The Sunday Summary: Brave browsing, experience, Beeper, and gratefulness

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In an effort to help me keep up with everything I post each week, here is my latest “Sunday Summary” of my posts from the week.

Mon, June 3: A Brave new browser
In an attempt to slowly de-Google my life, I’ve moved from Chrome to Brave for my daily browsing, and it was a pretty easy move.

Tue, June 4: Do your years of experience matter?
Having experience can be helpful, but it quickly becomes less helpful if you’re just going through the motions year after year.

Wed, June 5: Consolidating my messages with Beeper
I’d heard about this app before, but just now finally gave it a try. Wow, it’s great!

Thu, June 6: The step between an event and a reaction
A slow response is often the best one.

Fri, June 7: Where Google’s downfall began
An old quote from Jeff Bezos helps explain why Google is struggling so much lately.

Sat, June 8: Grateful in the macro and the micro
It’s great to be grateful for the big things in your life, but being grateful for the small things can have an oversized impact.

I hope you found some value in this. If you ever have questions, ideas, or disagreements regarding anything I write, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Grateful in the macro and the micro

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When you ask someone what they’re grateful for, you often get the same kinds of things – health, family, friends, etc. Those are all wonderful things, and we should all be grateful for them, but being grateful for smaller things can sometimes have a bigger impact.

In a recent episode of “My First Million”, the hosts (Sam Parr and Shaan Puri) interviewed Gary Vaynerchuk and it was a fascinating conversation. I encourage you to listen/watch the entire thing when you have a chance. You can view it here (or listen on the “My First Million” podcast):

One piece stood out to me, though, and it revolved around gratefulness. It started with Sam saying:

“I’m like, dude, I did not work any harder than anyone else who else, like who have done some of things, but failed. This is 100% luck. And I’m so grateful that I like it just has worked in my way in many ways.”

He’s absolutely right. I’ve worked hard to get where I am, but it took a tremendous amount of luck along the way. If you’re reading these words, you’ve been lucky enough to be born in a time with this amazing technology, and you’re financially well-off enough to at least have a phone or computer (and internet connection) to make it happen. You may feel inferior compared to your neighbor, but you’re way in the top 1% of lucky humans of all time.

Shaan took it a bit further and talked about macro versus micro, with:

“I think people make a mistake. They’re grateful in the macro.

So if you say to somebody, what are you grateful for? Almost everybody, my family, my health. And to me, I’m not saying they’re wrong. Obviously, those are great things, but it’s sort of like when a company says our values, our integrity and excellence, it’s true, but not useful. It basically has me leaves no register. And so I try my focus is how do you be grateful in the micro?

Can I be, if I’m in an elevator, can I find something in that moment? Can I get a rep, a practice rep of gratitude in that? Because that actually shifts me. When I can take a breath, be grateful for the fresh air, I can look at something my kid is doing and how silly they are and just in that moment, find something.

And if I could do that, you know, 10, 15 times a day, that is, you know, the antidote.“

Being grateful on the macro level is a great thing; I’m happy for my health and I love my family. To affect the day-to-day, though, finding things to be grateful for on a micro level can make an instant difference.

Where Google’s downfall began

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While Google is clearly still a huge and impactful company, it appears things are heading in the wrong direction. If that’s true, it’s easy to point to where the slide began.

Back in 2018 Jeff Bezos told his employees that one day Amazon will fail. He’s not wrong, but his intent was inspiration to keep them on the right track. Going a bit deeper, here is the exact part of that talk that stood out to me:

“If we start to focus on ourselves, instead of focusing on our customers, that will be the beginning of the end. We have to try and delay that day for as long as possible.”

That’s clearly where Google has failed. They focused on their customers for 20 years, but over the last five they’ve becoming heavily inward-focused. If you look at the four items on my recent post about why Google is failing, all of them are things that they’ve turned from customer benefits to internal money-saving.

On one hand, it’s understandable. Things get a little tighter, so you work to raise the bottom line a bit. The problem is that when you do things at the expense of your customers, you have no choice but to keep tightening things up and it becomes a death spiral.

Media Play

It reminds me of one of the last times I bought something from Media Play, probably 20 years ago. They were already fading, but they were clearly trying to squeeze every last bit they could. Upon checkout, the poor woman checking me out had to go through like 10 different up-sells (mailing list, membership, extra batteries, etc). It was super annoying, though I know she was only doing it because management required it. When a company starts getting desperate, you know they’re in trouble.

Google has sailed past the point of “start to focus on ourselves“, and I feel that it’s only going to get worse from here.

The step between an event and a reaction

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In Daniel Kahneman’s famous book “Thinking, Fast and Slow“, he describes the two types of thinking that we can do:

  • System 1 (fast) – The impulsive, automatic, intuitive
  • System 2 (slow) – The thoughtful, deliberate, calculating

While being slow isn’t always good, us humans tend to go with the “fast” response far too often.

In Ward Farnsworth’s “The Practicing Stoic“, he has a similar comparison by explaining how the “slow” system adds a step in our thinking that the “fast” system skips. He says:

“The Stoic claim, in other words, is that our pleasures, griefs, desires and fears all involve three stages rather than two: not just an event and a reaction, but an event, then a judgment or opinion about it, and then a reaction (to the judgment or opinion). Our task is to notice the middle step, to understand its frequent irrationality, and to control it through the patient use of reason.”

Generally speaking, responding this way will gain you more respect from those around you. Donald Miller has said that “we respect people who react a little under, not over, the level of drama a situation deserves“. Showing off your temper just isn’t a great thing to do, and taking a beat to consider the middle step between the event and your reaction is a fantastic way to keep it in check.

There are times when a fast response is required, like slamming on the brakes of your car to avoid another, but most of the time the slow response will yield better results, particularly if we pay attention to our judgement in the middle.

Consolidating my messages with Beeper

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I’d heard about the Beeper app a while ago, but didn’t actually check it out until recently. I should have looked earlier, as it’s fantastic.

Beeper app screenshot

Very simply, it’s an app that puts almost all of your messaging apps in one place, in one stream of content. This includes WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, LinkedIn, Signal, Instagram, Google Messages, and many others. I intentionally said “almost all of your messaging apps” because it can’t handle Apple’s iMessage despite their best efforts. iMessage support aside, it’s a fantastic app.

For me, I primarily use it to handle my text messages, LinkedIn messages, and Facebook Messenger. However, I’m also in a new WhatsApp group (and I don’t often use WhatsApp), so it’s great to just tuck that in here too.

As another bonus, it solves a minor frustration with Google Messages. Google Messages only handles text messages, but they have a nice desktop tool to sync them. The problem is that it can only connect to one computer at a time, so as I’d jump around a bit throughout the day, I often saw this message:

It was merely a click to “fix” it, but if that window was buried I wouldn’t be getting those notifications. Beeper can be live on as many computers as needed, so that small annoyance has gone away.

It’s everywhere

Beeper has apps for Android, iPhone, iPad, macOS, Windows, Linux and ChromeOS, so it can literally be on every device. All of your messages in one app. It’s beautiful.

There are three other great things to know:

  1. It’s end-to-end encrypted, which means that the Beeper folks literally can’t read any of your messages, even if they wanted to.
  2. It’s owned by Automattic (the company behind WordPress), who I trust more than most companies.
  3. It’s free to use and will always be free to use. They plan on adding new features in the future at a paid tier, but the features we have today will always be free.

If you find yourself jumping between different messaging apps, give Beeper a try. Even without the iMessage integration, it’s still likely worthwhile for Apple users too.

Do you use Beeper or anything similar to it?

Do your years of experience matter?

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Years of experience can be beneficial, but it often depends on what was in those years. As I shared last year, experience isn’t the same as practice. For example, most people have decades of experience typing on a computer, but only those that specifically practice at improving will get any better at it.

In his book “7 Strategies for Wealth and Happiness“, author Jim Rohn shares this same point by saying:

“The “guy” says, “I’ve got ten years’ experience. I don’t know why I’m not doing better.” What he hasn’t realized is that he doesn’t have ten years’ experience. What he has is one year’s experience repeated ten times. He hasn’t made a single improvement, a single innovation in nine years!”

That said, sometimes simple experiences can help a bit. While I try to specifically practice the skills that matter most, experience can matter in some situations. For example, while my experience in driving everyday has only made me a minimally better driver over the last 32 years, my experience in diagnosing WordPress or DNS issues is valuable simply due to the time I’ve put in. In those cases, the number of issues that can arise are almost limitless, so experiencing more of them over the years helps me to be able to more quickly diagnose new issues that clients might bring to us.

For your core work, is experience valuable or does it require specific practice to improve?

A Brave new browser

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As I’m slowly shedding the Google services in my life, I recently made a fairly big move and switched from Google Chrome to the Brave browser. If you’re wanting something more privacy-focused, Brave is likely the best way to go because it’s very similar to Chrome.

There are other great browsers, including Arc and Firefox (and many more), but they all have their own special features. That’s not a bad thing, but if you’ve used Chrome for many years Brave will feel awfully close to home.

Brave runs on Chromium, the open-source software that powers Chrome, but they use it in a very privacy-focused way. It can import all of your bookmarks and passwords, and it’s really a very easy transition.

I encourage you to download it and give it a shot, as it’s free to use and there’s no downside to giving it a test drive. Your privacy will thank you for it.

Have you moved to Brave or any alternative browser yet?

The Sunday Summary: Creativity, goals, spam, and challenging ideas

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In an effort to help me keep up with everything I post each week, here is my latest “Sunday Summary” of my posts from the week.

Mon, May 27: Make Mistakes Once
It’s often worth making a mistake, but you also need to make sure that you learn from it.

Tue, May 28: Creativity isn’t about writing or drawing
There is a difference between “creativity” and “personal creativity”, and some of us only get one of them.

Wed, May 29: Goals or not?
I’ve posted on here about the importance of goal setting, but also about how goals aren’t that important. Here’s a bit of a discussion between those two points.

Thu, May 30: Bugging 24,990 people to make 10 sales
The math of spam is just ugly.

Fri, May 31: Build a brand outside of Google
Google is still important for websites, but building a brand outside of Google is going to become essential.

Sat, June 1: Ideas that challenge
“I think because many of us, maybe even most of us, seek to ingest the information to cement our own biases instead of ingesting information that challenges our ideas, challenges our thinking.”

I hope you found some value in this. If you ever have questions, ideas, or disagreements regarding anything I write, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Ideas that challenge

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I love being challenged by new ideas. I’ll certainly defend my point of view on any given subject, but I try to remain open to other possibilities. As Daniel Kahneman has said, it can be a great to be proven wrong because then you are “less wrong that you were before“.

On a recent episode of the 2Bobs podcast, Blair Enns got into this idea a bit as well when talking about finding information that is outside of our filter bubble. He said:

“I think because many of us, maybe even most of us, seek to ingest the information to cement our own biases instead of ingesting information that challenges our ideas, challenges our thinking.”

It’s a balancing act that I often struggle with. I want to dig deeper into the things I believe so that I can more soundly understand and defend them, but that’s not far off from the bias of a closed mind.

Having people around that don’t agree with everything that I believe is a great thing, provided that the conversations can remain civil. Those that think differently than I do but are caring and empathic people are some of my very favorites to spend time with.

Do you do anything in particular to avoid simply cementing your own biases?

Build a brand outside of Google

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There was recently a huge leak from Google that detailed much of how their search algorithm works, and it was quite eye opening. One of the best overviews of the leak comes from Rand Fishkin, and you can read it here.

In digging in, he had a few very insightful thoughts that I wanted to share here.

Big brands matter

He had a few thoughts about building a big brand in order to rank well in Google. Here is one:

“If there was one universal piece of advice I had for marketers seeking to broadly improve their organic search rankings and traffic, it would be: “Build a notable, popular, well-recognized brand in your space, outside of Google search.”

A related thought is a bit more glum, and essentially says to put your efforts elsewhere if you can’t be seen as a major brand.

“The content you create is unlikely to perform well in Google if competition from big, popular websites with well-known brands exists. Google no longer rewards scrappy, clever, SEO-savvy operators who know all the right tricks. They reward established brands, search-measurable forms of popularity, and established domains that searchers already know and click.”

Clicks matter, and Google lied

A theme that goes through Rand’s piece, along with others that I’ve read, is that Google has been dishonest with us for years. It could be somewhat defensible (trying to stop spammers from knowing everything), but it’s undeniable that Google literally lied about various pieces of how their algorithm works.

A major one is clicks in the search results. Google has long downplayed the importance of them (denying them completely until 2019, I believe), but it seems that clicks can matter a lot. Here is a scenario about that from Rand:

Let’s say, for example, that many people in the Seattle area search for “Lehman Brothers” and scroll to page 2, 3, or 4 of the search results until they find the theatre listing for the Lehman Brother stage production, then click that result. Fairly quickly, Google will learn that’s what searchers for those words in that area want.

Even if the Wikipedia article about Lehman Brothers’ role in the financial crisis of 2008 were to invest heavily in link building and content optimization, it’s unlikely they could outrank the user-intent signals (calculated from queries and clicks) of Seattle’s theatre-goers.

Extending this example to the broader web and search as a whole, if you can create demand for your website among enough likely searchers in the regions you’re targeting, you may be able to end-around the need for classic on-and-off-page SEO signals like links, anchor text, optimized content, and the like.

All in all, it’s a massive leak with huge implications, and I encourage you to read Rand’s piece and follow his links to other sources with more info. Things won’t change drastically for how search engine optimization is performed, but these new insights certainly shape how all of us think about Google’s algorithm and behavior.

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