The 3 Best Questions To Ask When You’re Drowning

When we have too many projects, ideas, or opportunities in front of us, the problem usually isn’t effort.

It’s the sequence.

You can work hard on the wrong thing and still feel like you’re falling behind - I’ve done this so many times it’s embarrassing (The worst - I prioritised nailing my NFT portfolio as opposed to building a long-term investment strategy). 

You can clear ten small tasks and still avoid the one decision that would actually change everything.

Here are the questions to ask yourself:

1. Which one of these, if done, would make the others easier or irrelevant?

Not the easiest one.
Not the loudest one.
Not the one creating the most guilt.

The one that, once completed, makes everything else simpler.

If you’re snowblind, call a mate (or email us) and ask them to look at your list and answer the question for you.

If you’re still stuck, use the following questions to get more details.

2. Which of these, if completed or moved to the next milestone, would make me feel proudest at the end of the day?

Pride often points toward the task that requires courage and doing something you’ve been avoiding.

3. Which of these will still be a success even if it fails?

Some projects only count as wins even if they reach an expected outcome.

Others create value even in failure (last week, I attended a two-day AI residency with the main goal of learning, but if that didn’t deliver, at worst, I still got to meet some really clever humans from our country).

The best work comes from knocking over the first domino, which makes everything else easier.

Using Word Of Mouth To Find Problems

Word of mouth can tell you a lot about your business.

It can tell you whether you’ve found product-market fit.

Why you’ve found product-market-fit, who you’ve found product market fit for.

And sometimes, like we’ve discovered at our gym, who we’re letting down.

The average age of our gym members is 31. Yet almost all of our word-of-mouth comes from 21-year-old university students.

So it means we’ve got 200-300 members who think we’re just meh.

We’ve done enough to get them in the door and to keep them (our average member stays with us for 2 years), but not enough for them to recommend us.

We could just ignore them and focus on students, but given the highly competitive Dunedin gym market and the limited pool of customers to chase, it’s at least worth investigating why.

So over the next few weeks, we’re going to be asking as many of our older members as possible, Would you recommend us to a friend, if not, why not?

I’ll report back in a few weeks with what we’ve learned.