New Year’s Eve: Some Principles I’ll Be Following In 2018
Over the Christmas break, I saw blog friend Nabeel had posted a list of three business principles he’d adhere to in 2018. They were:
- Think About Your Profit First: If you go out of business, then you can’t help anyone
- Repulsion Marketing – Push away those who aren’t your customers
- Optimise For A Good Life – get everything in balance
These are great principles, and I’ll try to follow them. Let’s talk about them and why they’re important.
Profit First (Or, Think About Profit As A Value Measure)
On a surface level, this sounds evil-capitalist and possibly evil 80’s businessman trope from action movies the world over.
Yet Nabeel summed it up perfectly: If your business is helping people and you go out of business, you aren’t helping anyone.
Moreover, you should aim to help as many people in as many ways as possible. To do this… you’re creating products, solving problems, providing solutions. The metric by which you determine whether that’s all successful is the amount of money that goes through your accounts.
A lot of businesses get caught up in “brand awareness” or “social media” but those things are very hard to track – if that’s even possible.
Also, especially with social media, it’s easy to get followers. (I’m not so good at it… but whatever.)
Some guy I worked with has two million followers across social media. He posts cute animal pictures.
Now, that’s great and a worthy goal in and of itself, because your reach is certainly important.
However when you’re trying to help people, remember it’s easy for them to click the “Like” button and never think of you again.
If they’re paying, they’re literally invested.
Repulsion Marketing
I’m not a fan of the term repulsion marketing. I don’t even agree with the principle per se.
However, if you simply amend “repulsion marketing” which is the act of splitting your reach into people who are definitely interested and people who aren’t, and turn it into, “investment-based marketing” I’m all on board.
I extend this not only to business, but to life in general.
There are guys who leave comments, talk on Twitter, send emails and stuff. With the freelance and other more business-focused stuff, there are repeat clients, buyers and other heavily invested people.
I care more about those people than people who’ve never bought from me, never talked to me and yet still want stuff.
This is an entirely reasonable position to take, and you should probably all take it.
The crazy fact is that there are far too many people who want to make life tougher for themselves and everyone else. You gain nothing from them. So you shouldn’t organise your activities – business or otherwise – in order to help them.
Instead, focus and invest in the people that invest in you.
Work/Life Balance
For the third point in Nabeel’s list especially, I need to do these things. I’ve been suffering from sleep issues and so taking care of my health is probably the biggest goal for 2018.
That said…
A lot of people – especially young guys and girls – create extreme plans for fitness, weight loss, whatever. I’m also old enough to know people who’ve spent a couple of years doing the “get fat and out of shape – yo-yo diet to super fit – back to fat again” cycle.
If you aren’t a professional athlete or swimsuit model or whatever, I think it’s best to create long-lasting changes to your lifestyle in order to improve your health. That’s what I’ll be doing.
Also, it’s easy to treat the symptom and not the issue itself: I’m 90% sure my sleep issues will be fixed by stuff that I do while I’m awake.
Now let’s add another key issue I’ll be tackling.
Better Planning
I let my schedule slip away from me this year, and it shows.
I’ve got a ton of unfinished projects that I need to clear. Then I need to organise better so that I don’t fall into the same trap again.
For success, you need three things:
- Systems that you can plug-and-play
- Planning for each iteration of the system
- Actually doing the work
By system, I mean template or understanding of what you’re doing. Most people have this in whatever field they work in.
By planning, I mean applying what you want to do to the system. You want to start a website about learning the piano? Great… what do you have to do to get there?
And obviously by doing the work, I mean all the plans in the world aren’t useful if you’re just going to ignore them and sit and play Minecraft or whatever.
You need all three, and the better you do with the first two, the easier dong the actual work gets.
Final Thoughts
Alright, I’ll wrap this up.
That’s a goodbye to 2017. Let me know in the comments your thoughts on business resolutions and the like. Or you could just go out and celebrate New Year’s Eve in whatever way you deem fit.
Tomorrow is the start of a New Year and you should use that to your advantage. Start afresh, do things better… and keep reading my articles.
See you in 2018.