[Part 1 of 2] How to sprint your way out of boredom and into engagement

Hey everybody. This is Calvin, your favorite Simpleros CEO.

I want to talk to you today about momentum. Juice. Getting the flow going.

So one of the things that I love to do and I've kind of discovered over the years is a little bit of a super power of mine is the ability to just get a ton of shit done in a short amount of time. Not always, not consistently, but look at it. Like Simplero was built basically by mainly by two people and most of it historically by me. And we have a platform that easily competes against behemoths like Infusionsoft or the other Ontraport or compared to any of the other companies out there that has way more developers and resources. And some of them even been at it longer than we have and yet here we are with so few resources.

So how do you do that?

How do you get massive results with very few resources?

And I've been trying ... I've been sitting this morning, went down to do a swim and then afterwards I was sitting in the steam room and just thinking, like, "What is it? What is it that I do?" I don't know exactly. But I'm trying to share. I'm going to share a few things here. I want to wonder about it over the coming weeks or something and see if I can figure out how to distill this into something that I can possibly teach others. That was interesting. Siri caught on to something I said apparently said something that sounded like her. All right. So let me know if you Siri device as well went nuts over that one.

In any event, so here are my tricks so far.

So let's just go at this. Number one is posture matters. So kind of the if you're like sitting like this working then that energy's not going to get you very far. So you want more of like a okay, all right, let's do this. Let's figure this out, let's make this happen. And maybe sometimes you need to like just take a break and change room, change location, right? Like go somewhere else. I like in the afternoon to go ... there's a hotel near me that I like to go to and theN I'll sit there in the lobby and work and can just really, really focus on my work there. And it just helps to change the venue to find new energy. So that's one thing. Notice like your posture.

Your attitude to it. Are you like, "Let's work on this thing." You're like, "All right, let's get this thing done. Let's make it happen. Let's just you know knock it out." I like ... Tony Robbins had a phrase that I heard years ago called I think it was like MAP Massive Action Plan. The the idea is like as soon as you decide on a goal, you immediately take massive action. Like right there.

You don't sit on it, you don't wait.

Just immediately take massive action.

Not just take action but take massive action, right? So that attitude of like, "All right." Let's just not anymore than is necessary but just exactly what's necessary.

The other thing is when there's more than one person involved, get everybody together and just be like, "All right, guys, we're all going to do this now." Clear distractions. So this morning, I haven't checked my email yet. It's 9:24 and have not looked at the email, any of that stuff. Like if you're like, "All right, let's make this happen by tomorrow, by today, whatever." Then there are some things that you're going to have to let go of. Maybe you're not cooking dinner. Maybe you're not answering emails. Maybe there was like some other thing that you will deal with that tomorrow or the day after when we've done this thing because right now, we just want to get this thing done.

Clear all the distractions. Facebook, whatever.

Find the joy. It's really important that you enjoy the process.

It has to be fun. Like think of it like a game.

Like when you're maybe, I don't know ... as a kid with some friends and you were like all teaming up and playing this cave thing under the table with blankets and whatever not. Or you're a team that's like, "Yeah we're going to do this together as a team." Like it has to be that joy about it. It has to be fun, otherwise what's the point?

So here's another. Follow the energy. So yesterday I was able to get a ton of stuff done after talking to one of our customers or partners, as we like to call them. And just so many things that have kind of be sitting ... actually he's been talking to us for over a year and its just been like little nagging and not really getting to the point where we actually did anything about it. And now I've actually sat down and had a conversation with this guy for the first time and I was like, "All right, this makes sense." And so I had a list of the things that we talked about. And I was like let me just, today, just knock out all of these things and get them done. So I ended up just working 'til 9:30 - 10:00 PM and it felt good. It wasn't like, "Oh my God." It wasn't like, "Oh I have no personal life." Or anything. It just felt really awesome to just like, "All right, we talked about all these things. We talked about them for a while. Let me just figure it out, make it happen right now."

So follow that energy when it's there right after you talked about it to someone. Or right after you've discovered that this needs to be done.

Something else I managed to do yesterday was in Simplero, in the filters where you pick a value or filter by something, if there's a dropdown or if there's a ton of value options in that dropdown, it can be very hard to search and navigate. So I used a different component that makes that easier. You can do more fuzzy search in that. And replaced it and there's all kinds of little details around that but I was like ... I just felt right there, let me just do it. Let me just get it done and finish it. It took several hours but I'm glad I did, because I just ... it was right that moment that I felt the need and the desire to fix that thing.

And so when you're following that energy when it's there, that has tremendous power because there's something ... some energy ... just the momentum is there. Later, if you're like, "Oh yeah, I'll get around to that later. I'll put it on a list." And then you get to it later and the energy's gone. It's just not that excitement about it. There's not alive anymore. It's kind of dead. It's just been sitting there stale like a piece of bread or something and you're just like, "Ugh, this was a great a week ago. This was great two weeks ago but now it's just ugh."

So follow that energy and even if it means, like, all right. So now I'm going to do a sprint. I'm going to work a lot more hours. That's fine. Take tomorrow off. It doesn't matter. Use the energy when it's there. Don't be so rigid about, "Oh I have to work only these hours because that's whatever." And even if you are a family, you're a parent and you have kids and like what do you want to teach your kids? Do you want to teach your kids, "No, you can't follow your energy. You have to be really regimented and routine because blah blah blah." Or do you want to teach your kids excitement about work and excitement about life and the stuff that you do? And then you'll figure it out. You're like, "Hey, great, we'll get take away tonight." Or something, right? There's ways around it. And think about how you want your children to live. Do you want them to have that joy and excitement and learn those methods of just making shit happen around you? Making great stuff happen around you.

All right, a couple more tips here.

Focus on the outcome.

So when you're doing stuff and then you kind of get stuck and then you're ... remember, what is the big picture goal here? What is it we're trying to accomplish here? So zoom out and just keep focusing on that. Drive to completion. Try to find the energy to actually finish this thing right now, while you're doing it. It's so annoying to have to like clean up that thing later. "Oh it's just 5% left." And then it ends up being 10. Well maybe it was more like 10% or 20% or really a lot more because there are things that you didn't realize and then because the energy's not there anymore it ends up taking a lot longer. And it's just, you know, not as fun. And you forgot some stuff that you had in your mind right then that you don't have in your mind then, et cetera. So like drive it to completion if at all possible while you're at it. Just like get it done, finish it up. Put a bow on it. Right? This attitude of just making it happen.

The other thing. So when you get stuck, shake the box. Shake the box.

So that could mean like get up and take a break, it can mean just like switch over and work on something else for a little bit. Maybe there's some other things that need to be done. I like to have a little to do list of just tiny things that when I'm working on one thing that I need to done and I get stuck on one thing and I'm like, "All right, let's just shake the box." Move to one of the other things, and then when I come back to the first one, chances are I'm going to have new insights and new ideas. You can also do what I talked about before change the venue. Like go to a different coffee shop or a different place or whatever can give you a fresh rush of energy. Not talking about the caffeine here, just the different location. Just getting up. Supposedly just walking is fantastic for our creativity.

My aunt taught me this thing with cross ... I forget what it's called but like basically if you walk with your right foot forward and your left arm forward and then, like, shift so you're crossed it helps that left right brain connection. So that can be a good exercise, a good thing. And then new insights and new stuff, ideas, spark into your head. And then you can move forward and you release the energy again. Right? So keeping that going.

Finally it's okay to make mistakes.

It's okay to fuck up and be like, "We don't need to worry about that right now." Or, "We'll fix that later." And just, when you're making shit happen, don't be afraid of making mistakes. Most mistakes can be fixed later, right? I mean, most of what we do here is nobody is going to die. It's just like somewhat people might be upset a little bit. And actually had that experience yesterday, where we had done our black Friday sale and that was exactly this way. We're just like, all right, a week before we're like, "Let's do a sale." "All right. What do we want it to be?" "Okay, let's figure it out." And then everybody goes on vacation because it's Thanksgiving. And we're scrambling to try to make things work. And then there's a bug that caused the price to show as like $2,500 dollars instead of $10,000 dollars, which is a dramatic difference. And of course someone got kind of miffed by that. And we're like, "Let's have a conversation."

And I was like, "Fuck, why do we do that? Like why didn't we double check and triple check and get someone to quadruple check all the things?" It was like all these combinations of things and its hard. It was literally like a five character coding mistake. It was like missing ... I had written ... it was me that had done this. I had written .plan instead of ... it shouldn't have had .plan in there. Stupid stilly little thing. Anyway, but the beautiful thing was what it led to was actually jumping on a call, having a conversation with this person. And we had an awesome conversation and just bonded so much. And we found a good resolution to the issue at hand. Plus a bunch of other things. And so net net was actually ended up being a massive win because chances are I wouldn't have jumped on a call with this guy anytime soon. Not for any particular reason other than I didn't have a particular reason to do that, which I realize now I should have done that years ago. I didn't and here was the excuse. And the excuse was that we'd made a mistake.

So making a mistake and fucking up is not horrible.

It's really an opportunity to really connect with people.

I like to think of it as friction.

You kind of want to create some ... you don't want to necessarily but like creating friction is a good thing. In relationships, when there's friction it means that you have something to connect over and something to talk about. And that can create the connection. If everything's completely frictionless, then you just like walk by each other. Like if you were walking down the street and everybody's like walking ... or then you bump into someone. Then, whoa, all of a sudden there's connection there. Now we're talking, right? There's like, "Oh, sorry, yeah. I'm fine." But let's just like ... and maybe you end up falling in love and getting married. Or what do I know?

Or if you're at your local coffee shop that's not called something that rhymes with mucks. Just kidding. And like the barista spills your coffee or something breaks down or whatever. Like that's when you have an opportunity to actually strike a connection and conversation and talk to people.

So friction can actually be a good thing. So don't be too afraid of making mistakes.

I think those are my tips so far. I think I want to try to distill this down and really figure out what the hell it is that I do that makes this possible, because there seems to be something. And yeah, I want to share that super power with you and of course with my team. And that's what I've got for you today. Cheers everybody. Hope you're all excited about this Wednesday. Talk to you soon. Bye.

Calvin Correli.