Strategy is Choosing What Not to Do + FridAI

Business brain, episode 645 for Casual Friday, May 2, international scurvy awareness Day. Also National Truffle Day. Are they related? I don't know. 2025. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take some ideas, we crunch them, we dissect them, we use them to tune all of our business brains collectively, individually, every single time we get together so that we can keep on living those charmed lives. Store.insta360.com is where you're going to go to check out the Insta360x5 camera, which is our sponsor for today. And promo Code Brain gets the first 30 of you that order an X5 of free invisible selfie sticks. So we'll talk more about that in a little bit. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And here in Lafayette, California, I'm Shannon Jean. I can't get over my floating head today because I'm wearing black. If you're watching the live stream. Sorry. Or you watch this later.

I, I. When I was at Podcast Movement Evolutions last month, I saw a session done by Stephen Robles, who does the primary tech podcast. He has a YouTube channel where he does really well. And he also works for a company called Riverside, which makes product, kind of like what we use with Streamyard to, to make the show happen here. And he did 30 minutes of how to, of real time, how to publish, how he publishes his podcast. So I was like, all right, I'm going to go. I'll learn something. And he had a camera that was sitting over his shoulder. And Riverside does something similar to Streamyard where we can, you know, it's a video platform, even though this shows primarily audio, and we do release the video and use it to chop it up and put on socials and things like that. And the first thing that I noticed was that his confidence monitor, if you want to call it that, his, his where he can see what's being broadcast on the video, was not in front of him. It was way off to the side. And so I asked him about it, like, do you look at yourself? He's like, no. He's like, I know that I'm going to be in frame because I know what camera I'm using. I know I'm not moving my chair around. He said. So I just worry about what I'm doing for the show. It's like, see, this is how the pros do it.

Yep.

No reason to be distracted by looking at ourselves.

It's super interesting. Yeah. I had a. I call them strategy calls, a coaching call for an hour just last week. And I got on and it's a zoom. And so, you know, they have me for an hour and it's a paid call and we go all this, you know, go through everything they want to learn and they have some pre questions they ask. And on this call the person had no video, didn't turn it on.

Yes.

And I was like, okay. So it was kind of weird. I was trying to. I just kind of. I don't, I won't even look. And then I started getting going and I started talking and they had no questions. I kept going, hey, okay, you have any questions about. Nope. And it was essentially me talking for almost an hour.

Huh.

That was very hard. And in the sense. Because I'm trying to, you know, usually you get some feedback like, oh, you're interested in that. Okay, let's break this down. And I had, you know, I did screen sharing and I went and some different stuff and, and they gave me a few prompts. But it was a different experience than a back and forth strategy session where I'm, you know, good. But I don't think very distracting.

I don't think that was only. I don't think the reason for that was that they didn't have their video on. I think they're. The fact that they didn't have their video on was a symptom of them doing two other things at the same time as being on the call with.

You very well could be. And just kind of listening. And I told them I send them the, the, you know, the video recording or whatever it is. Yeah. So it's just kind of. Excuse me.

I find with certainly calls where I'm meeting someone for the first time or that sort of thing, like the video can be helpful. It's nice, it's fine. But if it's somebody that I'm meeting with regularly on my team or whatever, I. We start with our cameras off and we only turn them on if we have to because it's. It. It is so mentally exhausting not to see the other person all the time. But what most of us wind up doing is looking at ourselves.

It's mentally exhausting.

And then you're worried about, well, is my hair in the right spot? Is this like if you and I were sitting and having this conversation?

No, I wouldn't have any ever.

It. Here's the thing. It is unnatural for us to see ourselves so frequently. Like think about nature. How many reflective surfaces do we encounter in Nature now take glass out of it, because glass doesn't exist. It's water. That's it. Water's the reflective surface of nature.

Yeah. That's pretty wild, right? And so really interesting.

You don't see yourself all that often. It's. It's not good for us, I believe.

Yeah.

But I would agree. It is it. It is good. A lot of times in Zoom, I will turn off my own view.

Yeah. Because that. That's what I was thinking. You could, you know, you can just. Okay. I don't need to see myself. I'm doing my thing. Hey. Because I want to see them. I want to gauge reaction. I want to do those things. But. But I don't need to. So I got to play with my. My settings a little bit more. But. But hey, we're going to talk about. Before we get to Friday.

AI Six minutes in. Go.

Well, maybe we. Maybe we should save this topic for.

Next time we can.

Because I don'. Had this comment about strategy is choosing what not to do.

I like it.

That's. Yeah. I mean, what do you. What do you mean by that? Give me some. Give me some feedback.

You know, I was listening to Guy Kawasaki's podcast. Okay. And he had. Oh, now I can't think of her name. A woman that also had done a lot of work with Apple, a designer who also has her own podcast. And her name is just, of course, flaking on me right now. I will find it. Because they both were talking about how working for and around Steve Jobs, you learned that strategy is choosing what not to do. Like, that's the whole Apple ethos is saying no is something you do far more often than saying yes. And it is valuable because if you try to do everything, if you say yes to everything, you are going to be completely. You're not going to be. You're not going to be good at anything.

No. Ineffective.

Very, very much ineffective at best. Right.

Yeah.

Debbie Millman, who has her own podcast. Yeah. So. So they were talking about these two things. So. Or these two people were talking about this. And I, you know that that phrase has always stuck with me. And when he said it, I was like, yeah, I've heard Steve say that and I've heard other people quote Steve saying that. And it really is important to choose what you're not going to do, and then what's left is what you are going to do. Like it.

Yeah.

That. That and saying no is the hardest.

It takes practice. It takes practice, right? Yeah, It. It. Because I think it's human nature. To want to help. And I can. Oh, I can help you with that. Or I can solve. If you're a problem solver type person.

I can solve.

I can help you solve that. But it's. It is very distracting and it can be. It waters down your effectiveness.

Right.

And I would agree. I think it can be a superpower to say no.

Oh, it absolutely is. Now, the problem is, as entrepreneurs, when we're starting out, we sometimes by. By nature of needing to survive, like literally to put food on the table, we wind up saying yes to everything because we have to that and.

Yeah.

And then that. You're. Go ahead.

Yeah. You're. You're building. I would say, you know this analogy. If you're like weaving a net.

Right.

And when you're just getting started, you're. You. It's pretty narrow. You can't own anything, so you're just trying. Okay, how do I build this thing out and catch as much as it's going to come near me?

You need to put food on the table. You got a minimum income you need to hit, or you're doing something to build the business. So you just say yes to a lot of different things, and that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that.

But at some point.

But when that becomes habitual is when you have a problem. When you've built up your business and now you've got too much coming in, that's the point at which you want to employ a strategy, and strategy is choosing what not to do. I love it. That's where that came from.

Yeah, man. Thank you for the reminder.

Yeah.

And back on our zoom topic, I just covered half the streamyard screen, so all I see is you. And it's way better.

I do that. It's kind of the way. The way I have things laid out. When I have our agenda up, I don't see you. And that's so much better.

Yeah. You don't see me or you don't see you?

Sorry, I. I don't see me.

Yeah. Okay. Thank you. I'm making sure I'm not interpreting this the wrong way.

No, all I want to do when I. When I podcast is look at myself.

Shannon.

That's it.

There you go. That's it. Yeah. See, just.

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Yes.

And my mackica podcast. I was looking. We, we were. I was kind of building out a new spreadsheet for an ad agency last week and they wanted, like most agencies do, the full name as it exists in Apple Podcasts of the show. So in Apple Podcast as of last week, like, this show isn't Business Brain, it's Business Brain, the entrepreneur's podcast. We may want to workshop that.

Got it.

Right. But macgeek Gab wasn't macgeek Gab last week. It was macgeek Gab. Your questions answered tips, shared troubleshooting assistance. Okay. So I went to put that in there and I thought that could be better. I don't like that. Now here's the thing. Pre chat GPT I would be. This is one of those things I'd be paralyzed about because it'd be like, all right, I gotta come up with something better, but I can't. And that I'm sure I came up with off the cuff. It's like, all right, well now I'm gonna. Now that I've decided to think about it, it's time to overthink it. Right? And now this is gonna Be a weeks long process and I need to solicit input and all that stuff. And I'm like, no. So I put it into ChatGPT and I said, great, I need to come up with a better name for my macgeek gab podcast. And it gave me some names and they all had like Mac in the thing. I'm like, ah. What you need to know is that this is an Apple podcast. We just happened to start it before Apple had any products other than the Mac. And it was like, got it. Great. How about Mac Geek, Apple Tips, tricks and troubleshooting? Like. Right, that's what it's going to be. Thanks very much. Have a good day. Moving on.

Yeah, that's it.

But that's it. And it, this is one. It was one of those things where like, I know myself, I'm. I would have spent. It would never have happened. Like, I, you know, I would have been paralyzed by it.

Yeah.

And now I think it's like, oh yeah, I've got, I've got my assistant working on it with me.

Yeah, that's it. And that's the key thing is using it on a. I'll give you a couple of examples. It is definitely my assistant. I'm having a problem. This has nothing to do with business, but I have a problem with some irrigation at my house. And this weird problem is the, these very, these zones don't turn on automatically based on the schedule, but if I hit manual, they turn right on. And I'm using my phone, my sprinkler controllers, app and everything. So it turns on, no problem. Like, oh, well, it must work. But then it never turns on schedule. Never works schedule. So I redo the schedule yesterday or Saturday. I'm like, I'm gonna make schedule like 1pm and I'll be here. And I could watch it. Yeah, nothing happens.

Right.

And I was like, that's crazy. I go to ChatGPT, I describe the problem and it says, absolutely. There's a known issue that when you press the manual button, it sends a higher pulse of electricity through the wires when the schedule tries to turn on, it's lesser. I don't know why. Lesser volts. So if there's any problem in the wiring, it may not be enough to trigger the solenoid on the, on the, the sprinkler valve. And I was like, you've got to be kidding me. And sure enough, the. And I said, well, I'm having problems across multiple valves, so it's not one valve. Say, yeah, check, check your wire and it says, check the common wire, because that's what they all have in common. That's what they have in common, hence the name.

And sure enough, 24 volts or whatever it is.

Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah. Sure enough, the common wire was not quite connected. It was enough to turn on when you hit the manual, but when the scheduling turn supposed to turn on, it wasn't enough. Now, do you know how long it would have taken me to. I already replaced the controller. I thought the controller was bad and I put a new one in and it still had the same problem, thankfully. I wanted to standardize on these controllers anyway and these WYZE controllers.

But.

So that's amazing. As my assistant, like, I use YouTube in the same way when I'm trying to figure something out, but keeping it in your pocket. I talk to it all the time. I use the voice thing. It's. It's amazing. However, it's also a liar. Oh, it.

I. I was gonna say ChatGPT for tech support in general has gotten so much better. That's one thing where I would say, even in the last six months, maybe the last three months, the level at which it is able to give reliable tech support has increased substantially. And my guess is that that's because it's something so many of us use it for. Right? It probably one of the most popular use cases is how do I X. Right.

Yeah.

And it was bad for a while. But the nice part was for somebody like me or you that were fairly technologically savvy, we can like, parse out like, okay, well, that's B.S. like, that's not going to work. And you push back a little bit and. And maybe you get good information and. Or maybe not, but at least you're not wasting your time. But in the last couple of weeks, I've had experiences like you just described where it like, needled in on exactly the thing. It was like, dude, this would have taken me hours.

Hours. Yeah. So.

But it does lie.

It does look, today I'm creating this. A presentation, one pager, advertising thing, whatever. And as I get down to it, it's not. I'm like, okay, it says, yeah, I'll create this PDF. And it's. This PDF wasn't good. And it didn't look that great. I was like, well, can you make it better? It's like, no, it says, but I can create an editable Canva template for you to use. I said, great, because I'll go use canva. I have an account there. And it says, got it. I'm creating the true editable Canva version for you right now. And it does all this stuff. It's like, I'm building this now. This usually takes five to seven minutes.

Okay, great.

I'll send you a direct Canva editing link where you can view it, edit it, download it. Hang tight, I'll be right back.

Okay.

And of course it cannot build me an editable canvas document because it's theory. It could, I guess. Yes. I come back and finally I'm like I said, you, you can't.

Is that coming along?

It says, you're right, I can't do that. You know, and it's, it's like, but I can help you lay it out and yada yada yada. It's so funny. It just cracks me up. But I, I also want to mention another AI service, I guess you could say that I used this week called typeset.com.

Okay.

Which I found very useful for a specific thing. It's a design platform. It creates like ebooks. What else? PDFs, different things. And it basically you put your content up there and it builds a wrapper around what you're trying to, to make. It adds graphics based on images based on your, based on your content. It's tied in with Getty images so you know, everything is licensed and you can like just scroll over different templates and it'll change in real time so you can get some, you know, really great feedback on what you'd like it to look like. I just did the monthly sign up, which I, I thought, well, I don't want to do a year yet on make sure I'm going to use this thing.

Yeah.

But I created an ebook for a client of mine that's going to use it as a lead magnet and it was great. And I used Chat GPT to help me create some content and flush out some ideas. And then I went over and used typeset to create a great looking, you know, 10 page ebook that had, just has some great content in it. That's then the design language around it made it look much more professional.

Check it out.

Yeah. Dot com.

Yeah, it's either 19 or 39amonth. You can save 20% with annual plans and you get different things obviously out of the basic and pro accounts.

But yeah, yeah, but if you do stuff like this, if you create, you know, PowerPoint type presentations or you could do webinars and you want to walk through it and all that stuff, it'll, it'll kind of take you there. So I'm just starting. I just started playing with it yesterday as a matter of fact, and I'm. I'll know more about it as. As I delve into it. I tried to build this one page sales or media kit thing with it. I didn't like the turnout on how that turned out. I used Canva on that. But go check it out. Typeset.com.

Amazing. I love this stuff, man.

I do too. And share your AI with us so we can investigate it, talk about it. Feedbackusbrain show and we'd love to get your review.

Yes.

What happens if they leave a review, Dave?

They get entered to win a MacBook this year.

Shannon, that's awesome.

Yeah. Leave a review.

What are the podcasts is giving away a MacBook?

I don't know, but I don't know about them. I mean, I know a lot of podcasts. I don't know anybody that's given away a MacBook this year. So you can be the lucky winner. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Thanks for hanging out, everybody. Thanks for doing what you do. Thanks for being who you are and thanks for listening. We'll. We'll enjoy the weekend. I hope you enjoy your weekend too. Keep living that charmed life and we'll see you next week.

See ya.