116: What’s Keeping You Up At Night? 🦟 On Business Mosquitoes

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You can kill any one mosquito in.

The moment that sneaks into the room.

But is there something that you can put in place that will take care.

Of similar business mosquitoes in the future.

That will reduce the man or woman let's call person power needed to wake.

Up in the middle of the night, turn the lights on and try to hunt for this tiny little evasive insect.

This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with fathers, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Last night I was hunted and haunted by a very sneaky, pernicious, obnoxious attacker that just wanted to make sure I could not get a wink of sleep. I woke up every hour on the hour and if you live in a hot, humid area in the summer, you.

Know what I'm talking about.

The most annoying insect of all time. The mosquito. This mosquito, as my husband put it.

The one we couldn't kill, he said, is the maverick of mosquitoes. Much like Tom Cruise in the movie Maverick. This friggin mosquito will dart and weave and we cannot catch it. I was gonna say him, but did.

You know that the mosquitoes that drink.

Our blood are female? I hate to say it, but it's true.

I went to bed at 9pm Thinking I have a big day tomorrow. I'm going to Gotham Production Studios. I'm recording back to back podcast episod and then we have a call for BFF where we brilliance barter mastermind with each other. It's going to be a long day. I'm going to get a great night's sleep. So I head upstairs. 9:00pm and then sure enough, at 9:30, what's that itch on my left elbow? I go back to sleep. 10:30. What's that itch on my right elbow? Go back to sleep. 11:30. What's that itch on my left shoulder?

Cause you know, I'm tossing and turning.

Of course, because I cannot sleep. Oh my goodness. So then I turn the lights on.

And the room is bright and I'm determined to hunt this thing down. My husband and I have no insect kindness when it comes to mosquitoes in the middle of the night. This is our zone. It is our time to sleep. And they don't belong.

I get up, I turn the lights on. I cannot find this thing anywhere. So defeated, I go back to sleep. Then 30 minutes after that, it gets.

Me on my right shoulder. And so I turn on the flashlight on my phone.

I'm kind of scanning around. There it is, sitting inches away from my face on the pillow, just resting, fat and happy because it's been feasting on me all night.

If you look at my whoop sleep tracker, it just shows these massive spikes at each one of these time intervals. Terrible night's sleep. I probably got five and a half.

Hours altogether because of this one tiny maverick mosquito. What does this have to do with anything, you ask? Well, when something literally keeps me up.

At night, it's usually juicy fodder for.

Some kind of metaphor that I can share about business. And I'll just think to myself, what is the proverbial mosquito in my life or in my work business? Mosquitoes, or what's keeping you up at night are persistent interruptions, things that interfere with much more important goals like sleep or peace of mind. They're not to be confused with what I shared in episode 106 on Splatology that was about clearing time clutter. And I know maybe you're getting grossed.

Out by now with all the bug metaphors, not to mention eat that frog that I shared on my made by Monday content batching strategy. That's episode 61. I'll put it in the show Notes.

Splatology and Clearing time Clutter was more about small, low stakes. Clutter Low Stakes items no.1 is a big deal. All adding up on the windshield until you just can't see the road ahead anymore. In contrast, mosquitoes, they wake you up. You have to deal with the problem. Or you could bury every inch of.

Your body under the covers. The proverbial head in the sand.

They're harder to see. They're harder to catch.

At least again, like the friggin maverick mosquito last night, until they're perched on the headboard, resting, fat and happy after feasting on you.

So mosquitoes, even one needs to be addressed.

My longtime friendor mbs who you hear.

Me talk about all the time on this podcast.

In fact, he and I were podcast.

Accountability buddies and book writing buddies.

To make this whole show happen at all, he shares in his book how to Begin.

There's a section called Notice the Mosquitoes. Mbs writes. Mosquitoes are both tiny and mighty. Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop, famously said, if you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room. The 200 million or more people who contract malaria every year would agree. Your worthy goal, as he calls it, comes with a cloud of its own. Mosquitoes. These mosquitoes are all the things you're currently doing and not doing, secular sins of commission and of omission that are contrary to this worthy goal you've set for yourself.

You'll find they're numerous. Some are tiny, others more significant.

No single mosquito is fatal in and of itself, but together they irritate you, weaken you, slow you down, and distract you from your worthy goal. No one mosquito may kill you, or one mosquito bite, although sometimes they do carry malaria and dengue fever if you've ever traveled in Southeast Asia.

Or they don't carry dengue fever, but they can give that to you.

And someone told me they come out the most in full effect at sunrise and sunset. It's like, way to ruin a good thing, mosquitoes.

Timothy Winegard wrote an op ed or some kind of feature in the New York Times. I'll never forget it. It's called the Mosquitoes Are Coming for Us. I'll put it in the show notes. The subtitle says.

They are our apex predator, the deadliest hunters of human beings on the planet, he writes. It has been one of the most.

Aggravating sounds on Earth for more than 100 million years.

The humming buzz of a mosquito an eye, Jenny will add, especially when you're trying to sleep.

Weingart continues.

She gently lands on your ankle and inserts two serrated mandible cutting blades and saws into your skin, while two other retractors open a passage for the proboscis.

I have no clue if that's how you say that.

With this straw, she sucks your blood while a sixth needle pumps in saliva that contains an anticoagulant that prevents that blood from clotting.

This shortens her feeding time, lessening the.

Likelihood that you splat her across your ankle. Skipping ahead a little bit, he writes, mosquitoes are our apex predator, the deadliest hunter of human beings on the planet. A swarming army of 100 trillion or more mosquitoes patrols nearly every inch of the globe, killing about 700,000 people annually. Researchers suggest that mosquitoes may have killed nearly half of the 108 billion humans who have ever lived across our 200,000 year or more existence. We also have valid, although yet unknown, reasons to be careful what we wish for. And this goes back to the system's thinking, philosophy and steps that I share at the beginning of free time, he writes. If we eradicate disease vectoring mosquito species, would other mosquito species or insects simply fill the ecological niche? Would one disease be swapped out for another? What effect would eliminating mosquitoes or any other animal have on Mother Nature's biological equilibrium?

And this is the last paragraph I'll.

Read, But perhaps now, as in the past, we are underestimating the mosquito. She evolved to endure global showers of the eradication chemical DDT and may genetically outflank CRISPR as well. History has shown the mosquito to be a dogged survivor. She has ruled the earth for millions of years and has killed with unremitting potency. Throughout her unrivaled reign of terror, she has steered the course of history, scratching her indelible mark on the modern world order. How's that for drama?

He even wrote an entire book about.

This called the Mosquito A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator. So I'll put all these links in the show Notes if you also want to research these annoying little insects, you might be familiar with the butterfly effect that some call it a myth. But if a butterfly flaps its wings across the globe, it can have effects and ripple effects and waves in much bigger ways across to the other side of the planet. From Wikipedia in chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. The term is closely associated with the work of mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz. He noted that the butterfly effect is derived from the metaphorical example of the details of a tornado being influenced by minor perturbations, such as a distant butterfly flapping its wings several weeks earlier.

Interesting side note, it says that he.

Originally used a seagull causing a storm, but was persuaded to make it more poetic with the use of butterfly and tornado by 1972.

So I'm not sure that he exactly.

Measured that a single butterfly. I don't know if this has been.

Proven, that a butterfly can cause a tornado, that kind of thing. Clearly he's using metaphor here, as am I. So the question is, we're not talking about the butterfly effect. We're talking about the mosquito effect. We're talking about mosquitoes in your business. What is keeping you up at night?

We'll be right back just after this.

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Some examples could include a technical glitch that you don't know how to fix, miscommunication with a team member, a hovering deadline, and lacking the energy, motivation or resources to complete it. Maybe it's a squeaky wheel customer or business partner that you don't know how to appease.

Maybe it's trolls in your social media.

Comments, or one troll in particular, or one bad review in particular. Maybe it's knowing you need to give feedback with what author Kim Scott calls radical candor without tipping into ruinous empathy, manipulative insincerity or obnoxious aggression.

Perhaps you have a looming tough decision, one that my friend Tara calls hard but good. Maybe there's a friend or client draining your energy, literally, kind of sucking your energetic blood, your resources, your energy, your life force. A little bit or a lot every time you interact with them.

Perhaps you're saying yes when you really should have said no. Now you need to renegotiate. So maybe there's something looming on your calendar as you look ahead. It's like that mosquito at night. It's like you can't quite pin it down. Or there's this amorphous sense of stress. Or you know you're doing too much, you're tipping toward burnout, and you got to catch it. You got to cancel something.

You got to make some moves.

Maybe there's a project of yours that no longer has life in it. You need to pivot in a new direction in order to keep things fresh. Or as I share in free time, you're falling into the burdensome bees you're getting burned out, bored, bottlenecked or otherwise buried by bureaucracy and you're not sure what to do about it, what steps to take next. Irl when you actually have a mosquito problem, there are all kinds of things you could do. You could wear bug spray, although who wants to go to bed with bug spray on. You could light one of those mosquito incense candles or incense sticks, although who.

Wants to smell that while you're going to sleep?

You could get screens, which Michael and I have, but Ryder likes to sleep on the terrace. So we have this kind of flapping screen window thing.

I'll try to find the link and put it on Amazon in case any of you need one.

And so yes, it is possible that mosquitoes sneak in through the cracks every now and then.

Or you could employ what is one of the most hilariously reviewed products on Amazon, the catchy spelled with a K, K, A T, C, H, Y. You know, I'm going to put this in the show notes too. And the number one most helpful review. 3406 people at the time of this recording have found this review helpful. This guy, his nom de plume is NYC Mark Seattle.

He says, best medieval torture device for mosquitoes ever. Mark writes, so basically this device entices bugs with a pretty light, sucks them.

Through a turbine where they get stuck.

To a glue pad and starve to death.

Sorry, mosquitoes.

The only downfall is that it lacks a tiny microphone that would amplify the cries of agony as a blood sucking vector of disease writhes in agony. We have two toddler girls who kept having these horrible red welts on their skin that we would find in the morning. Turns out that like their mother, they're highly sensitive to mosquito bites. Out of desperation we bought this little guy and since then, not one bite, only the great satisfaction of seeing the machine's overnight kills. We hate mosquitoes and so we are very happy with this product.

We now have three. Oh, it's just so poetically written. And then another favorite, somebody wrote it does work. Two insects is anything but a noticeable improvement when mosquitoes are the state bird here in Arkansas. Another person said, great for small bugs, disgustingly satisfying.

So here's a device, by the way, a lot of people have given it.

There'S reviews across the board because apparently it doesn't work that well with other bugs. They say that the papers are expensive to replace and that there's this thing with a light and a fan that is now running in the background of.

The bedroom and it's expensive.

I think it's almost $50.

However, my sleep is priceless and if I can't sleep, I can't do anything the next day. I'm a mess. So I haven't bought it yet.

I haven't implemented this yet. This is an example of a machine.

Or a pilot that I could try to deal with the Mosquito problem if.

We come back to business mosquitoes.

The question is yes, you can kill any one mosquito in the moment that sneaks into the room, but is there something that you can put in place that will take care of similar business.

Mosquitoes in the future that will reduce.

The man or woman, let's call it person power needed to wake up in.

The middle of the night, turn the lights on and try to hunt for.

This tiny little evasive insect. Think about and at least just notice in the next week. What are your business mosquitoes? What is keeping you up at night? What might be tiny but pernicious and harmful and uncomfortable and interfering with your joy and your peace and your sense of ease in yourself and your body?

You hereby have permission to identify problems, no matter how tiny, that are keeping you up at night. I would love to hear from you. What are some of your business mosquitoes? And even more so, what tips and tools and strategies have you tried to reduce them? Moving forward, you can always submit a voice note for me@itsfreetime.com Ask or leave a review for the podcast Two Birds, One Bird Feeder as I like to say because I am all about bird kindness and not killing them with stones. But you could leave a review@lovethepodcast.com freetime wherever you listen and share one of.

Your favorite tips or tools from the.

Podcast in general, or a tip or tool that you've used to deal with things like this in your business.

We don't necessarily have to fill the reviews with mosquitoes, then they would really live on in infamy.

I hope you found this episode helpful or at least marginally interesting or at least some kind of bomb for all your metaphorical and literal mosquito bites that you're dealing with and itching and scratching and trying to make go away.

I really appreciate you being here listening. Thank you so much everybody.

Have a beautiful rest of your day.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.

Thank you.

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