Just Do Stuff

Sorry I rushed this, so it won’t read as usual. But hopefully there’s still a useful idea in there somewhere.

When I was picking fruit for rent, I spent all day dreaming about working for myself.

I used to think you needed an amazing idea. As I flipped through hundreds of them in my head over a fruit season, I'd always test them in my mind. But I could never see past the first few steps I needed to take. So I didn't take any.

Then we (me, my cousin, and one of his mates) started Cherries-online, a proper business with a grand name and even grander hypothesis to match… rich people in Auckland will pay for good cherries to be delivered to their door.

We had some rough ideas about how to do it: build a website, create a Facebook page, promote it... and that was enough. We just started doing stuff, and each step we took illuminated the next one.

In a funny way, it reminds me of playing Crash Bandicoot.

Everything I've done since has reinforced this experience: you don't need to know what you need to do beyond the next few steps.

When people tell you how they built their businesses, it's all hindsight, dressed up as foresight.

I've got ~10 years of experience building businesses now, and sure, there are a few common steps I take for every business, like setting up bank accounts, creating a website, or hiring a bookkeeper.

I've got a playbook of sorts that I run for each business: a collection of things I've done, know are needed, and know work. But these aren't the things that create alpha; they're just a few pieces of the puzzle that I know how to fit every time.

The moves that have made my businesses successful have been almost completely unknown to me until a few weeks or months before I made them.

Take my gym, for example. Almost out of the blue last year, in quick succession, we decided to deliver "training courses" for our members, focusing on stuff like "getting running strong." Then, off the back of their success, we saw an opportunity for small group training that mimicked the purpose of the courses.

Within two months, we launched two new products, bringing in thousands of extra revenue per month. But for the previous seven years I'd owned that gym, I barely acknowledged the silhouette of either option.

I'm making a move right now that could dramatically change the trajectory of Gravy (I'll write about this in another newsletter). It seems obvious now, but until it entered my head in December, it didn't exist.

I'm not sure what you should do with this* information,* if you'd it call it that.

But for me, it's therapeutic knowing that I don't need to know our next 20 steps—just the next one or two—and everything else will take care of itself.

Hitting Goals

Only 9% of people who set new years goals achieve them. Here’s how to avoid failing yours based on the data:

1. Choose one goal - “I want to lose 10 kgs”

2. Choose when you want to do it by - “I want to lose 10 kgs by April 1st”

3. Change your identity to match the person you want to become - “I’m the type of person who exercises regularly and eats well and loses weight at will”

If you’ve got multiple goals do them sequentially. Doing two at once adds complexity. Complexity is the enemy of execution.