and I actually care about – the core value proposition of your product.

Don’t throw in stuff about some cause that has nothing to do with the value prop.

“We also reduce carbon footprint!”

That’s when you lose your soul. You play the game of pretending to care about something irrelevant to your business, because your customers also pretend to care about it.

Customers will lie to you. They will tell you they care about things they don’t. You don’t have to indulge those pretenses to win.

You can win by calling their bluff. You can win by ignoring their bullshit and talking about what they really care about, not what they pretend to care about.

Good customers like to be told the truth about themselves.

People complain about cancel culture. But really, you can hold just about any opinion, say just about anything and get away with it.

Sure, you may get shadow-banned, or lose an account on social media. But you’ll still have supporters rally around you. And in your offline life, you’ll always have friends and those totally fine with whatever crazy, insane, offensive thing you believe or express.

It’s a very tolerant culture, no matter how much people want to make it appear otherwise on the surface.

You can be forgiven or at least tolerated for actions and ideas beyond the pale.

Except for one.

There is one single belief that will evoke disgust and ostracism from every single group on every single side of the political spectrum. No religion tolerates it. No ideology accepts it. No social circle will stomach it.

If you question the institution of dog ownership, you will be rejected by all.

More than a murderer, a racist, a child-hater, a baby-seal clubber, a terrorist, a religious extremist, a Satanist, or a corrupt thieving politician.

Any of those can win sympathy by posting dog photos.

The person who questions the posting of dog photos will be summarily exiled from society.

You have been warned.

How will you pick and purchase the next software tool for you and your team?

It won’t be from a cold email trying to get you to schedule a demo.

It won’t be from an ad on Twitter.

It will probably be from one of these:

• Word of mouth from someone you trust
• An agency or contractor you work with tells you you need it and sets it up for you
• A software you already use advertises it as a helpful integration to make their tool even better (e.g. “Get better data on your WordPress site with Mix Panel”)
• You go to a marketplace of some kind to find and compare solutions – either an integrations directory from an existing tool, or an independent site like G2

None of the above are “direct” sales or marketing plays for the company who makes the software. They are all different kinds of partnership plays.

Products that live in the ecosystems and communities you live in will find their way to you through nodes of trust. Tools that have a great network of agencies who service or resell them, a great network of developers who build on top of them, a great network of products they integrate with, and a great network of companies they go to market together with are the tools that will win.

This is the era of partner ecosystems.

This is what we talk about all day and all night at PartnerHacker.

How this shift affects startups is just beginning to dawn on people.

But it will be HUGE.

Come find out exactly how and why from the best minds across all departments in SaaS startups.

Come step into the Partner Led Future.

Try keeping a budget in your head.

Tracking and memorizing what money has gone out, how close you are to your limit for the month in various categories, remembering money committed to future expenses vs what’s available, etc.

The stress is real. The task is too taxing.

Now introduce the simplest tool imaginable. A table. Not the kind you eat on, but the kind you write or type in. Just a bunch of vertical and horizontal lines on a page that create little boxes.

Getting all those numbers out of your head and into written symbols in little cells is one of the most amazing powers humans possess. Animals don’t use spreadsheets.

Even though we’re still staring at symbols which only abstractly represent the actual quantities of money (itself a representation of past value creation), putting numbers into a table concretizes everything. It immediately relieves stress (I’m happy just writing about it) by allowing all the moving parts to be frozen at given slices in time and seen at the same time.

Our brains can do amazing things. But visualizing the state of all parts of a system of many moving parts at any given point in time isn’t one of them.

Getting information out of your brain and into a table makes you a kind of wizard. The levels of complexity you can command with ease are mind-boggling (especially if you’re an advanced spreadsheet user).

I think double-entry bookkeeping is one of humanities greatest achievements. And it’s all built on the simplest of tools. A surface with crisscrossing lines on it.

Beneficial activities aren’t always fun.

I tell myself and others, don’t do stuff you hate. But if you follow this, it won’t result in always having fun.

Doing things you value and even love does not feel fun much of the time. It’s hard work. It’s fulfilling. It’s worth it. But it can drag.

The way to overcome feeling like you want to run away from the struggle isn’t through introspection. It’s through rhythm.

If you create unbreakable habits and structures you abide by no matter what else happens, it builds a natural rhythm to your days and weeks. Flowing with a rhythm is easier than making one up at all times.

You can dance to the beat of your own drum, but also routinize that drum so it’s not different every moment. Otherwise you leave yourself too much room to think about what to do; too much opportunity to be tempted by activities that are fun in the moment but lead you towards a life you hate. This makes it easier to get down when your highest value activity isn’t exciting.

Rhythm is the best way to break the blues.

I didn’t care for them

Then began to understand

We need rituals

There’s a paradox in many parts of life where the more you care about an outcome, the less likely it is to occur.

The problem is that not caring isn’t really an option. If you try not to care as a way of getting the thing you want, you’re not caring because you care, and you’re back where you started.

The only way to escape the trap is to find something deeper and further up to care about and focus on that. Find the thing behind the thing – the higher principle, goal, or ideal from which the object of your care flows. Aim at that.

If you start to apply this, and keep aiming as high as you can, the concept, “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and all of these things shall be added unto you” starts to make sense.

Focus on the highest thing you can and you’ll get the lower order stuff that flows from it. Focus your care on the lower order stuff and you’ll only get frustrated.

Not an easy process, but worthwhile.

Lots of business consists of mundane tasks just to fund the basic functions of the operation.

Any kind of financial transaction is oddly complex, slow, and expensive. Paying a vendor, for example, seems like it should be a one-click experience, but it’s really a pain.

I hosted a panel discussion yesterday about the promise of micropayments using BitcoinSV or other blockchain solutions. One of the use-cases discussed was split payments.

On BSV, you can have payments split between hundreds or even thousands of recipients automatically, from a single input. You can even do this for payments in the pennies or fractions of pennies.

Say a user clicks “Listen” on a podcast and is instantly, automatically charged 50 cents from their wallet. The podcast host could get 20 cents, 10 cents to the guest, 5 to the editor, and the other five split between 100 early backers who invested in the pod buy buying a revenue share token.

Now multiply that by thousands of listeners.

Absent a solution like BSV with instant transaction splits, you’d need an entire accounting system, bookkeeper, bank, and payment processor. You’d have to take one lump sum from the user (a minimum of a few dollars with fiat currency), wait a month or so until enough user payments were made, waiting a few days for each to clear the bank. Collect W9s and bank info for every party you wanted to pay. Send monthly ACH payments to each. They’d wait several days for those to clear. And none of the payments could be lower than several dollars (hence the monthly batching).

Who is going to run and process all those individual payments? How much will that cost? Your cash situation will always be days or weeks behind actuals, and you’ll have many points of failure, administration as people change addresses and banks, etc.

Instantly split payments down to sub-cent levels removes every one of these headaches businesses have simply come to accept as normal and built entire departments to handle.

Removing the time-intensive cascade of payments and replacing it with the instant split is a big deal. Very few yet know it’s possible and happening right now among tinkerers and early adopters while the rest of crypto people chase meme stocks.

I asked my daughter her first impressions of New York City.

“Expensive, but poor.”

It’s a pretty concise way of communicating the strange combination of high demand and low quality of life.

Things are expensive because the delta between the demand and the supply of nearly everything in NYC is greater than in most places on earth. Though many of the costs are also the result of tyrannical and corrupt policies.

Quality of life is subjective, but it’s definitely low in all of the externally visible ways a kid from a small town can see. There is trash everywhere. Heavy traffic. It smells bad on nearly every street, even by fancy buildings.

They get the allure of visiting. But the perplexing question it leaves my kids with is, “Why do so many people choose to live here?”

That answer was easier in the past. There’s more opportunity here, or immigrant communities of similar background congregate here. Tons of people come for that, which makes it more valuable, which leads to more people coming. Like any network effect or result of collective action, it’s still hard to untangle how and why this sequence began where it did, but it makes sense.

Now it’s harder. My kids are used to remote work and virtual connection to friends and activities. They’re used to relatively cheap travel (our airfare to NYC was cheaper than the bicycle taxi ride we took).

They wonder: why do people still want to live here?

Of course they can’t see the social and professional settings of the citizens, or gauge how it makes them feel. And there still is a magic to this city – a testament to entrepreneurial ambition, immigrant ethic, man’s conquest over nature, and free enterprise.

But it kind of feels more like a museum to these things than a living embodiment.

You can feel the desire to leave beginning to swell where once only pride for living here existed.

Never underestimate the power of being someone fun and easy to work with.

It can open more opportunities than even a great product or ideal alignment on mission or strategy.

Conversely, if you’re not easy and enjoyable to work with, there’s a “ghost pipeline” of dead deals or opportunities that never come your way because people don’t look forward to working with you.

It’s not out of deliberate vendettas or grudges, but a subconscious tendency to avoid discomfort.

Oh, and it’s a misnomer that being easy to work with means being a pushover. Not having firm, clear, direct communication and boundaries actually makes you hard to work with too.

You can be a pain in the ass by being too passive just as easily as by being too pushy.

I’ll do just about any activity or task I have to. But I try my best to leverage my time for maximum return.

One way to do this is to try to double up.

Instead of just doing something, show someone else how to do it at the same time.

This dramatically increases the value per activity. Learning out loud is often efficient.