Author: Phil Garland

Phrases Have Truth

Two phrases that we often hear from a young age “Talk is cheap” and “Action speaks louder than words” are fundamentally true. Although those phrases are usually overused by the media, in an office, or by a parent, the value they provide is quite high.

Talk is Cheap

I can talk all day about the things I want to do, the ideas I have, the business I could create, and the world I want to live in. I can complain to friends and family about how my boss treats me, that it’s unfair I have to do chores, that I don’t like dealing with certain decisions. In these instances talk is either used to project an idealistic future, or complain about a changeable circumstance.

It’s cheap to talk. Saying you’ll do something or saying you’re unhappy is a cry for attention. Instead, maybe you should be focusing on doing something, building a company or changing your situation at the job you hate. Doing is far more valuable than talking.

Action Speaks Louder Than Words

I’m not sure if the saying is “Actions speak” or “Action speaks” but I like the latter version better. Action starts with doing something small. If I say I want to start a business I need to take a single action. Maybe I research how I would build a business, or start developing a product in my mind. I don’t simply take actions, I take calculated action. Each action builds on the previous action and creates the business on its own.

Nobody likes hearing you complain. Instead of talking about your miseries maybe you should reflect on why the miseries exist, what you can do to fix them, and then put your plan into action. It starts by doing. The truest path to walking the walk is to start walking. Instead of talking about your fortunes and misfortunes you should take responsibility for yourself.

Action is Taking Responsibility

By taking responsibility of your actions you are able to become the person you want to become, and not the person nobody wants to be around.  Responsibility is about being fully in control of your mind. Once you have developed your mind you can start assessing plans of action to achieve the things you want.

Action is about doing. Words are about dreaming. The only way to arrive at your dream is to shut up and start doing.

Fiverr is Amazing

Yesterday I was in a hurry to ship something, I had most of the pieces together but needed one last finishing touch. Remembering The $100 MBA challenge I went to Fiverr and searched for what I needed: An excel graph. Yes, I’m very capable in excel, but I figured someone out there could make a prettier graph than I could.

I had never used Fiverr and I had just left my house to head to the office. I logged onto the Fiverr website, did my search, found a 5 star excel person, logged into PayPal, downloaded the app and was immediately asked to send what I wanted. I typed in the data set and walked to work. By the time I was in the office I had a notification that my data set was now a bar graph. Is that not amazing?

Working is Overvalued, Knowledge is Not

How many times have you said “If only I had more time?” or “I’m sick of doing the same mundane tasks over and over.” In the palm of your hands you can summon a person from anywhere in the world to do almost anything you want. And within a timely fashion. And from someone you trust (remember, I used a person with 5 stars). You don’t have to have more time, but more knowledge of who can create value without wasting your time.

What’s better than working? Having someone work for you. Fiverr is full of people who will do almost anything you want. And for cheap! All it takes is having knowledge of what is being offered.

I could’ve easily made the bar graph. Once I received the excel file I realized that’s within my capabilities. But I didn’t have to do anything to make it. I typed 50 letters into a text message. That’s it. For $6 ($5 + $1 processing fee).

Decentralizing Work

This will be a larger blog post in the near future, but we are entering a time when we can be truly comparative advantageous. In the words of Dr. Thomas Rustici, comparative advantage is “doing what you do best and trading for the rest.” In an interconnected world we can focus on doing the stuff we enjoy, selling ourselves on sites like Fiverr, and use our earnings to enjoy things we want in life.

Again, it’s truly an amazing time to be alive.

Defeatism

When I think back over the years, graduating high school, graduating college, working at CPA firms and now a startup, I have a feeling of regret. I wish 26 year old me could go back to 16 year old me and say “Fuck the system, go build your dream tomorrow.” But that’s the defeatist approach.

My Approach

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” – Chinese Proverb

Yes, it would be great to have a time machine, teach my 16 year-old self the basics of starting a business/entrepreneurship, and watch myself grow into the person I’m starting to become now. Since time machines haven’t been invented I am choosing the second best option: Now. We can only change ourselves from today on. Whatever you did yesterday, last month, four years ago has no impact on you becoming a better version of yourself today. If you truly want to be free and live life to the fullest you have to actively change yourself. Not your past self, but today’s self.

My approach to changing my today’s self has a lot to do with learning me. What makes me tick? What makes me happy? When I feel angry, why? Am I doing stuff I hate? These questions aren’t something my past self thought about. And they’re not a burden for my future self to tackle. They are the quest for my present self. If I’m happy I try to reflect on my happiness and put myself in that situation more often. If I’m angry I try to think about why, take a couple deep breaths, and work on a happy resolution. And  if I’m doing something I hate, I actively try to find the best way out. These are all things that can be done today and are not tied to the person you were but the person you want to become.

Be a Gardener Today

Don’t become a square peg for the square hole. That would be a shame. Become a shape that doesn’t fit any cookie cutter (a bonsai tree, perhaps!). We should be creating our own path forward and not be afraid to step beyond our comfort level. And it starts with now. Don’t put it off until you think you’re ready. Do it today. Start transforming yourself into the person you want to become, and you’ll look back to your past-self seeing your growth each day. Become a gardener and plant your wildest dreams right now.

Redundant How-To’s

Before writing this post I decided to Google “How to get better at blogging.” It’s amazing how many results there were (4.84 million). I opened seven different tabs and read each post on becoming a better blogger. Here’s what I learned:

1. There are 2 million blog posts each day
2. It’s all about content
3. In order to make money you need to optimize your blog with all sorts of add-ons and SEO (search engine optimization)
4. Blah blah blah

To some blogging may be a profession, a way to generate income, a means to gaining clients or selling something. That’s great, there are a ton of How-To’s to get you there. Honestly, for this blog I don’t care.

Motivation for Blogging

As I posted yesterday, blogging daily for me is about forming a habit. I am not blogging for money, to gain a massive following, or any other reason outlined in the How-To blog posts. The idea behind blogging daily is to do something day-in/day-out, make sure to ship something, and eventually see the results in improved writing and increased knowledge. It’s also about putting my thoughts into the world and not being afraid of other people reading my ideas.

Be True to You

If I’m going to be one of the two million blog posts everyday, I am going to write something true to myself. I am trying to get better. I am trying to dedicate a portion of my day turning my thoughts into words. I am not going to over-analyze my content in order to gain followers. I am not trying to increase my blogosphere community.

I have determined my motivation for blogging: To create a better me. Whatever motivates you to do whatever you do, I think it’s best to do it for yourself. Yes, generating income is doing something for yourself, but it’s important to stay true to your beliefs while doing it. One of my favorite quotes is “Decide what you stand for and then stand for it all the time” by Clayton Christensen. Being free is about holding ourselves accountable and that means living by what we deem to be right in whatever situation we find ourselves in.

 

Bad Habits

When we think of habit we usually think about bad habits. Even the definition of habit is about something to give up: A settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up. To us, habits include dieting, quitting smoking, stopping drinking, all habits that are bad. Yes, bad habits need to be recognized and extinguished, but I think the definition is missing a key point.

Great habits can have a profound impact on us but great habits are really hard to cultivate.

Cultivating Great Habits

About a week ago I posted about being an Entrepreneur, Founder, or Employee and by my definition an entrepreneur is someone who deliberately works day-in, day-out. Deliberate work involves painstakingly developing great habits. Yes, people can be born with skills, but those skills need to be honed. Habits are the tool to sharpen your skills.

There are plenty of books, blogs, philosophers, and podcasts that will help in habit formation, I am not going to list them here, but you probably know where you could find them. The point is, there is so much literature on the subject of cultivating great habits because it’s what helps us accomplish success. Habits allow us to put X, Y, and Z together to create XYZ. They are the engine that moves ideas from imagination to reality.

Impact of Great Habits

The development of great habits leads to many successes. The impact of blogging daily has been hugely beneficial to me. Not only have I found blogging to be easier, my writing skills improving, and my thirst for more knowledge constantly growing, it’s become part of my daily checklist. It’s taught me that building the habit creates the mindset that I need to accomplish more.

The foundation that blogging has created, “basement building”, is something bigger than I thought it would be. Instead of thinking I can build a nice two-story house with a garage and maybe a nice backyard, I now see the skyscrapers I can build. The impact has been immense and I’ve realized I need to start applying it to other great habits.

Back to Basics

I am fully aware of the great habits that make me successful. Exercising daily, reading interesting blogs and books, learning about new businesses, drinking less, getting fresh air, and eating Paleo. These are all habits I’ve developed before. Sometimes I get caught up in the rat race of life and don’t do my great habits. But that will not lead me down the path I want to go.

My 30-day challenge: Get back to basics. Exercise, reading, learning, outdoors, strict Paleo and drinking far less are all part of my checklist. For the next 30 days I will mindfully check off each of these things, day-in, day-out. Although it might seem small, these are the things I need to start my next chapter. And within 30 days these habits will become my foundation on which I can start my skyscraper. It starts with getting my basics back.

This is a “pre-recorded” blog post. I am currently hiking Grays and Torreys Peaks. My first, and probably only, fourteeners of Summer 2016. Fourteener is the name for the 54 (or 58 depending on your source) 14,000 ft and above peaks in the Colorado Rocky Mountains.

What I’m Listening To

Big Gigantic – All of Me which is on the “Indie Electronics” playlist on Spotify.

My Blogging Future

I’m nearing 30 straight days of blogging! I have decided I will continue blogging and focus on writing longer blog posts. Doing the blog challenge has showed me I am capable of doing more. My goal for the next 30 days is to really challenge myself to become a better writer and find my niche.

That’s all I have. Hopefully I have a new post on Monday, if not please call mountain rescue, I’m probably stuck on Grays or Torreys.

Doom and Gloom: Robots are taking over the world

We’ve all seen a movie, read a sci-fi book, or caught a glimpse of the former Governor of California kicking robot butt, in which robots take over the world and it’s up to the protagonist to save civilization. It’s a popular script for Hollywood, and has bred a sense of fear towards robots.

But, robots are all around us. Robots are already driving cars for Uber, picking boxes to be shipped by Amazon, putting your cars together, and soon might be pushing your shopping cart at Walmart. Taking robots away today would be a step back, the only step forward is embracing robots.

Technology’s Frantic Pace

In the podcast Exponential Wisdom Dan Sullivan and Peter Diamandis discuss applications of Moore’s Law, the law which states technology, specifically the number of transistors in a chip, doubles every two years. Both hosts agree that the doubling trend will continue into the foreseeable future.

What does this mean? This means we are living in a world where manual labor is being outsourced by robots, the capabilities of robots will continue to double every two years, and our day-to-day tasks will almost assuredly be replaced by robots.

Cannibalizing our jobs today

John Hagel blogs at Edge Perspective and has some wonderful posts on robots taking our jobs. They can be found in full here and here. I am going to pull some of his passages as they apply to the cannibalization of our day-to-day jobs.

Our Day-to-Day Activities

Almost all work tasks we do on a daily basis have evolved from the Industrial revolution, and the need to produce things at scale. The model can be described as scalable efficiency. What are its core components?

1. Tightly specify all activities required to generate output.
2. Highly standardize all of those activities so that they are done in exactly the same efficient way anywhere in the organization.
3. Tightly integrate all of those activities so that we remove all of those inefficient buffers that often separated activities required to yield a specific output.

These are the same principles Henry Ford adopted in the making of Model Ts and what tech startups aim for today. But, do you know who’s really good at completing tasks laid out in the scalable efficiency model? Machines. Robots are really good at completing algorithms and pre-defined, scalable processes. As more and more of our tasks become outlined processes, and robots become more capable of outlining our processes, the day-to-day activities of humans will shrink and be automated away.

Our Future Activities

Since the mundane, scalable tasks will be taken over by machines, what are we left with? Hagel states, “Ultimately the jobs of the future will focus on serving four basic human needs – exploration, connection and creation as well as the learning required to do the first three more effectively.” Instead of working for companies, we will be living a world of entrepreneurship, each one of us being a small business providing one of the four basic needs, preferably all four. It will allow us to find creative uses of our time and to create a profit. This may seem scary for some, but there are ways to prosper.

 

Setting Ourselves Up for Success

We can prepare ourselves for a future without mundane tasks, and free of day-to-day busy work, by focusing on the things that work towards, exploring, connecting and creating. This will unleash creativity and more time to play with innovations, as noted in this post on Singularity Hub called The End of Meaningless Jobs

Automation certainly won’t mean the death of human work. In the best of all possible worlds, it will mean an end to work that is unfulfilling. For some, that would mean time spent creating and inventing, for others that might mean a lot of time spent playing with all those new creations and inventions.

Creativity, arts, and finding fulfilling hobbies will all be part of the future. We can use our time doing things that make us uniquely human. These are things that machines aren’t capable of. Human to human interactions, love, painting, poetry, enjoying the outdoors – the things that we look at as leisure today – will become our day-to-day “jobs”. Our place in the economy will go from being enslaved to manual labor to opening our creative minds to the world.

Optimism

You shouldn’t be afraid of robots taking over the world like in I-Robot or some sci-fi future like The Matrix, you shouldn’t even be afraid of robots taking over our jobs. Instead you should be thinking “good riddance”. Robots will allow us to be us, human. We will be freed of the mundane tasks that frustrate us on a daily basis and be able to focus on our creative human desires. More from Hagel:

Rather than view this new wave of technology as a threat, we need to view it as an opportunity to redefine work at a very fundamental level. If we do it right, we might actually be able to evolve a form of work that taps into our uniquely human capabilities and restores our humanity. The ultimate paradox is that this technology may become the powerful catalyst that we need to reclaim our humanity.

We can, and must, embrace machines in order to be fulfilled going forward. Although our current jobs will be taken from us, our humanity will be restored, and we can shift our focus towards creativity.

It truly is a great time to be alive.

Fun fact: Ten Thousand Hours by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis is one of my favorite songs. The Heist [Deluxe Edition] by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis is one of my favorite albums (don’t judge). And Macklemore has my favorite Tiny Desk performance.

And my favorite verse? “The greats weren’t great because at birth they could paint, the greats were great because they paint a lot”

Ten Thousand Hours

According to Outliers by Malcom Gladwell, once you spend 10,000 hours doing a certain task you become an expert. Although that has been debunked, see 10,000 hours myth, the idea still holds true. In order to be great at anything you want to do, you have to do it a lot. That’s part of the 30-day blog challenge.

You won’t become a better blogger, or writer, by saying “Hey, I want to be a writer”. You do it by shipping words. Putting your ideas into sentences, combining those sentences, building paragraphs resulting in posts. The posts add up. I have almost written 20,000 words. But how did I get here?

Fundamentals

I grew up playing a lot of sports. Basketball was my favorite. In the 3rd grade I started attending basketball camps full-time (Thank you parents for funding me!). Our camps always started with dribbling skills, followed by defensive drills and finally arriving at offense and shooting. Although we all wanted to be Kobe, firing shots from 28′, our coaches insisted we focus on the fundamentals. Yes, offensive strategy and shooting form was taught, but being able to dribble, pass and play defense is what wins games.

We learn fundamentals in almost everything we do whether it’s school, work, hobbies or blogging. The fundamentals are what create the foundation, the launching point of something bigger. For this blog I turned the dribbling drills into Google searches like “How to start a blog?”, “How do I buy a domain?”, “Should I use a hosting company?”. Slowly, but surely, I’m connecting the dots, all because I started with fundamentals.

The Sky’s the Limit

I have proven to myself I can tackle a blogging challenge, find the necessary skills to make it happen, and even start other projects. I  know I can achieve what I put my mind to. And although the 10,000 hours “test” may be a myth, the idea holds true. If I practice over and over eventually I will have the skill set necessary for what I want to become. There is something of value in challenging yourself to step outside of your boundaries, work hard to develop the appropriate skills, and do it day in, day out.

 

Not much in the tank tonight to write a blog post. I have revised an older post. Enjoy!

Coffee Studies

There are plenty of studies claiming that drinking coffee is unhealthy, plenty claiming coffee is healthy and some claiming moderation is key. I’ve read various studies to learn more about coffee drinking. I don’t want to drink something that might result in long-term health issues like cancer or heart disease, however, I find my daily couple cups of coffee are necessary for cleansing reasons. I know how my body reacts and no study will change my habit.

That is also why I have taken up an interest in diets. I’ve tried the typical American diet, vegetarianism, veganism, and am currently Paleo. None of these diet attempts are for losing weight, an environmentalist heart, or the desire to become a caveman. I can read studies, find success stories, read about the failures of the diet, but without knowing how it will interact with my body, I have no idea what is best for me.

Diets are for the Individual

Choosing a diet isn’t about the latest fad but what works best for you. It’s much easier to find that out by figuring out how your body reacts to certain diets.

Next time someone tells you they’re on a diet ask them questions about why they’re on it and how they feel. Be inquisitive instead of making a snooty comment. Maybe try a “fad” diet yourself. It could turn out to have benefits you weren’t expecting.

As part of the $100 MBA challenge, which I outlined in yesterday’s post, I challenged myself to ship a product in 24 hours.

Accounting Over Coffee (www.accountingovercoffee.com) is the product I am shipping. My motto “Providing custom accounting solutions over a (virtual) cup of coffee”. My first product: Invoicing for freelancers.

If you are a freelancer with Net terms, as in you’re getting paid at a later date than when services were performed, then I want to handle your invoicing!

I will also provide free accounting consultations where we can talk about any accounting problem you have, ways to fix those problems and even teach you how to issue/track your invoice.

The idea of the product is to help freelancers track their finances and cash flow.

If you know any freelancers who may need invoicing or accounting help, send them my way! I can be reached at [email protected].