9 Daily Habits for Business Success

The Transcript

9 Daily Habits for Business Success

Brian Clark: This episode of Unemployable is brought to you by StudioPress Sites, the innovative solution that gives you the ease of an all-in-one website builder with the flexible power of WordPress. It’s perfect for bloggers, podcasters, and affiliate marketers, as well as those selling physical products, digital downloads, and membership programs. Check out all the amazing features today at StudioPress.com.

Robert Bruce: Welcome to Unemployable, the show for people who can get a job, they’re just not inclined to take one, and that’s putting it gently. In addition to this podcast, thousands of freelancers and entrepreneurs get actionable advice and other valuable resources from the weekly Unemployable email newsletter. Join us by registering for our free Profit Pillars course, or choose to sign up for the newsletter only at no charge. Simply head over to Unemployable.com and take your business and lifestyle to the next level. That’s Unemployable.com.

Brian Clark: What’s happening out there, unemployable people? Welcome to the show. I’m your host, Brian Clark, founder and CEO of Rainmaker Digital, the company that brings you StudioPress, the Rainmaker Platform, and Copyblogger. I’m here, of course, with the voice, Mr. Robert Bruce. How are you, Robert?

Robert Bruce: I’m well, Brian. I’m sitting in front of a blue light because we’re in, I think, the 100th day of rain up here. It’s actually a blue light that Kelton Reid sent me a couple of years ago. It’s the kind of thing that keeps you from hanging yourself in the depths of winter weather.

Brian Clark: You know, you could move to Colorado where we have sun.

Robert Bruce: I’ve heard that. You also have snow.

Brian Clark: It’s not that bad. You can actually slap planks on your feet and turn it into a sport.

Robert Bruce: Slap planks on … Yeah, at this point I’ll take anything but rain.

Brian Clark: Explain this blue light thing. Is this some quackery? If Kelton’s involved it probably is.

Robert Bruce: It probably is. Yeah, it’s a known quantity in the scientific community, in the show notes I’ll drop all the links to scientific papers about it. No, I will not be doing that.

Brian Clark: I didn’t think so. I thinking to myself, “Is he serious?”

Robert Bruce: Well, what is it? It’s like UV. We first came across it in Seattle. You can buy light bulbs that are like full spectrum light bulbs. I don’t understand the thing behind it and it probably is pure … What do you call it when you take a sugar pill?

Brian Clark: It’s a placebo.

Robert Bruce: A placebo, exactly. But as long as nobody tells me that this is a placebo, Brian, the blue light will continue to work. So you might have just ruined my only escape from the rain of an undisclosed location in Oregon.

Brian Clark: What I’d like you to do is admit to the audience, be honest — it’s a tanning bed.

Robert Bruce: I have no idea what you’re talking about. I can’t possibly imagine any …

Brian Clark: As white as you are, you can refute that pretty easily.

Robert Bruce: That’s right, it’d be pretty easy to do. That’s not a bad idea. Actually, I have to say, a lot of people do that here for the same reason. They just go lay in a tanning bed for whatever, half hour, and get their “sun.”

Brian Clark: Interesting.

Robert Bruce: As a way to battle — it’s SAD. It’s Seasonal Affective Disorder. I do not have that, I won’t go that far. But man, it gets old.

Brian Clark: I love the pacific northwest for that three weeks in summer where it’s nice.

Robert Bruce: That’s right.

Brian Clark: That’s when I come up, hang out, and leave.

Robert Bruce: Yep. You’ve got to plan that trip, by the way, for this coming summer.

Brian Clark: I’ll get it done. I will.

Robert Bruce: I ran across a little article on Entrepreneur.com, and I wanted to shoot this your way. It’s one of these listicle deals that everybody likes to mock. Everybody loves, but also loves to hate. The title of this article is “9 Things You Should Be Doing Daily If You Want To Be More Successful In Business.” How could you not read that? I don’t see, let me give credit where …

Brian Clark: Is this one of these expert roundup things?

Robert Bruce: I think it is. I’m trying to find the author. Obviously we’ll link to it in the show notes, but I don’t want to go without attribution. Anyway, it’s not obvious here. But yeah, this writer got a bunch of people together to give their advice on these nine different points. I thought it would be interesting to run these nine points by you and get your take on it, if that works for you. What do you think?

Brian Clark: So you mean value-added listicle, I hope.

Robert Bruce: I think that might be the worst phrase I’ve heard in a week. Value-added listicle. Yeah, that’s good, let’s run with that.

Continuously Define Success For Yourself

Robert Bruce: Okay, let’s just jump into it. So this is, again, “9 Things You Should Be Doing Daily If You Want To Be More Successful In Business.” Number one: continuously define success for yourself. Darrah Brustein says, “The foundation of this question lies in defining for yourself what success means, and regularly evaluating how you’re doing against your own metrics. For me, it’s based on freedom of my time and how I spend it. When I get to call the shots about when I work, where I work and what I’m doing with my time, that is success to me.” So define it for yourself. What do you say?

Brian Clark: Given that it’s one of the major themes of this show, I’m going to have to go ahead and agree with Darrah. The reason why I continue to harp on this whole, “Trust me, freedom is more important than things like money and status” — even if you also get money and status, if you had to trade something, don’t give up your freedom. I think, more and more, everyone’s on the same page about that.

We’re still hearing about the uber entrepreneurs — no pun intended, Travis — all the Elon Musks and shoot-for-the-moon types. But I think everyone gets that it’s a media construction. That the number of entrepreneurs playing at that level is small, and the number of entrepreneurs that aspire to achieve that has an incredibly high failure rate. And, as we suggested last week, even some entrepreneurs who succeed at that type of heavily capital-intensive entrepreneurism — disruption, changing the entire world-type thing — a lot of those people really aren’t that happy.

We went through, I think it was a couple of years ago, where there was just a spate of Silicone Valley suicides from entrepreneurs. That is one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to Sherry Walling — we had her on several weeks back. She’s a psychologist talking about issues for entrepreneurs. But the rest of us can be afflicted by those things as well. Now, imagine the pressure on top of that. So yes, what does success mean for you? Like we talked about last week, if you can work for yourself and have the lifestyle you want — whether that means traveling, staying home with your kids, or just going to see Logan on a Tuesday afternoon.

Robert Bruce: Yes, or a Thursday night.

Brian Clark: It was our before-show conversation. I went to the movies on a Thursday afternoon because I decided as soon as I got my work done I was going. I was working later that night, but it didn’t really matter. I went to the movies in the afternoon. That’s what I wanted to do. But anyway, yeah, I agree. And I think from the feedback we’ve gotten from the audience, that’s what people are looking for. They’re not necessarily looking to even build a company like ours. It’s more like, “I want a company that serves me while I’m serving my customers and clients.”

Always Continue Learning

Robert Bruce: Okay, Chuck Cohn brings in number two, and that is: always continue learning. Basically he says, “No matter how successful you are, do not grow complacent in your knowledge. You can always learn new things and add habits. Keeping up with industry publications and such.” You talk a lot about this in terms of learning — with looking outside of your industry maybe even more than inside, right?

Brian Clark: Yeah, I think that’s where I get my best ideas. It’s interesting, because just last week on Further I wrote about two types of learning. I led off with … I went to this conference on presentation skills to learn more about the performance aspect of a presentation, meaning physical movement, the intentional performance of actions to create an experience instead of an information dump. That was me pushing myself in a completely new direction. I have no training in that whatsoever. Our friends, Michael Port and Amy Port are great at that, and if I ever do individual coaching I’ll hit them up for it, because they’re fantastic.

But the interesting thing about this particular conference was, half of it, as it would be, is about creating the content of the presentation itself. Now, we know a thing or two about that, and have been teaching people that over the last 11 years. I said in Further, it would be so easy for me to tune that out or even skip the day and a half that was devoted to that, but I honestly … I got a lot out of the physical stuff, don’t get me wrong. This woman, Victoria, studied under Marcel Marceau. That’s amazing stuff. But I loved the way she approached creating content. It wasn’t new to me, but it was different. It was a perspective that came from a different angle.

I talked about that in the context of approaching mastery. “You’re an expert at something. Do you want to be the best in the world?” Not me, necessarily. I want to be the best I can be. I agree. It’s a combination of, “Let’s learn something that takes me completely out of my comfort zone,” which is the performance stuff, “but let’s take another look from a different angle at stuff you do know, so that your understanding is enhanced.” And let’s be practical. At the speed of change, the pace that we’re operating at right now with technology, society, politics — everything. Man, you cannot afford to get complacent on learning.

Robert Bruce: An entrepreneur learning from a French mime.

Brian Clark: Well, he’s dead, but he was channeled appropriately.

Keep Your Eyes Open

Robert Bruce: That’s right. All right, Rakia Reynolds brings — I hope I’m saying that right — number three: keep your eyes open. The next one in this list. He or she — sorry, Rakia — makes the point, “I’ve learned to keep my eyes and ears open, not just for the things that are front and center, but the patterns and ideas that are gaining popularity behind the scenes.” This is one of those things where, if you get good at it, Brian, you can get to a place where it seems almost like you’re predicting the future.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and it takes constant awareness. I think that’s the right word. Observation is a one I use a lot. So keep your eyes open would make sense. But here’s a caveat, because I know a lot of people that are paying attention to the cutting edge so they can find the new and shiny, and then they go off on a tangent and get lost from what they were trying to accomplish in the first place. We notably do not do that.

For years, we had a new social media platform — whether it be Ello or Snap or Instagram, or whatever. These things can be valuable, I’m not saying they’re not, but there seems among some people to be this incessant chasing of the latest thing. Things are moving so fast, how in the world are you going to accomplish anything if you let every new shiny thing distract you from the core plan? If something comes along that is perfectly complimentary and supplements and enhances what you’re trying to do, then you have an obligation to embrace that. But most things aren’t like that, and that takes some discernment and some discipline, I think, to be aware without chasing your tail.

Be Persistent

Robert Bruce: All right. Robby Hill with number four, which is: be persistent. I personally think this should have been number one. He says, “It’s so simple — some people are born with this trait while others need to learn it. Starting something risky often means getting told ‘no’ countless times. The natural instinct is to stop trying and move on to something that is easier.” What do you think about this? Be persistent.

Brian Clark: Of course.

Robert Bruce: Actually, let me ask you this: what do you think of it, but also give us an example that you can think of in the early days where you were like, “… this. I’m out of here. This is too hard.”

Brian Clark: Yeah, I don’t know. Okay, here’s my take on this. I think a lot of people take perseverance or persistence … Once you’ve started doing the thing and you hit some road blocks, you’re like, “Oh, this is harder than I thought. Maybe I should go chase something new and shiny.” I think that may be related to the last one. Everyone’s looking for the next thing because the current thing looks like work.

I’m going to take a slightly different take on this one and say, your persistence should be up front, before you necessarily jump in. Now, I know there’s all this advice. “Jump and the net will appear.” “Fail fast.” All this stuff. But if you’re persistent up front — and that is really a matter of research, critical thinking, looking at various scenarios where things could go wrong, scenarios where things could be hard, and contemplating — up front perhaps — how you might route around that stuff.

This all relates to my favorite quote, which is from Albert Einstein. He said, “It’s not that I’m so smart. It’s just that I stay with the problem longer.” That’s it. I stay with the problem. Whatever intelligence or talent I have, it wouldn’t work without the application of that persistent staying with the problem. Then when you go out, you tend to have adequately surmised what the obstacles are and how to get through them without giving up.

It’s only when you face something hard that you didn’t think of at all. Sometimes it still happens, but if you can cut that down without never launching — which is the opposite problem. Other people think about it so long and they never do it. You’ve got to find that point where you’re going to go. I think a lot of people don’t put enough work in up front.

Be Generous

Robert Bruce: Number five is: be generous. This comes from Rahul, basically tapping into the idea of the more you give, the more you get. He talks about the idea of referrals. People discovering — through the unbelievable power, by the way, of referrals. And that relationships are all that matter to Rahul in business. It says that, “The key to building relationships is to be of service and to lead with generosity.” What do you think of this one? This one sounds very familiar.

Brian Clark: Yeah, come on. Generosity is one of our core principles, which is why we give as much valuable stuff as we can. We give up front, without expecting anything in return. A lot of people never give us anything in return, and that’s just fine. But, Robert, we do have to pay some bills here, so maybe we should talk about the sponsor for this episode before we proceed.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this a little bit today. If you go to StudioPress.com, I want you to look at a particular piece of microcopy up in the top-right corner that is three little words. It says, “Create a site.” I was thinking about this idea of what that means. What that has meant over the last 20 years of the Internet. What it means today. The big idea, the ability, basically, to easily create a site.

I think sometimes — many times — we take a lot of this power that we have at our fingertips for granted. You think about the old concept of he or she who has the printing press has the power. We all have this unbelievable power at this point in history, that whether you’re in business, whether you’re in the arts, whether you’re in journalism — whatever it is that you’re doing — we all have this ability to “create a site.”

What we’ve done with StudioPress and at StudioPress.com is, in the context especially for those who are creating an ongoing story — and a lot of you are using WordPress to do that. A lot of you even may have used StudioPress themes in the past. But one new way that we, in the last couple of weeks, put together and launched out into the world to do that — to create a site — is with what we call StudioPress Sites. That takes all of the headache, all of the pain out of these ideas of hosting and configuring WordPress, keeping up with things and managing the updates of your site, and essentially handles it for you.

There’s some specifics in there that we can get into, but you can see those on the page. More than going through those details, I just wanted to think for a moment and stop about that idea of the ability to create a site. So go to StudioPress.com. Realize where we are in this moment in history. Realize that it’s not too late. Brian, you’ve talked about that recently. The idea that you can create a site, it’s a pretty profound thing. So anyway, that’s it for this week, and that’s StudioPress.com.

Brian Clark: Well done. All right, let’s continue with our listicle. This is kind of fun.

Use New Technology to Automate

Robert Bruce: Yeah, number six, Nicole says, “Use new technology to automate.” She says, “I’m a firm believer in finding technological answers to some of my business challenges. The more I can automate, the more clients I can serve. This not only leads to excellent growth, but allows me to scale my services to a larger population of prospects and customers.” Automation, Brian, what do you think?

Brian Clark: On one hand … I want to put this in the show notes — the episode I did with Jennifer Bourn, who is a designer who takes high-end clients, that was fantastic. I got a lot of great feedback on that, and if you haven’t listened to it yet, you should. She’s talking about automation in the context of onboarding and client management. Robert, as you know, back in the day before Copyblogger, you could have sold me that technology pretty quickly if I would have taken five minutes to even think about fixing those type of issues in that business. It’s common. It’s hard to delegate, we talked about that last week.

But the amazing thing about automation now is … You still have to take that time. You know how people say, “If you do it one time and show someone else how to do it, you don’t ever have to do it again. But if you don’t, you’re going to do it again and again and again.” You still have to do that. But I wonder if some people don’t feel more comfortable using technology solutions rather than sometimes trying to deal with people. So that’s one aspect of it.

The other aspect is, of course — we sell a marketing automation platform in Rainmaker, and yet I started the year off going, “Look, if you don’t understand the fundamentals of how to connect with human beings at an emotional and psychological level, all you’re going to do is automate a bunch of crap.” So that’s how we took things back to basics and we went through five weeks of content marketing strategy and all of that stuff. Because it felt like the tech — with all the talk and machine learning, and then we’ve got AI — everything that’s on the horizon is a new and shiny. It’s a substantial one, and I think it’s one that none of us can afford to ignore. Which means, get on the human basics right now and make sure that is institutionalized into your business. Then automation can be an amazing asset both in bringing in new customers and clients and then working with them.

Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously

Robert Bruce: Number seven comes from Tomer, and that is: don’t take yourself too seriously. Tomer says, “The key to success for me has always been balancing approaching work seriously, but never taking myself too seriously.” He makes an interesting point, basically, to the idea of submission of the ego to the task at hand and to your audience in the context of what we do. Don’t take yourself too seriously.

Brian Clark: Yeah, this is a big one. It can be rare, because in this time of personal branding it seems people are taking themselves pretty damn seriously. More so about their image than necessarily their work. Not always, sometimes. Another one of my favorite quotes — I forget who said it, but it’s, “Always take your work seriously. Never take yourself seriously.” Those are words to live by. Serious work, but don’t let it turn to arrogance, pretension, all of these kind of things. I’ll be honest, I have the capacity for all of that stuff, so I’ve got to slap myself down.

Recently I went through a period where I started taking my position — thinking about it too seriously in the sense that I don’t consider myself a traditional CEO. I’m the face of company as the founder, but more and more it seems like a lot of times the CEO isn’t necessarily the first public face of the company. But when it comes to day-to-day stuff, I spend a lot of time in what looks more like a chief revenue officer job. I’m constantly focused on strategies for growth and then implementing and executing on those things. So I’m saying, “Am I not doing enough as a CEO because I don’t act like the stereotypical representation of a CEO?” Finally I woke up and I’m like, “What is wrong with you? Everything’s fine. The company’s still going fine. Who cares?”

I will say this, I think that’s an awareness that is healthy, in the sense that a lot of CEOs figure they’re entrenched, for example, if they have investors or whatever. And someday you get to feeling … They think someone else should be doing your job and it’s devastating. I don’t think that would bother me as long as I get to do the work I want to do, which brings us back to the point that I don’t really care what my title is. So I went through a period of taking things a little too seriously, only to come to the conclusion that ultimately I care about the work. It’s normal, but I think it’s an act of self-awareness to make sure that you don’t let that aspect of yourself get in the way of the work.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, normal for sure. Anybody who says they’re not struggling with this is a liar. This is a human thing, these struggles with the ego and all of that.

Brian Clark: It could be the central struggle of life, if you’re into the Buddha.

Robert Bruce: Wait, did this just turn into a different kind of podcast? I like that.

Brian Clark: This is now the Further Meditation podcast with Brian Clark and the dulcet tones of Robert Bruce.

Prioritize Your Customers’ Needs Over Your Own

Robert Bruce: Oooooh. Okay. Dan has number eight for us, which is: prioritize your customers’ needs over your own. That speaks for itself. He says, “Instead of pushing what you want to sell, find out what people want to buy, and sell that.” I’ll leave his description at that, but what do you think of this?

Brian Clark: Well, I was at this presentation conference with Jerod Morris — who we have to mention every episode, it seems. Also we have to make fun of him.

Robert Bruce: Why? Oh yeah, making fun of him is fine.

Brian Clark: I don’t know. Maybe you should make fun of him this time, because I think I did last time. I actually told Jerod he might show up as a third here, and then we could just make fun of each other in tandem.

Robert Bruce: I think that would be a great show.

Brian Clark: That would be a great show, although Jerod is the nicest person in the world and you and I are not.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, but he’s really smart, so when he wants to he can throw out a zinger that is unique, devastating.

Brian Clark: Yeah, you never see it coming too, it’s devastating.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, right.

Brian Clark: Okay, so Jerod’s there with me and there was a lot of stuff that we were exposed to that reminded us of ourselves, as I mentioned, which got us thinking beyond creating a presentation and more high-level visionary-type stuff for the company. We started talking about core values, and I touched on their importance in my content marketing strategy series. In this approach for the conference it was a called a through line, which is basically your core values propagated throughout your presentation, your content, and your narrative over time. Makes sense. That was one of those things where I’m like, “Hey, we call it something else, but it’s the same thing.”

So we started trying to jot down … Basically, it was pretty easy because our core values have been expressed through the content for over a decade, which is the reason why we can have a virtual organization and yet everyone is so tight, on the same page — philosophically and otherwise. Number one — I reduced it to audience-first. We were playing with language to think of the best way to express it, so it’s not finished.

Audience-first has come to mean — at least in the startup world — build an audience first and then figure out what products and services to develop, and that’s gaining a lot of traction. That’s what we’ve done, that’s what a lot of people have done. But that’s not what I meant. I meant exactly what this guy is saying. Put them first. Help them succeed. That’s so core, I don’t think you can do content marketing effectively without that mindset. You do have people, and I still run into them to this day — “I’m not giving a bunch of freeloaders free stuff if they’re not even going to buy anything from me.” I’m like, “You don’t understand marketing. Be off with you.”

Robert Bruce: Yeah, it goes back to that last bit about ego. This idea of, “I want to build and sell what I want to sell and everyone be damned.”

Brian Clark: Yeah, they feel like they’re being victimized. I’m like, “If you get more business out of it than you would have otherwise, how are you victimized? You’re not, you’re just successful.”

Robert Bruce: Yep, and by the way, if you want to build what you want to build and that’s that, that’s fine too, just you can’t complain if it doesn’t sell.

Brian Clark: Yeah.

Create a Daily Top Five

Robert Bruce: Last one, number nine, Bryanne says, “Create a daily top five.” This is basically a situation where she’s writing out the top five tasks that she wants to accomplish in that day and then categorizes them from high to low priority. So this is basically a focused list of the most of important top five things she needs to do today. Pretty basic, but again, profound advice if you actually … This is one of those things where everybody talks about it but nobody does it.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and you have to. I don’t even go for five. I’ve long said that whatever is the most important thing I have to do that day, that’s going to be the first thing I tackle — barring some emergency, which is incredibly rare. I basically would say I have a top two. One is, “What’s the most important thing that needs to get done and out the door?” That could be called an execution task. Then the second thing is always, “What’s the most important long-term, strategic aspect of our business that I need to push forward today to some degree?” It could be thinking through things. It could be outlining an idea for a campaign. It could be anything that’s not in your world, Robert, on a Trello card, but someday could become a Trello card.

Then, from those two things, your next tasks tend to naturally flow. You execute on something and you realize, “Okay, I need to reach out to either Jerod, Robert, Stephanie, or Lauren — whoever — and make sure that whatever …” I don’t need five, because some are going to emanate out of one. Then, oftentimes, I’ll think near-term stuff. For example, you’ll notice I tend to call you in the afternoon and change something completely, or at least somewhat. That happened yesterday, right?

Robert Bruce: Yes.

Brian Clark: You’re never going to hear from me at nine in the morning unless there’s a problem or I want to hear what you thought about Logan when you went to the movie the night before, that’s about it. Since our team is really jelled — I’ve got to say, you guys give me the freedom. All I really ask is, unless there’s an issue and it’s unavoidable, let me have my morning to work on those things. Then the rest of the day unfolds, and we make decisions and we make adjustments, and all that good stuff. If some people in Support heard this they’re going to laugh at me, but it generally doesn’t cause a fire drill. Every once in a while, but it’s only out of necessity.

Robert Bruce: Usually that one thing, let’s be honest, the most important thing is the copy or the certain copy that I need from you on a particular day. Could be a small thing, could be a longer … Just if we’re honest and if we’re just telling it like it is here, right?

Brian Clark: Yeah, absolutely. That’s why I don’t even like to commit to five things, because that generally suggests that I’m not really living in the moment of what I’m actually doing, if that makes sense. Keep one specific “got to be done today” thing, and then one “big picture for the future” thing. The rest of your day will fill up once you add in calls, emails, and things that come up from external sources, which, come on now, it always happens.

Robert Bruce: Always. Okay, well that is Brian Clark’s take on “9 Things You Should Be Doing Daily If You Want To Be More Successful In Business.”

Brian Clark: Hopefully that was the most useful listicle ever.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. Listicles always are.

Brian Clark: Now there goes my ego, right?

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: I thought it was good. No, honestly, that’s good advice. I usually see articles like that and … Some of the stuff, like you said, is basic. Everyone should be doing it and everyone should know better. And yet, when you get down to it, people aren’t doing it. They don’t quite accept it, or they don’t quite spend enough time thinking about, “How do I actually become more generous or more focused on what’s important or prioritizing customers’ needs above my own?” They sound like sound bites, but these are business principles that basically form the backbone of your business. So if you don’t have a tenth thing — I like how they only had nine, that really threw us off.

Robert Bruce: I will say this, if you’re going to do a listicle, I prefer odd numbers. I think you like the evens though, right?

Brian Clark: No, I’m an odd guy.

Robert Bruce: Okay, all right, good.

Brian Clark: Three, five, seven.

Robert Bruce: Yes.

Brian Clark: Usually 10 is the mainstay, the top 10. But it’s used so much that I kind of like nine.

Robert Bruce: Yep.

Brian Clark: All right, that was the tenth thing, listicle headline writing tips. All right, everyone, thanks for tuning in. I hope you got some value out of this. If you didn’t, it was Robert’s idea, and what am I going to do? We’ll be back next week with another show. In the meantime, thanks for listening. Keep going.