Tag “approach”

Prefer not to know ★

There’s an endless flood of information. It keeps going 24/7.

And not just information. Knowledge, too. Courses, webinars, conferences, new technologies. We’re forced to be aware of all those things, care about them, have an opinion on them. But should we?

We learn so many things through life that we’ll never put to use. Daily we receive more information than average person from 19th century probably received in their life span. For example, in 2011, Americans took in five times as much information every day as they did in 1986. That’s insane!

We’re overdosed with knowledge. The worst thing is that we’ve decided that we’re obliged to know everything and be always aware. We are voluntarily agreed to have our attentional filters overwhelmed on a regular basis. We should leave some mental space for just being, instead. As we used to do 30−50 years ago.

I remember that even in my childhood that took place in 1990s we didn’t have this problem. On the contrary, people had to make a lot of effort to gain some knowledge, to get some information. To read up for exams you have to go to the library or ask a friend who had a PC to visit him so you could search something on the internet. You had to be creative to get information.

So much we didn’t know back then! And we couldn’t care less that we don’t. We didn’t consider whether it was a lack of knowledge or we were uneducated. We simply didn’t give a fuck about that. We were much more easy-going and didn’t put a pressure on us for not knowing. Things are different today, bad different.

So when I hear people say:

— Oh, there this ChatGPT thing. I have to learn more about it…

— Oh, there’s this Barbie thing, I should create a pic of me as a Barbie doll

… Oh. there’s a new program language I should learn to code in…

I think to myself, “Jeez, I am lucky not to know!” Because no matter how hard I try to filter the incoming flow of information, people still will bring it up and post it anyway. There’s literally nowhere to hide from it these days.

I prefer not to overload my brain with that information. I prefer not to know. 'Cause let’s be honest, 99% of news and information on our feeds is a complete bogus. It’s useless. So why bother? Why waste our energy, motivation, and attention on it? Why please interests of those who will not care back?

You don’t need to know everything that is out there. It’s hard to be good at one thing, and yet people try to be good at plenty. Instead of stuffing your brain with another new technique do what you already do well and perfect your routine. And choose wisely and thoroughly what you want to see on your feed, what you’d like to draw your attention on.

Know your drill. Keep your focus clear and steady. Prefer not to know.

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The less, the better

For six years of writing I used to believe the more platforms I post on, the better. It wasn’t a very effective strategy.

Yesterday I deleted my Twitter and Instagram accounts, and soon my Telegram channel will be closed. Starting from today I will keep writing only on these three platforms: this website, Substack, and Mastodon.

The less platforms I have to maintain, the more attention I can pay to the writing and not the distribution.

If you’ve been feeling overwhelmed lately, seek an opportunity to reduce the amount of projects, errands, and tasks you’re dealing with. Keep three the most important to-dos you have on your list, start with them and drop everything else. You’ll get back to it later after you’ve handled the essentials.

If three is too much for you right now, cut it to one to-do. The less, the better:

  • Doing three projects? Take a break in two, and finish the one with higher priority.
  • Reading three books, none is finished? Pick one, finish it, then move to the next one.
  • Repair works are stuck and it’s all a mess? Stop everything and choose one, for example, fix a kitchen door that’s been out of order for weeks.

When life pushes hard, don’t try to bear it all on your shoulders. Reduce the number of options, select the most important thing to focus on, and after it’s done move to the next most important thing on your list.

One-thing-at-a-time strategy always works, plenty-things-at-a-time strategy—not so often. The less, the better.

To stay in touch: follow me on Mastodon, subscribe to my newsletter on Substack, or grab the RSS feed. See you there!

No Comments 2023

Marketing is BS ★

Marketing is everywhere. Someone’s ad is targeted at you when you’re taking shit. Someone is trying to sell you their stuff right now while you’re reading this post. Brands have gone too far playing this marketing game. It stopped being funny. It has become more of a burden.

People are tired of marketing. Badly. Especially of the one that teaches how to live your life, treat your kids, or become a better version of yourself. They say, “You're imperfect. Do this and you’ll become that. Buy this thing and it’ll empower you to do those cool things.” All kind of bullshit like this is ubiquitous. It’s all over the place.

Brands keep selling magic pills when people know it’s a myth. Fuck them.

No surprise we’re so tired of marketing. No one likes to be taken for a fool. People have learned most of the marketing tricks they used to fall prey to. They don’t fall for them anymore. But most marketers are too short-sighted to see that. So they keep pushing.

People don’t want to be manipulated or be taken advantage of anymore. They seek respect, trust, and care. They look for help, support, and understanding. They have always been looking for those things, long before marketing was invented. People want to see they’re heard.

To put it simply, marketing is any communication between a brand and a customer. However, most of the time you don’t even know you’re a customer. Brands simply push something towards you without asking: an email, a message, a call, an advertisement.

You’re no longer taking an active part in this play. You’re an impersonal audience they sell to. You are to watch and choose between Y and N buttons. That’s your role when it comes to marketing today. No one give a shit what you need.

But marketing is not about selling by force. It’s about selling to the right people by fitting their needs and solving their problems the way they expect.

Moreover:

  • Marketing is not about bombarding people with calls and emails. It’s about talking to the right person as if it was a private meaningful conversation with a friend which is in need right now.
  • Marketing is not about deciding what is the best color for the CTA-button or if it should have an outline and a shadow. It’s about finding the right words and images to convey your message, to make others feel they belong.
  • Marketing is not about a bouncing popup-window that appears when you’ve just opened the website. It’s about letting people look through your page and make an informed decision on their own.

We need to remarket marketing. We need to have a clear and honest conversation with people we’d like to see as our customers and clients. That would be a great start.

Subscribe to my newsletter and follow me on Mastodon to receive new interviews on management and leadership on this blog.

No Comments 2023

How to make a great interview

No one likes taking part in a dull, predictable conversation. No one likes watching boring interviews. But all of us enjoy interviews that accidentally turn into an argument or that make us feel good about ourselves. The best way to do that is to ask thought-provoking and insightful questions such as:

  • What did you feel when your father passed away? How would you describe that feeling?
  • Why you didn’t leave the country after those events? What impact did this decision have on you?
  • What’s your attitude to those who thinks this way? Do you agree they should be…

You got the idea. Thought-provoking questions are necessary if you want your interview to be engaging and memorable both for your guest and your audience. Here’s how they contribute to that.

Thought-provoking questions:

  1. Help you stand out among other interviewers.
  2. May lead to a series of questions and topics you didn’t expect to arise.
  3. Make the interviewee look good or put them on the spot instead.

These types of questions spice things up and put your interviewee on a spot. It shouldn’t necessarily be an open conflict, but it should be provocative and hard to answer right away. Easy questions have no challenge for the interviewee. So this is one way to use those questions: create a small conflict and push the buttons that may lead to a debate.

Though there’s another way to use thought-provoking questions. Put the interviewee in a spot where they can express their opinion and prove their expertise and status. Give them the green light to show their best side. That’s why people do interviews: to build their media platform, to share their ideas with a new audience, and to feed their ego.

It’s totally fine to use insightful questions to make your hero look good in the eyes of their followers. Their answers will also make their audience feel smart, valued, and honored.

No Comments 2023

Keep your pace ★

Writers and designers are afraid of ChatGPT and other AI services popping up all over the place. They shouldn’t be. It won’t leave you out of work unless you do one thing: keep moving.

TV didn’t kill theater. The internet didn’t kill TV. Remote work didn’t kill offices. Those things changed the game, but didn’t kill prior technologies. They just kept going. Nobody likes change, but it’s not death.

AI is yet another tool to your arsenal. It won’t replace you, because it can’t feel and reflect. It runs algorithms designed by… humans. It was designed to replicate and repeat ideas invented by humans. And most of the work today can’t be trusted to AI. Not without a human supervision.

ChatGPT can write a good summary, give some ideas, and spur your imagination. But it can’t create new meanings. Humans exceed AI in innovation. And I don’t think AI will ever come any close to what we are capable of when it comes to creating new paradigms, concepts, and ideas.

Don’t panic. It’s a long-term run. A marathon, not a sprint. Keep your pace and stay in the game as long as you can by bringing new meanings and ideas to the people you serve. It never goes out of fashion.

No Comments 2023

Know your focus ★

For the past three years I’ve worked with and for various product and SaaS teams. They were from different industries. But all of them had one common problem—bad focus.

I can’t count how many times I’ve seen small teams and products initially aimed at a certain audience transformed in the minds of their founders into humongous, rigid structures. Simply because founders lost their focus.

I can’t count how many times I’ve heard these words: “We need to get attention of everyone on our product. Our product should be universal. Our goal is to corner the market and beat those big guys!”

Really? I believe your starting plan was to create a better user experience for a certain segment of the market, rather than corner it. But appetite comes with eating. This rising appetite blinds people and makes them lose the way.

Knowing your focus and saying no to other things is the most important lesson I’ve ever learned.

The lack of focus erodes ability to flex and accomplish your initial goals. In 99% of the cases the focus shifts to money, and here’s why.

Startups are hungry and it’s a good thing. Business should stay hungry. Hunger keeps the mind clear and the focus precise. However, you have to control your hunger and not let it become a starvation. Have a bite once in a while. Starving businesses lose their focus easily.

It’s not long before they start eating anything that comes their way, just to beat this sick feeling at the pit of a stomach. Side projects, little opportunities to make some money on the side, new feature that your customers want to see, a darn dark theme, or a mobile app. That’s how it always starts. The end is never that fun though.

You probably wouldn’t like the idea of feeding your body with crap like chips and coke. To stay healthy, efficient and strong you have to eat proteins, slow carbons, greens, and drink a lot of water, not soda. The same goes for business. You should be cautious about what you’re feeding your product with. The businesses feed with ideas, hypothesis and guesses you take. Take one and go with it. Don’t squander.

Control your hunger and know your focus. Otherwise you’ll end up creating a product that has no market, no demand, and no unfair advantage. All of that is simply because of a bad focus.

No Comments 2023

Ten takeaways from “It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work”

The first book I read this year, and it was good. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson managed to balance the brevity and depth of their thoughts and keep their vision clear.

Instead of bringing new ideology or another corporate bullshit standard, they offer common sense as a universal tool—like a Swiss knife—to make decisions and handle chaos in any situation.

Their book is an easy-to-digest and ready-to-go manual for those who finally want to make a change at work and feel good about it rather than stressed, anxious, and humiliated.

Here are my ten takeaways from it:

  1. Bury the hustle, go with calm. Calm is meetings as a last resort. Calm is asynchronous first, real-time second.
  2. No goals. Goals are fake. Nearly all of them are artificial targets set for the sake of setting targets.
  3. Deliver updates in six-week cycles, no sprints. Fix a deadline and budget, flex the scope.
  4. Do good work. Most of the time it’s enough to stand out.
  5. Less is more. Stop chasing many and much, choose just one target, and aim.
  6. Protect your focus. Depth, not breadth, is where mastery is often found.
  7. Productivity is a myth. Filling every moment with something to do is all it’s about these days. Dump it.
  8. No public calendars. Time is the most valuable thing we have. We don’t have the right to decide how our teammates should spend it. We may think it’s a meeting, they consider it’d better be an email.
  9. No all-nigters and 80-hours weeks. Sleep, eat, and rest enough. In the long run, work is not more important than sleep.
  10. Hire only those who fit your mindset. No rock stars and fancy titles would do if you don’t feel right about the person applying for a position.

I came to most of these ideas while running my design studio. It was good to see that an ocean away there’s a company run by similar ideas and principles.

Check out the book at 37signals' website →

No Comments 2023

Note-taking is the key to consistent writing

Let me share two principles that help me write consistently and be abundant: write everything down and keep it simple. Let’s look at them closer.

Write everything down. It’s a fundamental principle of my writing process. I guess nothing gave such a boost to my writing as building a habit of taking notes. There are three reasons for doing that:

  1. Taking notes frees up the space for new ideas in your head. Since I’d begun writing down all the ideas that crossed my mind, the more new thoughts started coming in. My wife often observe me rushing to my desk from the bed to write down the idea that arose in my head before sleep.
  2. Writing ideas down helps to structure the knowledge and experience you’ve gained. Writing and deconstructing things I’ve learned was the easiest way to understand them much deeper and turn them into simple but efficient management principles. No video or audio can do so. Writing is the only creative process that implies analysis.
  3. Writing is the fastest and cheapest way to share your knowledge with others. Videos and podcasts require many additional skills and postproduction, while writing doesn’t take much time and energy to convey a message. Also reading is a natural way to get the idea, while a video or a podcast doesn’t allow you to skip a part of it without losing the context or some important details.

Keep it simple. I’m talking about note-taking, of course. I know that some of you may have a tendency to hunt for a new super powerful all-in-one perfect application that would empower you to start taking notes. I’ve been down that road. That’s a self-deception.

Dump this idea. Don’t wait for the perfect tool. It won’t make a difference to the world, but your writing may.

You already have a note app on your phone. It already has hashtags, folders, headings, bullet points, etc. You don’t need a list of unique features to make a grocery list, same goes for ideas. All you need is to start writing them down.

The simpler your note-taking process is, the better. I use standard Notes by Apple to jot down my thoughts. It’s enough to capture the idea that came to me and make the first draft so I could forget about it and move on. Any app that has autosave, folders, hashtags, and cloud sync will work.

This is how my note-taking system looks like

To sum up:

  • Write down all ideas that cross your mind
  • Take notes so you could forget and get back later to edit them
  • Keep your note-taking system simple
  • Use a standard app that is aimed at getting the job done
  • Use hashtags for topics and folders for projects

The next time you’re going to write something on social media, open you notes, pick one topic and simply edit this. No need to write from scratch anymore, you will always have a list of ideas to go with.

No Comments 2022