Ari Meisel

Stop Raging. Start Documenting

July 18, 2018 by Ari Meisel

Access without information and instruction is painful, and totally unproductive. But if you document the process, the problem disappears.

I travel a lot, and I’ve noticed something pretty interesting over the years: hotel reviews are almost never accurate. Very often when I’m looking up a hotel to stay in, I find myself a bit nervous after reading the reviews — the shower is slow, the lobby smells, the security guy makes weird noises, the cutlery is dirty.

And every single time those fears turn out to be unwarranted.

You see, one of the unfortunate byproducts of the information age (and the internet), is that we’ve commoditized (and militarized) an age old human tradition: whining. To complain is a very human thing to do — unfortunately, the internet has allowed what would otherwise be fleeting methods of vented frustration to be immortalized.

The same exists for software — scroll through G2Crowd for any piece of software you use, and you’ll find a shocking number of people for whom it was an absolutely abhorrent experience. Tools which form the backbone of your work and productivity, others found completely useless.

How exactly does this split happen? It’s a problem I like to call access without information.

If you really think about it, the amount of tools we use on a day to day basis is astounding. With the boom of SaaS apps in the last half a decade, every professional has their own toolkit. At Less Doing, our big two are Trello and Airtable.

The issue is, there’s very little onboarding on these tools. Imagine being a blacksmith and you just start hammering away on your first day — you’d probably leave a bad review for that hammer on G2crowd too, wouldn’t you?

Because the cloud has made software so simple to access, the typical onboarding & training you see with enterprise software doesn’t exist anymore. So pretty often, new employees for example might jump into a tool and start using it in completely the wrong way, leading to bad process and a poor experience.

The funny thing about this is it’s easily fixable. There’s usually one or two simple adjustments that make the difference between a bad experience and lifelong software loyalty.

I’ll give you an example. I was reading in a Google Groups thread a while ago of a guy who was complaining that Gmail doesn’t have a way of keeping evergreen content — that it was easy to lose important information. He was requesting a “pinned emails” feature, where you could denote extra important emails and have quick access to them whenever.

If you haven’t caught on yet, Gmail already has this feature — starred emails.

You see, the guy was using starred emails sort of like a to-do list — in the morning he would star the most important emails in his inbox, and throughout the day he’d prioritize those over everything else. While it was a pretty useful way to use the stars, it wasn’t the best way, and as a result he was missing out on the most important use case of that feature.

This is a classic example of access without information.

In the workplace, this can cause a lot of process disruption and make the onboarding process for new employees particularly challenging. I’ve got two solutions I’ve found that work well: talk in assets absolutes and people absolutes.

When you’re documenting a process for instance, don’t speak on assets in relative terms — i.e, don’t say “for the next step, refer to the payroll document”. You’ve immediately added a layer of complexity for the individual… where’s the payroll document? Do I need a password? What tool do I use to get there?

Similarly, referring to people in an absolute sense is essential in process documentation. Never say “once you’ve finished this up, send it to Geoff at Accounting” — say something more along the lines of “send it over to the claims department in accounting”.

You see every time you speak in relative terms, you add another complexity point, which is often met by resistance. While a good employee might ask about it to clear it up, often they’ll just power forward and try to figure it out themselves.

Every time this happens, it builds up “complexity debt” — and complexity debt is the biggest problem with access without information.

So, simple lessons: asset absolutes and people absolutes, and be cognizant of complexity debt. And on the employee’s side?

Ask questions.

I guarantee that you won’t just solve your own problem, you’ll be solving the same problem for a lot of your co-workers who were too embarrassed to ask.

Further vs Farther — One Letter Makes All The Difference (in YOUR Business)

July 11, 2018 by Ari Meisel

There are two types of roles in a business: ones that take you farther and ones that take you further.

Bear with me here.

When structuring roles in your company, you’ve got an opportunity to do one of two things: on one hand, you can build a basis for an employee to explore, refine & expand their own position in a particular skill. These are general technical positions — think sales, programming, etc. These are the roles that take employees farther — they enable a very surface-level career growth, strictly along skill lines.

On the other hand, you can structure your roles not around particular skills but around business areas. Hiring people to take ownership of some pillar of your business — whether it’s a market, a technology, an underlying value — and deep diving into it. Rather than focusing a person’s attention on being, say, an engineer, their focus and company identity is refocused around the business goals they’re solving.

Both types of roles have their benefits (and really, many roles have some mix of both), and fundamentally your business needs to accommodate a mix of both. Ultimately though, roles that are built to take one farther generally end up in folks moving on from your company — there’s a skill ceiling to any role, and beyond that point, there’s little you can do to accommodate further leveling up.

On the other hand, roles that take folks further are the ones that form the pillar of your company. These are the lifers, the ones who stick around for half a decade, a decade or more, and pick up a PhD in the minutiae and finer points of some business aspect. These are the ones who drive your business forward, the foundations on which you 10x your growth.

Most companies have too many roles that take you farther, and not enough that take you further.

I know what you’re thinking: “Alright, that’s just peachy Ari, so what now? Do I just scatter the words farther or further a bunch of times in my job posts?”

Ultimately, the way to make use of this dichotomy is to rethink the way you see a “role”. Rather than hiring for specific roles, the best companies are those that (for at least some part of their hiring budget) hire generalists. I don’t mean the tacky startup thing of hiring “hustlers” — I mean they focus less on skills-based jobs and more on ownership.

Rather than hiring a strong technologist, hire someone with the eagerness to take ownership of a particular business domain who also happens to have those technological skills. Rather than hiring an engineer and then assigning them to a cross-functional team later, hire for a specific team right from the get go.

When you take that approach, you start attracting folks who aren’t just interested in leveling up their particular skills — you find people who are actually inspired by the business problems you’re trying to solve.

And while you might find yourself compromising slightly on skill, it’s generally more than made up for in dedication & results.

Kodawari: Long live the perfectionists!

July 5, 2018 by Ari Meisel

Ever seen a Japanese bonsai tree?

That’s your business.

Even if you’re dealing with Excel sheets, you’re a craftsman. And the Japanese get that.

In fact, they even have a word for doing things perfectly, and I came across it in Helena Escalante’s excellent newsletter:

Kodawari.

One definition says it means to obsess with details. Another (and this is a very accurate one) is: a sincere, unwavering focus on what you’re doing, with a goal of making it perfect.

Now, you don’t want to get bogged down by the details or miss the forest for the trees, but Kodawari is a standard that we set for ourselves when we refuse to cut corners on something important.

Why?

The most incredible things were created because the creators wouldn’t compromise.

Steve Jobs created Apple because he was focused. He wanted things to be done not just any way, but the right way. It’s not just perfectionism, it’s the craft of doing things perfectly because you know it can be done better.

If you look at the Japanese, you can see it’s really ingrained in their culture. They take pride in their attention to detail.

Have you ever seen Japanese pastries? They look perfect, inside and out.

When I was in Tokyo, I saw these young ladies in nice uniforms, cleaning the streets with a dustpan; with focus, pride, and craftsmanship.

That’s Kodawari in action.

I’m always saying that we don’t want to get stuck in the details, what we want to do is focus on that ONE detail.

That one detail is really worth it, and I’m willing to spend 10 minutes on it because what I’m going to uncover, will have real value for me.

Perfection takes time, don’t rush it.

It’s not necessarily more efficient for the process, but the benefits carry over. There’s such a satisfaction when you remove one step from a process, and it’s incredibly motivating.

Invest your time in the beneficial details. Clip that leaf over and over again, even if no one else understands. You are the leader and you know what is right for your business.

Kodawari means knowing your craft even better, and making your business the best it can be.

It’s not just perfectionism — it’s relentless devotion. You started your business with passion but it’s easy to slip up and say: this will do.

It won’t.

This is your craft. Don’t cut corners.

Take pride in it.

tl;dr What can we learn from Kodawari?

1. Know when not to compromise.

2. Perfection takes time.

3. Don’t focus on making things perfect — focus on doing them perfectly.

A Win is a Win (Celebrate, Damn It)

June 28, 2018 by Ari Meisel

There’s no bigger jerk in the world than an entrepreneur talking to himself.

Seriously, nobody. Ever heard your own self-talk? It’s brutal. There’s a innate terrifying and natural tendency to downplay every little thing that comes with being a great entrepreneur.

I like to call it “productive paranoia” (or “why you’re spending your Friday evening looking up your churn rate”).

Want a quick lifehack to making running a business more fun? Celebrate wins. Any win — automated away 10 minutes of your weekly work? Boom, celebrate that. Cleaned up some old work that’s been lying around for weeks that nobody wants to touch? Celebrate the hell out of that.

Sing a song. Do a little dance. High five yourself.

It sounds nuts, but in many ways making your dreadful Excel spreadsheet more palatable is just as big a win as, say, selling your entire company.

Why?

Because the second you sign on the dotted line you’ll be right back on the wagon thinking of what to do next. That’s the nature of entrepreneurship. Hell, that’s the nature of life — it’s in our biology to constantly strive to do more.

If you don’t appreciate the little things you accomplish every day, you’ll very quickly become very unhappy.

Tim Ferris has this idea of a “jar of awesome”. Every night, he writes down the small victories he accomplished that day and puts it in the jar. Whenever he’s in a funk, he pops open the jar and reads it.

It sounds corny, but it’s deeply rooted in our psychology. We need positive reinforcement, even if it comes from ourselves. It’s been shown psychologically that simply smiling boosts our energy and dopamine levels — patting yourself on the back can have a similar effect on motivation.

It’s doubly important to celebrate the simple things if you directly manage others.

The Harvard Business Review ran a research study trying to figure out what makes workers tick. They tracked “step forward days” and “step back days” — days where there was a sense of positive & negative progress respectively. There was a whopping 76% correlation between step forward days and employee satisfaction.

Celebrating wins makes you happy. Celebrating wins makes your workers happy.

So, tl;dr?

Celebrate the small wins. Write down the victories. Sing a little song.
Reflect. Go back and look at your small wins. Remind yourself of your triumphs.
Be nice to yourself. Business will continuously kick your ass, you should at least have yourself in your corner.

Just a high five here and there. That’s it.

Change Your Set Point Weakness

June 19, 2018 by Ari Meisel

This last Monday was national cotton candy day.

That’s right, that’s actually a thing. Go figure. I guess the cotton candy lobby is a powerful force indeed.

But it reminded me of something in my own life: my sugar addiction.

I was crazy for sugar. And let me tell you, access to large amounts of refined sugar is a pretty modern and recent thing. Even regular old white table sugar wasn’t something widely available until the second half of the nineteenth century.

Our bodies haven’t had a whole lot of time to adapt to it, and we’re naturally “wired” to seek it out and get as much of it as we can at once.

That’s because for most of human history, sugar’s been something that’s nutritionally dense, especially in calories — which you need when you have to walk everywhere, you probably do physical labor every day, and food is something you have to actively seek out.

Load up on seasonally available fruits while you have them, before winter sets in.

So you’ll naturally snack on sugar whenever you have the chance. It’s rewarding on a really basic instinctual level.

But it’s not natural, when it comes down to it.

Tons of people struggle with a sugar addiction. I’ll go ahead and clarify that I don’t mean “addiction” as in a seriously debilitating dependency. That can happen, sure, but most of us just get hooked on sugar without realizing it.

I had to break my own sugar addiction, which is what I wanted to talk about today.

I’m not talking about some magical miracle cure. That isn’t a thing. There’s no pill you can take that will suddenly make sugary snacks revolting and nauseating to you.

You have to address your own habits and change your behavior if you want to curb your sugar addiction. It’s not necessarily easy, but your teeth and your waistline will thank you.

A lot of us have tried to do this with something in our lives. Maybe it’s sugar, maybe it’s smoking, maybe it’s procrastination.

But it’s easy to fall back on old habits. You make a change, and make some progress… then something happens, and you fall back into that original pattern you tried so hard to break.

You spent all that work, and it seems like it was for nothing.

Part of the problem, I think, is an awareness issue. We don’t consciously realize it when we slip back into those old patterns, because they’re so deeply ingrained into our behavior.

And one of the biggest catalysts is stress. You try to cut back on sugar — or whatever other relatively non-life-destroying but bothersome vice you’re dealing with — and you’re in some stress-prone situation.

Like you’re without an insurer.

Then some stressful event brings that to a head, and the mud hits the fan, and you go, okay, forget it, I’ll just have one.

And you skip your afternoon run, or you go buy a bag of Dove bars, or whatever. You justify it because you’re stressed, and a lot of vices — especially sugar — are comforting. They release serotonin in your brain and help counteract anxiety.

But you just end up feeling bad. And your “clean streak” is ruined, and you think, gosh, I’ve failed. I lost. I might as well give up.

You shouldn’t, but you feel that way when you “break your streak,” and it makes you feel like you’ve ruined everything and might as well not even try. (In reality, you could just go back to the changes in your behavior. One bad meal won’t ruin your diet, just like one good meal won’t fix your weight problem.)

This happens in business too. You try to do something, to make a change, to break away from a habit that’s holding you back. Maybe it’s procrastination. Maybe it’s being cheap when you shouldn’t. It can be all kinds of things.

Whether it’s a professional issue or a personal one, like my sugar problem was, you have to change the offending pattern of behavior, for the long term. That’s what it comes down to.

You have to do this *actively*. If you’re not conscious of your behavior, and don’t actively go against the grain, you’ll fall back into a “homeostasis,” because the patterns are ingrained.

You go back to a “set point,” to what’s comfortable.

You have to change that set point. You have to make the new behavior pattern your new default.

My friend Ben Ahrens, who has a great podcast, is writing a book right now on “set point theory.”

And the thing is, it works best if you change that set point by changing your behavior gradually, and consistently. You’re working towards a “new normal.”

Will you stress eat a bag of Doritos again at some point in your life? Sure.

But that isn’t a failure. It’s just a stumble.

You did what you did. Fine. Go back to the new pattern. Eat clean again tomorrow, and every day again after that.

You’ll trip and fall. It happens. But you have to get back up. Don’t just sit there on the floor and mope.

Now, this doesn’t always work in every single case. I’m talking about confronting habits like procrastination, or poor eating habits, or lack of exercise, or too much sugar. This isn’t for substance addiction or anything super serious like that, and I do want to make that much clear.

But over time, when you have more good days than bad, and keep moving forward more than you trip and fall over, you can gradually shift that “set point.”

You create a new normal for yourself. Your old normal was eating too much on a daily basis.

Your new normal is a healthy, balanced, calorically sensible diet with just a tiny bit of sugar every now and again.

Will you eat a pint of ice cream while sobbing and binge watching Netflix a year from now after a bad breakup?

Yeah. Stuff happens. That’s okay. The point is, that isn’t your normal anymore.

Shift your set point, and create a new normal for yourself. That’s the real solution for behavioral change — whether you’re fighting a bad habit in your personal life, or trying to change a problem you’re having in your business.

Want to Get Things Done Right? Here’s the Question You SHOULD Be Asking.

June 10, 2018 by Ari Meisel

Are you focusing on “Who” or “How” as a Founder?

Being a founder means figuring out how to make things happen.

You start with an idea, some great new thing that you want to make happen.

The first question your mind comes to is usually this: “How?”

How can I bring this product to life, turning an idea into something tangible?

How can I market this, getting it in front of the right people at the right time?

How can I get the funding I need?

How can I make this profitable?

There are a lot of “hows” involved here, and they’re all important and legitimate questions.

But in the midst of all these “hows,” founders miss another question that’s even more important: “who?”

Businesses are made up of people. Sure, some things can be automated here and there. Physical products can sometimes be made completely by robotic equipment in factories. Some kinds of business tasks can be partly or fully automated, like bookkeeping or data entry.

But people are the heart and soul of commerce, and as of today, there is no business in existence that doesn’t have people at its core.

“Who” Over “How”: Why Planning Should Start With People

Many of the things you need to plan and figure out as a founder have a huge “how” factor.

Examples include things like social media marketing, sales funnels, and other sales and marketing operations.

The processes are important, sure. But if you want to get anywhere with them, you need to make sure you have the right people first.

People with the right knowledge and skills to make things happen. Even the most well optimized and well planned processes can’t be put into place effectively without the right people running them.

Delegation is key.

Of course, it’s a little more complicated than just “delegate things to get more done.”

Delegation isn’t one thing, it’s more of a spectrum.

That spectrum runs from “do exactly what I say, verbatim,” at one end, to “do whatever you think is best, as long as it gets done” at the other.

Domino Delegation

My friend Joe Polish runs the Genius Network event.

His domain name is “TheFirstDomino,” and there’s a reason for that.

It’s because of how human connections create chains of causality that ultimately get things done.

Joe himself is “the first domino.” He’s the “first mover” in this scenario.

When you know Joe, and you need something done, you can get what you need through his network.

Joe passes it along to a resource you need, the second domino, which connects you to someone or something else, and so on.

Joe gets as much done as possible… while doing as little as possible himself.

As that First Mover, he also makes sure the people who come to him actually know what they need. He won’t hit the next domino until he’s sure.

He’ll ask things like, “Why do you think you need that?”, or suggest, “You actually don’t need that person, you want this person instead.”

As First Domino, Joe makes sure that when he falls, the next domino he hits will be the right one.

He does this by having a great selection of go-to people, the “second dominos.”

Find Your Go-To People

Founders are skilled innovators and business developers. You might also have some other relevant skills, depending on your professional background.

You might be a copywriter, or a web developer, or a social media marketer.

But your business will inevitably need things for which you’re not necessarily the best person.

That’s where your “go-to people” come in.

Rather than figuring out the “how” in areas you’re not familiar with, find the right “who,” the person who already has the “how” part down perfectly.

Tons of successful founders have these “go-to” people. A go-to app developer, a go-to copywriter, a go-to marketing consultant.

Knowing the right people is essential here. This type of “domino delegation” gets things done faster, more efficiently, and a lot more effectively than trying to wear all the hats yourself and figure out the “hows” independently.

Ask “Who,” Not “How”

Next time you have a problem, or you need something done, don’t ask “how.”

Ask “who.”

Don’t ask, “How can I construct an effective sales funnel?”

Ask, “Who do I know that knows sales funnels better than anyone else?”

This goes for just about everything. By using “domino delegation” for anything outside your core areas of expertise, you can focus a lot more effectively on what you are good at, while making sure all those other things get done well.

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