180: 📉 Diminishing Returns and the True Costs of Shiny Shoulds

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I just want us all to be aware when we're following best practices that actually are not serving us or the quality of the work. That's the thing about sailing the sea of shiny shoulds. As the sidebar in free time goes, it can quickly lead to diminishing returns in terms of focus, energy and output.

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What business best practices drive you nuts? What are the best practices you wish people would follow, but they don't? These, my friend, are clues to things you can be doing differently or to stop doing altogether in your business. I've got to start today with a rant. This is building on the previous episode 179 with Jacqueline Fish. I just love how she declared that she's running a video free business. She created a blanket rule to say no video. She doesn't like it, she doesn't want to do it. She will say no to an opportunity, at least most of them if they're going to involve video. So if the person doesn't want to renegotiate the format, that's fine with her. She'll keep moving. This reminded me of my early days when I was blogging life after college as a side hustle while working at Google and I had one of my very first interviews like a live interview over Skype. I remember that because I was on the west coast. I scheduled this for 7am in the morning so that I could do this interview before heading into work. And this was somebody else interviewing me. So around 6:30 I'm probably having coffee rolling out of bed at that time. Speaking of rolling, I used to put hot rollers in my hair and then a grandma cap over it. Like you can imagine the cartoon of the old maid this is what I looked like. So I would put in these hot rollers because I was too lazy to use a curling iron, nor do I even know how to do that. And then I would put this cap on to keep the heat in. So I would sit like this in the morning while doing the rest of my stuff to get ready so that I could unfurl these beautiful curls on my way into work. This was back in the day when I actually felt really my whole life, until probably five years ago, that I needed to straighten my hair, otherwise manipulate, do something to my hair to make it acceptable. Maybe this is an apt metaphor for today's conversation. And then finally, some guy I was dating said, I like your hair so much better when it's wavy. My hair is naturally wavy, curly. And I don't know why. I just needed to hear that. It had been something that maybe even my dad said to me growing up. Why do you straighten your hair? It looks so great wavy. And finally I realized, yeah, what am I doing now? I'm really on a tangent, but stay with me still. For years, I used to go to dry bar every time I had a speaking gig. I would still go to dry bar, sit in the chair and wait as somebody blue dried my hair. I have thick hair, so it always took a while. It was this big pain in the neck. But there again, I'm following some best practice in order to look professional while delivering a keynote. I should get my hair blown out then and actually accelerated by the pandemic and things going virtual. I just realized, why am I going to all this trouble? Why can't I just sleep on wet hair? I'll wake up, it's wavy, it's good enough. I can do it. I can zhuzh it in just the right way and it will look fine. And not only will it look fine, it will be my natural actual hair. So it will save me time, it will save me energy, and I will be embracing an innate part of myself and not trying to change it to fit somebody else's impression of what might look good. Okay, so I did not expect to go on that hair tangent, but it actually does tie into what we're talking about today. So it's 7am I sign on to Skype, ready for this interview, assuming that it was going to be audio. And the host, a guy has his video on, and I'm just so surprised. I'm like, what is this, a video interview? I'm groggy, I have no makeup on, I'm wearing the grandma cap, and he's like, yeah, yeah, this is a video interview. I was so annoyed and I said to him, I said, listen, if you're gonna interview a woman on video, you gotta give her a heads up. At that time, I would have never dared be on video with no makeup. Now I don't care anymore. I do it all the time. I'm almost like protesting, overdoing makeup. And so I purposefully don't wear it most of the time, which would have been terrifying to me even 10 years ago. I used to wear makeup to yoga class, okay? Just another form of people pleasing and trying to fit in with the societal ideal. So I said to this guy, like, give me five minutes. But also, men don't have to do that much to be camera ready. Of course you don't want hair sticking up or something, but guys aren't really going to. You don't need to do makeup. You don't look that different waking up and then turning video on than the way, like for some women, we actually need to put some effort in to look the way that we look. Ever since that morning and me being so annoyed, hopefully the guy, the host, learned a lesson, a systems lesson, that if you're going to do a video interview, you gotta give the person a heads up, tell them in advance. And I often advise podcasters to this day, listen, if it's a video interview, you gotta put that in the title of the calendar invite so that people don't miss it. Because if you don't know it's a video interview, you might be like me and sometimes roll out of bed, your hair's a mess, all kinds of crazy stuff might be going on. The background doesn't look good, the lighting's not set up right. And the issue is I don't care that the host sees me looking scrappy. That's not my issue. It's that when the video gets posted to YouTube, it's there for all of eternity. And as people are searching or as my name then comes up on YouTube, I mean, I just want to look a modicum of presentable, you know, I just want to meet a baseline standard of presentability. My standards again of how I look and show up on video and in search are much, much lower than they were in the past. But it still annoys me if I don't have a heads up that this is happening now. The annoyance of all this has accelerated. Specifically in the last year, I have noticed a trend. When I did the free time book launch, it was very different than the pivot launch. More and more hosts were saying to me, yeah, I'd like to keep video on the whole time, if that's okay, because we splice up. We don't use the whole thing, but we'll splice it up and post on social media. And I get what they're trying to do. They're trying to follow a best practice of being everywhere. If you're going to do a podcast, well, you might as well record video so you can splice and dice it and post it in all the places and then be discoverable in all the places. I totally get that. At the same time, I feel that it's completely sucking the joy out of this format. I always joke that I have a personality for podcasting. A lot of guests that I interview on my two shows feel the same way. I can't begin to tell you the relief when I tell people, no, no, don't worry. I just keep video on to say hello, if they even want that. And then we turn it off to record, and it's like both of us just exhale. Ah, now we can relax. Now we don't have to stare ahead at that little tiny pinhole for the entire time and try to make correct eye contact with the camera so that the person across from us perceives that we're making eye contact. We don't have to worry what we're wearing, what our body language is doing, what the background looks like, how the lighting is. Sometimes I'm on video, and I lead a Q and A call for the BFF community. And when it's the middle of winter, I go from looking totally normal to like, a freaking ghost. I'm telling a ghost story with a flashlight under my neck because the way that the sun is setting, I look frigging scary. By the end of these calls, it's a completely different look and vibe and scene than the way I might look during the summer Q and A calls. The point is, people need to know if it's on video, and video requires significantly more thinking, focus, attention, and, in my case, energy. I can perform for video. I've done five LinkedIn learning courses. I can speak quickly. I can record things, usually in one take. I don't mind being on video when video feels like the true and absolute best format for something. But what I don't appreciate is everybody jumping on a bandwagon, feeling like they should record video. And then all of a sudden, the medium of podcasting doesn't get to be what it is. It's an audio format. But then just because you have all these companies, social media platforms who say, oh, upload video now. I mean, that's exponentially more expensive and again requires more attention and energy. So I feel like there's this tension between what the format itself really is and what big platforms who just want more attention and eyeballs and advertising. Sort of the siren song of what they tell you the best practices should be. I'm not trying to be a Luddite or a grump. I mean, I definitely am grumpy about these things, but I'm not trying to be overly resistant to change. I just want us all to be aware when we're following best practices that actually are not serving us or the quality of the work. That's the thing about Sailing the sea of shiny Shoulds. As the sidebar in free time goes, it can quickly lead to diminishing returns in terms of focus, energy and output. You know, if you've read the book, if not, what are you waiting for? That I say in this sidebar, frittering your attention away does not benefit you, but it very may well benefit the platforms you are spending it on. As the now very popular saying goes, if you aren't paying for the product, you are the product. Let me read you one more little excerpt and I'll also link to the full Shiny Shoulds episode in the show. Notes with all the noise online, it's easy to get lost sailing the sea of shiny shoulds. Some shoulds are an obvious yes or no. Shiny shoulds tempt you. Deep down, you know you don't want to pursue them, but you feel lingering pressure and obligation. They're shiny because everyone else is doing it, even succeeding with them. I'm going to share a couple examples, actually six to be precise, about shiny shoulds and diminishing returns in my business. And I'll also share the one question that I feel is the most powerful antidote to stop doing this. But first, to finish this sidebar in the book, I ask do you enjoy doing this activity for the sake of it? If yes, fire away. If not, you have two choices. This is where we bring the systems piece in. Number one Quit completely. No regrets. Why do anything if you don't enjoy it? How could the ends justify the means in terms of fractured attention and diminished energy? Why participate in a system that doesn't support you? One thing Sidebar that's not in the sidebar One thing about quitting completely or making a blanket decision. I quote Jim Collins. Tim Ferriss often talks about this. Jim Collins says, don't make a hundred decisions when one will do. I even think that's a paraphrase of Peter Drucker. I was trying to trace the origins of this. Essentially, when you can quit something completely or make a blanket rule like Jackie no video, then you eliminate all the friction in the future and all of the decision fatigue from having to consider similar or related decisions every time. The second choice if you have a business, shiny should design it as another business system with a regular process based cadence. No, you don't love it and you know you don't love it, but you cultivate it all the same. Just as you would keep up with monthly bookkeeping or quarterly tax preparation. Of course, who loves bookkeeping? Maybe accountants. Who loves doing taxes? Certainly not me. There's even a phrase.

The fear of taxes and the irs. Yes, that's me. I lose sleep at night thinking about the irs. Okay, not often, but every now and then and I'm like on the up and up above board. But it just freaks me out if I see anything from the government in the mail, my stomach drops to the floor. The thing about shiny shoulds, and the reason I'm bringing this up again as it relates to diminishing returns, is that they're shiny and you're often stuck doing them because it seems like a good idea at the time. However, it obscures the true opportunity cost of what's really at stake. So we're talking about prioritizing sometimes short term gains or vanity metrics versus long term quality, output, energy and even enjoyment from your business. Now let's give a caveat. Sometimes you have to experiment with a shiny should to just know if it's for you or not, or know if. Okay, this is shiny. I don't love it, but let me create a system around it that's not nearly as annoying as it currently stands. In the example of podcasters conducting an interview wanting to splice it up for social media, could we not record for an hour, which is exhausting on video? What if they just said let's turn video on for 10 minutes at the end? I'm going to ask you a common core question. In my case it's the permission slip question. And you can then apply that video snippet, that one piece for video, to send out onto all the socials. Still, that would require a heads up. It would require the person making sure that their background is okay and their hair is okay and what they're wearing is okay. So I still find that a little annoying. But it's less annoying than having to stare at the little pinhole for an hour, which just makes my eyes tired because it's also hard to think and be really relaxed and in the moment, which is what I love about kind of intimate podcast conversations, when you can't just let your eyes wander or look outside or relax in your seat a little bit.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Let me give you six specific examples of shiny shoulds and diminishing returns in my business and try to be thinking about how does this apply to what you're doing? Some of these are bigger than others, some are really tiny. The point is to be an observer and notice where your energy drops, where you get drained, where you dread doing things in your business. You can also notice where people seem to enjoy telling you what to do and what advice you resist hearing. So if I had a dollar for every time someone said, oh, are you on Twitter? You know, in the last 10 years of launching Pivot, but then even recently I was telling someone, this was a year ago, we were driving in a carpool situation. I said that yes, I have a book coming out and just thinking about my marketing strategy. And he said, oh well, have you thought about TikTok? And he starts giving me a spiel about getting on TikTok. If you know me at all, which this person didn't, it was a new friend, you would know that my personality is like sandpaper for TikTok and vice versa. I think it's super entertaining to watch TikToks, but the absolute last thing that you're going to see me doing is getting on video, try to create this short form content, and certainly not to do that just to launch a book. No effing way. But this person starts giving me this whole spiel about why I should be on TikTok, and it's just a bunch of shoulds. He doesn't know me and he's kind of himself interested in TikTok. That's cool. It's one of the fastest growing platforms of all time, but it's not for me. So that's an example of just kind of advice that's out there that seems like everyone's doing it. Even if the stats these social platforms share make it seem like everyone's doing it, you don't have to listen. Okay, back to these six examples.

Number one, I've been ranting about video. I can't tell you how many times, once again, people have said we should record video. Well, you should upload your podcast to YouTube. I'll come back to that. But I respond by telling them I wouldn't have a podcast if I did it on video. It's not a question of, oh, video would be nice to have. No, no. I know myself, the second that I would make video a requirement, the fun would drain. I wouldn't do it anymore, and I certainly wouldn't be producing 12amonth because the setup cost of everything I described would be too high. It wouldn't be fun anymore. I wouldn't get to just sit here, what I'm doing, riffing on the mic and focusing on the content itself. So if I were to just try to add video because it's a best practice, and suddenly record only on video interviews and even solo episodes, it would be so much more complicated, exponentially so. It would be more expensive in terms of editing, post production, even the room I would be recording in, and way less fun.

Number two, social media. I'll link to the episode how I run my business without it. When I think about social media, I wouldn't have my third book. If I had been trying to keep up with social media, let's say after Pivot came out, I just wouldn't have a book. I wouldn't have that sustained attention, energy and focus day after day after day. I really do believe that deep focus is cumulative. Attention is a skill and it's atrophying. And so many of us, myself included, because the pace of TV and movies and if you are on social, oh my gosh, it's just the level of input into our brains per second is so fast compared to the really slow deep attention that's needed to have big ideas to plan a podcast episode, to write an article, it's a completely different thing. Even just to read a book requires a different level of attention. So if I had been trying to come up with little quippy things every day for social media, or even repurposing my own stuff, responding to people in the comments, reading what other people are doing reading what's out there in the industry. I simply think I just wouldn't even have another book that would have consumed my full time and attention.

A third example, I talk about this in a recent episode with K, he called Cut yout Losses since we've done a few together. The launch model itself is a great example of diminishing returns. If you want to build a course based business, you can't just be a good facilitator or content designer or even a good course launcher. And those are all very different skills. You actually need to make growing your list a top focus. Otherwise, with each subsequent launch you're going to experience diminishing returns and it's going to have nothing to do with the quality of your course, the quality of your teaching, even the quality of your launch. It's just that over time, if you don't massively grow your list between every launch, people have already heard of it and they've already decided in previous launches whether to invest in this training or not. So that's something I think people don't talk about nearly enough when talking about this as a business model. That again, if you have a course based business and it relies on a launch model one or two a year, then you're basically building as well an audience based business. And you need to know that.

Number four oh my goodness. The diminishing returns on low fit clients. These are clients that might have seemed good on paper, maybe they even were good for you in your business and vice versa in the beginning of the relationship. But over time they become increasingly draining. They might always be negotiating you down from your stated rates, they're not meeting or respecting your deadlines. Ugh. I had one case with a corporate client where they asked me to bill in a bunch of separate invoices. And long story short, my team member and I were chasing down tiny invoices for seven months trying to get them paid to the point where it decayed all profit we would have made from those invoices because I kept paying my team member to help chase these down. Follow up, understand why they keep getting rejected. Oh, now we need to resubmit in this way and now this way. And we lost all the profit from those invoices just trying to chase them down. So pay attention to where just like in a bad dating relationship, you might have diminishing returns on that too. This may be the case with low fit clients.

Number five Certain activities. I've talked about video podcasting. Now no one will really will invite me to their show, but think about other activities that seem like a good idea, but for you personally, they have diminishing returns. So I often talk about article writing that I didn't write a single guest article for a big publication for the free time book launch. Because when I did this for Pivot, I felt a little pressure that the publisher was helping line these up. I felt like I should do it. And I felt really fortunate to get to write and have a guest post on places that at the time I really loved, like Fast Company. And even back then, these would hover on my to do list. I would have a sinking feeling of dread. For some reason, I always had writer's block for them. They would just hang over my head in such a way that I became miserable and I would procrastinate and it just took all the joy out of it. I also wasn't convinced that for all that suffering on my part, I wasn't convinced that the ROI was there, that it really sold that many books or brought me that many people. Now, for others, where you could write articles in your sleep, my friend Dorie Clark, who I mention all the time, she's like an angel of the pod. She even has a course, rapid content creation so you can learn how to do this. Dori has a journalism background and she loves writing articles. She's great at it, she's fast at it, and that has built her platform in a really significant way over time. But for me personally, the level of friction, it doesn't lead me to that type of momentum snowball. Even though I also used to do journalism growing up and have been writing ever since I was a kid in some form or another, people have suggested, well, why don't you just hire someone to write your articles? And a lot of people I know have ghostwriters on their team who write the articles for them. I've never enjoyed this because I still would want to read something that's gonna have my name on it. I like anything that has my name on it. I want it to fit a certain voice and there's a brand voice of how I write or how I think that I would want it to meet. So I would experience just as much dread, delay, procrastination and drainingness from kind of working with a ghostwriter as well. So for me, that option is out. And I don't lose sleep over not writing articles because I experience such diminishing returns on the level of energy that I need to ramp up to do them in the first place.

The last example, number six, team members who are no longer a fit. This is often bittersweet because maybe things were really good in the beginning or even really good for a long time. But deep down you both probably know it's time to move on. And sometimes they hesitate to tell you because they feel bad, or they know that you need them really badly. They know that they're a linchpin in your business. And you certainly might hesitate to tell them, hey, this isn't working out anymore. I know as a manager, first of all, I'm not a very good manager. I'm okay. But you know, I think, well, have I given enough feedback? Maybe I'm being too much of a perfectionist. Maybe I'm being too hard on this person or I'm expecting too much. But the truth is that there comes a time where it's just in their life path to move on, and it's in the life path of you and your business to move on or to bring in fresh energy as well. So you can tell when you're getting diminishing returns in terms of a team member relationship. When they seem increasingly distracted or even grumpy, more things are falling through the cracks than usual. These are usually signals that you can even check in, hey, I've noticed things seem a little off. What's up? And just listen. And oftentimes in my experience, maybe it is just they're going through something really tough in their personal life and they need to scale back a little bit for a short amount of time and then things will snap back into place. But just as often it means they kind of outgrew the role. So if you can't reshape the role or reshape their projects to fit their evolution might just be time to move on because they're not enjoying the work anymore.

We'll be right back just after this.

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With all those examples. I encourage you to reflect. What are you ranting about? Most Often to friends or if you're in a business mastermind of some kind to your mastermind buddies, to other business owners. What annoys you most? I mentioned my thing of you gotta give someone a heads up. If it's a video interview, it annoys me if people don't do that. Or maybe there's something that annoys you in terms of how people communicate with you or any kind of business. Best practice where in your business do you experience friction, dread, delays or procrastination? This is the whole crux of free time is helping you move from friction to flow through smarter systems. And that's what the free time framework will help you do. So align design, assign. Because there's no point if the work is no longer aligned. There's no point in doing it at all or optimizing work that's no longer a fit. Where do you have diminishing returns on time, energy, money and or joy? Most business books do not include the joy factor, but I do. I think it's just as important. So look, where are you investing time, energy, money or sacrificing joy and the ROI on whatever those activities are? The math does the math. As the kids say these days, it's not penciling out. I mentioned earlier that I would share my one question, the antidote. When I notice that I'm being lured in by the siren song of shiny shoulds, or I notice an area where I'm experiencing diminishing returns, I go through this thought exercise. What if I stop this altogether? What's the worst that could happen? Might not happen. What's the best? What's the best thing that could happen if I stopped sailing this shiny should? And then I don't stop there. I say what else? What else? And I really take it to its conclusion of what could truly be possible if I freed my energy. Most of us spend the majority of our time on what's the worst that could happen? Oh, if I'm not on social media, I won't be discoverable. No one will know about me. I'll fall into obsolescence. My business will collapse as a result. Okay, but what's the best? Oh, I would be peaceful inside. I would be happier every day. I would be less distracted. I would be more present with my family. I would have deeper thinking time. I would create more original work. My work would make a bigger impact. My business would be thriving. So you can see how this antidote is not just asking what if I stop this altogether, but what's the best outcome that could happen? What Else, what else? What else? And specifically, as you reflect on that, look for asymmetric upside. I first heard this term from Nassim Taleb. I love his books, even though he's really grumpy, too. He is definitely cranky in his writing and against academics, and he has all his little bones to pick. But asymmetric upside, where stopping doing something doesn't really have much negative impact, but it has very high potential impact, or roi. The term itself might relate to investing, where you invest a little bit of money and it's kind of no big deal if you lose it, but you could win really big if it does go well. These are often bigger bets in your business, but you can still look for asymmetric upside in terms of time, energy, money, investment. And again, what if you stop doing something that has very negligible impact for you to stop, but so much positive return?

Of course you can look at the data, just cold, hard facts. How much is this earning? How much is this costing? How much am I paying this team member? How much are they producing? How much revenue do they influence? Okay, but I also want to invite you to include your intuition.

Sometimes it is hard to go a different way than what everyone else is doing, even when you know it's what's best for you. And that's why you're going to need to double down on your intuition here, because only you know what's at stake. It's really challenging. And every now and then I have doubts of, have I been making a mistake all this time not to be on social media? But that thought is so fleeting, it's just hard not to have it when truly you look and see that, like, literally almost everyone else who runs a business or has a podcast is very active on social media. And so I hang on to the outliers. I look for people who can be a beacon for me and give me hope and vice versa, for each other to say it's okay, even if it looks like 95% of people are doing something a certain way. Here are 5% who aren't. Cal Newport, who's been on the show, Alexander Franzen, who's been on the show. These are people who I keep close to my heart to say, we've got this, and together we can help show that another way is possible. But you've gotta lean on your intuition, because sometimes even the data, even on paper, it will look like, oh, you should be doing this in your business. But only you know that if you go down that path, you're gonna be miserable. You're gonna be procrastinating. You're gonna be paying all this money. Spray and pray. Marketing and spray and pray. Social media. And for all you know, it might dilute your message, your business, your impact. And I just wanna encourage you to consider the downside, to trust any upside and trust in your intuition with that. You hereby have permission to stop working on projects and working with clients who are no longer serving you that don't meaningfully contribute to your revenue and your joy. If you do one thing after listening to this episode Audit your business. Audit your time. What areas are past their prime or no longer aligned. And if you're being truly honest, which ones never were? Thank you so much for listening. Have a beautiful rest of your day.

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