Month: June 2021

Ink on paper

/ markbartels

“Just trust me

Give it time

It’ll be fine

They will look after you

You are being ungrateful

They will come around

Don’t push it

It sends the wrong message

You are being paranoid

You worry too much

You’ll come across as negative

lt will look like you aren’t committed

Nobody else has that

Who do you think you are?”

These are all the platitudes and excuses you’ll hear when look after yourself and negotiate.

Ignore the noise and get the hard stuff in writing even if you burn a bridge or two.

If you get through a negotiation and someone’s nose isn’t out of joint then you probably didn’t push hard enough.

Goldfish memories

/ markbartels

It’s easy to forget how many unknowns we faced in the first half of 2020:

  • Hoarding toilet paper, basic supplies and antibiotics
  • Alcohol wipes and disinfectant shortages
  • Crashing stock markets
  • Tom Hanks
  • Do face masks work?
  • Is covid airborne?
  • Elective surgery suspensions
  • Ground zero in Seattle’s old age homes
  • New York City and Italy death rates spiking
  • Closed borders
  • Chinese disinformation
  • Ventilator shortages
  • Trump in denial
  • Confusing messaging from the WHO
  • Conspiracy theories and miracle cures
  • Long-tail covid impacts
  • Zoom as a verb
  • School closures
  • Tier 1,2,3,4,5 Lockdown levels

As a global village we’ve come a long way!

Underneath the radar

/ markbartels

“Unknown

Unseen

We live underneath the radar

No sign – on screen

We dance underneath the radar”

Underworld – Underneath the Radar

Seek out the people who are quiet and competent.

Ignore the loud mouths who are banging the pots and pans – screaming for attention.

Platforms like Twitter and Facebook reward and amplify the blowhards, while the quiet and competent fly under the radar.

You have to seek out the quiet ones, but the reward comes in the form of life long friends, loyalty and low ego.

From one to infinity

/ markbartels
My biggest lesson was getting a glimpse of how much my parents love me. I used to think loving someone was on a scale of 1 to 10. When I had kids I realized that the scale goes from 1 to infinity. There’s no limit to how much I love my kids. 

Decide and Do

/ markbartels

The best things in life happened to me when I invested in myself, backed myself and stepped into the mystery without procrastinating. If you are going to do something, and it feels right then do it quickly.

Use the four cardinal virtues to think through a decision: Prudence is the base, followed by justice, fortitude, and temperance. THEN GO!

Cheap and Expensive

/ markbartels

Don’t go cheap if you buy these things.

Cheap gets expensive really fast:

  • Mattresses
  • Shoes
  • Teapot
  • Wifi / Mobile data
  • Tax advice
  • Used cars
  • Car tires
  • Vaccines
  • Frying pans
  • Sushi
  • Airline tickets with multiple connections
  • Airport hotel rooms

Spending time on the wrong stuff

/ markbartels

I’ve worked at small, fast-growing companies, large, slowly dying companies, and monolithic ones so big that no one person knows anything.

At dying companies, you spend a lot of time trying to figure out why something ISN’T working.

  • Why is the revenue going down
  • Why are customers complaining
  • Why are employees leaving for other jobs
  • Why aren’t we growing

You run experiment after experiment, and nothing moves the needle. Then you spend the next four weeks optimizing the same failed experiment. Small, insignificant wins are celebrated and then, two weeks later, forgotten. Instead of working on new things, most of the time is spent protecting the status quo. All this busy work is like rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic.

At fast growing companies, the bulk of your “data analysis” is spent trying to figure out why new features worked SO WELL.

  • Why did customer numbers double again
  • Why is revenue up again
  • Why are all the metrics up this month when it was flat this time last year
  • Why did we beat the budget again

At fast growing companies customers are your secret sales team as they refer your product to their friends. Happy customers also offer up great product ideas and they use your product in ways you never intended. It’s fun, exciting and fluid.

Take a breath, and ask yourself. Where are you spending your time at work? Is it busy work or are you holding on for dear life as the product grows.

Trust me; it doesn’t have to be that hard. I’ve seen a lot of brilliant people grind themselves down in slow-growth companies , while mediocre folks have found a winning growth company, buckled up, and been successful.

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