Chase down every reference

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Being curious can be a great thing. As an enneagram 5, I’m kind of wired to be curious, and most people in my life would agree. I like to know the “why” behind so many things, and this blog is a place where I unpack and share much of that.

In “Steal Like An Artist“, author Austin Kleon seems to agree, and he puts it this way:

“Be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else–that’s how you’ll get ahead.”

Whether you want to have an insane process for your notes and blog every day is one thing, but simply being curious about the world around you is almost certainly in your best interest. Whatever your area of expertise is, each layer deeper that you can understand and unpack it, the more beneficial it will be for your skills.

Plus, curiosity is often fun! Digging into the “why” behind the things that you discover will generally lead to the amazing people behind the initial idea, or the stroke of luck that brought something into existence. It can be a little dangerous to waste time going down rabbit holes, but injecting a bit more curiosity into your life has a great chance of making it a little bit better.

It’s the strong swimmers who drown

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In some facets of life, focusing on simply being “not stupid” is your best bet. Striving to get ahead can be good in many places, but knowing when to pump the brakes and just keep things on track can save a lot of heartache.

Charlie Munger has based much of his investing career on this, and had this to say:

It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent. There must be some wisdom in the folk saying: “It’s the strong swimmers who drown”

Strong swimmers are more likely to take risks, and as a result, can be more likely to drown. People that are weak swimmers will stay on the beach where they’re safe.

It’s kind of like my buddy Tim that was an excellent baseball player, but made boneheaded decisions because of his talent. He knew he was talented, so he’d screw around on the field and take foolish actions. The rest of us that were less talented would stay more focused and make the right play.

Pushing to get stronger is something we should all look to do, but choosing the right time and place to know when to “push” and when to “hold” can make all the difference in the world.

Make time for the right things

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A study by the Management Research Group showed that 97% of CEOs said that the key to their organization’s success was “long-term strategic thinking”.

In a different survey, 96% of CEOs said that “they don’t have time for strategic thinking”.

Clearly, something is lacking. Dorie Clark unpacks it in this excellent TEDx talk from 2021:

So how to solve it? Make time for it, literally.

Most people wait for some space to magically open up on their calendars, and that space just never stays open. Instead, block it out and make it happen yourself.

You can use calendar containers or other methods to keep your time free, but one way or another you need to just make sure you secure some space for this kind of work. It can be “magic time“, like Jen Waldman suggests, or just normal “clarity breaks” as I’ve shared on here before.

If you need to find more time for something to happen, make the time intentional or you may never get around to it.

See like your heroes

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I’ve been writing daily for around 600 days in a row now, and my purpose has always been the same — to gain better clarity of thought.

As I said very early in this process, my goal was to learn to see the world and think though ideas in a deeper and better way. I’m getting there, but it’ll take thousands more posts to get where I want to go (and even then, I won’t be “done”).

A quote in Austin Kleon’s excellent book “Steal Like An Artist” framed this in a great way:

“You don’t want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes.”

I have no desire to look like people such as Seth Godin, Adam Grant, or Malcolm Gladwell. However, if I can develop an outlook that helps to see the world in a similar way as people like them, I’ll be thrilled with that outcome.

Someone should do something about that

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I’m sure you’ve had a friend lament a bad situation and say that “someone should do something about that”. Perhaps you’ve said it yourself, and I’m sure I have at some point too.

Perhaps the person to “do something” should be you.

It’s a tricky line, because when things look bad, sometimes the best solution is still to do nothing. In most cases, though, rolling up your sleeves and digging in will be a much better solution than sitting back and wishing for someone to help.

In Ryan Holiday’s book “Courage is Calling“, he shares a variety of words to this effect, including these three quotes that caught my eye.

First, he shared a quote from Joan Didion on taking responsibility for your own life and your own actions:

“The willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life, is the source from which self-respect springs.”

Holiday also shared:

“The belief that an individual can make a difference is the first step. The next is understanding that you can be that person.”

And closely related:

“People who did what needed to be done. People who said, “If not me, then who?””

There are times when you should let others take charge, there are times when you should leave well enough alone, but there are also times when you should step up and be the change you want to see.

If you can learn to discern between them and then take action, people will appreciate what you do.

Clients, Customers, or Users

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Who does your business serve? You know, the people that spend money on your product or service. Do you consider them to be “clients”, “customers”, or “users”?

They all sound similar, and they are, but there are subtle and important differences between them. I see it roughly like this:

Clients are people you know and work with. You talk to them frequently, know them by name, and have a solid relationship.

Customers are people that buy from you, and you might recognize their face, but each transaction is a one-off, and you hope they come back again.

Users are people that subscribe to your service and pay for access, but you rarely (often never) have direct communication with them.

All can be good, but it really depends on what your business does and who you really want to serve.

Comparing them

An episode of The Long and The Short Of It podcast dug into this a bit, and I loved how the hosts both framed these types of people.

Jen’s thought was pretty simple:

“And I recognize that I want clients, and I have no interest in customers.”

She’s not against people being customers, per se, but for her kind of work she needs a deeper relationship, and it was a good way to frame it. I view our company through the same lens. We don’t sell a product to customers, but rather work with clients to help them achieve more.

Pete took it the other way, and discussed how “users” compare to the other two categories:

“And you could actually extend that further in terms of the other side of a customer, where you hear tech companies talk about users. And there’s a brilliant documentary on Netflix called The Social Dilemma. And they point out that there’s two industries that exist who refer to their clients/customers as users. That is the drug industry and the tech industry.”

If your company requires “users” to make it work, there’s nothing wrong with that. Just be sure about what kind of people you really want to work with, and treat them accordingly.

Notes versus highlights

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When I’m reading a book, I generally do a pretty good job of highlighting relevant bits of text, and then going back through it when I’m finished.

As I shared in my “big reading shortcut” post, I’m also pretty good about getting those highlights saved for future use, but I’m not as solid about creating my own notes to go with them, and that’s something I need to work on.

Saving highlights are great, but taking the time to rewrite them or include your own thoughts makes a much bigger impact.

In the book “The Coaching Habit“, author Michael Stanier shared some thoughts that I think are similar to my lack of proper note-taking. In his world, it’s the difference between telling something to someone (highlighting text) and instead asking a question to make them think about it a bit more (rewriting in your own words).

“I can tell you something, and it’s got a limited chance of making its way into your brain’s hippocampus, the region that encodes memory. If I can ask you a question and you generate the answer yourself, the odds increase substantially.”

Highlights are great, and they’re a necessary step in the process, but taking time to rewrite them in your own words and connect them to other ideas will make them much more powerful.

Take some time to do nothing

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Sometime in the next few days, see if you can carve out a bit of time to just do nothing. For many of us, that time needs to go on the calendar or it’ll never happen, so do that if you need to.

As Austin Kleon said in “Steal Like An Artist“:

“Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing.”

You can make it a proper clarity break if you want, or call it “magic time“, but simply making time for nothing can be a huge help to your creativity, so I encourage you to block out regular time for it.

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Google extracts “near me” from search phrases

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I mentioned a few months ago that using the words “near me” on your website (or even in the name of your business) was unlikely to help improve your search rankings, and now there is some more data to support that.

To be clear, people search for things “near me” all the time, myself included. That’s not a surprise. However, if Google sees the phrase “near me” in a search, they essentially strip it out and do a local search for whatever your other keywords are.

For example, if you search for “sushi near me”, Google will run a local search for “sushi”. Whether or not any of those companies have the words “near me” associated with them is of zero value. Instead, it comes back to a traditional search result based on location, rankings, other keywords, etc.

Chris Silver Smith summed it up nicely in a recent post on the Search Engine Land website:

Google has made it now so that a “near me” query will return the closest matching local businesses for one’s search terms within the Maps/Local listings. To do this, Google clearly extracts the “near me” portion of the user’s query and matches the remainder of the query with businesses and websites it believes are closest in location proximity to the user. This handling negates the efficacy of performing keyword optimizations with “near me” phrases for Google Maps/Local search.

Putting the words “near me” on your website won’t necessarily hurt you, but it’s of no value and you’d likely do well to make better use of that space.

Sometimes I’d rather just read

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I’ve talked a few times about my big reading shortcut, and how I can spend less than an hour to extract almost all of the best information from almost any book. It works amazingly well, but it’s a very focused hour to get it done (20 minutes reading, 20 minutes pulling more quotes, 20 minutes processing it all).

This past weekend our family went away to Charleston for a quick mini-vacation. It was a fairly packed and excellent weekend, and I knew I’d have a bit of downtime to just read/relax. However, that “shortcut” was far too intense for this kind of reading. For that, it was just back to some normal books on the Kindle.

I could read when I had a few minutes, but then put it away at a moment’s notice.

It was nice.

I’ll continue to work that shortcut a few times a week in order to keep my “to-read” list in check (it’s still at 147 books, so it’ll be a while), but it’s great sometimes to just relax and read and not worry about having to push so hard.