Philosophy2019-11-28T10:38:20-08:00

Jeff’s Philosophy

The How!

The world is changing too fast for us to over-think where we do what, or who we do it with. Much of this is out of our control. What each of us can control at all times is how we conduct ourselves in life & work.

This subject is briefly covered in a podcast I appeared on – Happiness Simplified by Dai & Kayvan

I firmly believe that it’s not so much about what we do, or where we live – if you work hard to be the best what whatever you have to tackle at each phase of life with a willingness improve your strengths, life will take you in the right directions.

Often, I am asked the following question:
Q: “Is this what you always wanted to do?”
And my answer to that, with a chuckle, is:
A: “No high-school kid ever said he dreams of running a B2B marketing agency that combines a SaaS with a boutique branding/design agency!”
Listen to the podcast by Dai & Jeff

“We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then is not an act but a habit.”

– Aristotle

The power of habit – Charles Duhigg

Discipline & Dedication

Countless wanterpreneurs start new ventures with lofty dreams of a sports car or infinite travling, only to quit when the going gets tough. To reach certain milestones it requires constant dedication with discipline over a prolonged period of time. If it were easy, everybody would do it. There will be more hard days than easy days if you want to come out ahead.

How you grind through the worst of times will define your success. There are countless days when I feel mentally exhausted after having dealt with unexpected technical issues, difficult clients. There are times when I want to quit my sets at the gym as my heart rate peaks, or my muscles fatigue. I still tackle each day with a fight, smooth or rough!

To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.
Audrey Hepburn

Discipline & Dedication

Countless wanterpreneurs start new ventures with lofty dreams of a sports car or infinite travling, only to quit when the going gets tough. To reach certain milestones it requires constant dedication with discipline over a prolonged period of time. If it were easy, everybody would do it. There will be more hard days than easy days if you want to come out ahead.

How you grind through the worst of times will define your success. There are countless days when I feel mentally exhausted after having dealt with unexpected technical issues, difficult clients. There are times when I want to quit my sets at the gym as my heart rate peaks, or my muscles fatigue. I still tackle each day with a fight, smooth or rough!

“We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then is not an act but a habit.”

– Aristotle

The power of habit – Charles Duhigg

Fulfillment over Happiness

If you are the typical millennial who thinks “I need to love every moment of my career!” and a few bad days (let alone weeks) is enough to make you consider a career change, you can kiss entrepreneurship goodbye.

The two things I enjoy most about running my business that give me a sense of fulfillment:

POWER & CONTROL – Implementation of new workflows and policies have a direct impact on how much more efficiency and growth we achieve as a team. This sense of strong leverage is exhilarating. A 20 minute investment that can save 2 of my staff 5 mins per project at 50 projects a year results in 25X return on investment!

TRAINING & MENTORSHIP – Transferring my experience and knowledge to help my staff work better and faster while improving their careers is a truly satisfying feeling. Helping another person learn better and faster is how humanity grows collectively. When our long-term team members take on jobs at bigger agencies with a higher-level role, we say they “graduated”, not “quit”

It’s easy to be enamoured by drastic changes and big shifts. But often, long-term life changes come with small tweaks and improvements that keep happening. Freakonomics has a podcast that was very memorable to me, titled “In Praise of Incrementalism”
Listen to the Freakonomics Podcast

Incrementalism

You cannot increase your 1-rep-max back squat from 225lbs to 365lbs in 2 weeks. The greatest changes in life and business come from constantly tweaking and improving. Like long-term investment growth, these changes compound on each other. Many improvements, while they appear small when individualized, propel each other for exponential results.

Small changes to improve project efficiency by a few minutes or few percentage points repeated over and over again can result in hundreds of hours saved each year, resulting in massive shifts in profit. Instead of obsessing over the “next big thing” every day, tweak and refine your workflow for anything that is repeated more than once a month, and the results will pleasantly surprise you.

Incrementalism

You cannot increase your 1-rep-max back squat from 225lbs to 365lbs in 2 weeks. The greatest changes in life and business come from constantly tweaking and improving. Like long-term investment growth, these changes compound on each other. Many improvements, while they appear small when individualized, propel each other for exponential results.

Small changes to improve project efficiency by a few minutes or few percentage points repeated over and over again can result in hundreds of hours saved each year, resulting in massive shifts in profit. Instead of obsessing over the “next big thing” every day, tweak and refine your workflow for anything that is repeated more than once a month, and the results will pleasantly surprise you.

It’s easy to be enamoured by drastic changes and big shifts. But often, long-term life changes come with small tweaks and improvements that keep happening. Freakonomics has a podcast that was very memorable to me, titled “In Praise of Incrementalism”
Listen to the Freakonomics Podcast