I have a close friend who has a successful business that has benefited from the growth in the economy over the last 12 years. He’s gone from strength to strength, hired a bigger team, and now has multiple revenue lines. Back in 2006, his original core business was tough. He carried a lot of inventory, with thin margins, and lots of face time. He had a fire in his belly and never stopped thinking about his customers, his business, his craft, and his growing family at home.

In 2007 things were getting frothy and a little nutty with all the money flying around. Easy credit, adjustable-rate mortgages…we all remember the deal. A lot of competitors started showing up. They were b-players and low quality, but there was a lot of work to around so everyone was feeding from the same trough. Everyone was surviving, but over time everyone’s margins got even thinner. Then the credit crunch hit in 2008 and things slowed down very quickly. The market softened and everyone was left carrying a lot of inventory with no buyers. In 2009 and 2010 the competitors closed shop, left town or just quietly walked away.

In booms times, things margins and A+ customer service didn’t matter, but when things got tight it was a different story. His company weathered the recession and survived because he delivered a high-quality product and was match fit when the real test arrived. Once the dust had settled and things slowly started to show signs up life again he was there to clean up. He hired the best people, consolidated some of the survivors and continued to build.

It’s weird to think that the recession was the launching pad.

Stay match fit and run scared.

Photo by Edgar Chaparro on Unsplash

My brother sent me a picture of a cloud the other day. The towering formation in the image looked familiar to me. I’d seen it before, but where? I’d never been to the place where the picture was taken, but it felt like I had.

In this picture, it’s the type of cloud that forms in tropics. Hot mornings, high energy, bright sun, and feeling that the sky is pregnant. An afternoon thunderstorm will come and go. I could feel the humidity, the Kikuyu grass under my feet, and hear the birds and the wind.

It’s incredible to me how a picture of clouds has the same effect as smell or listening to an old song. Memories were triggered as my brain dug deep and took me on a magical journey, all while looking at my phone.

p.s. I wrote this post with a couple of people in mind. I hope you are smiling and nodding as you read this.

The thing that never ceases to delight me about Twitter or Instagram is when I discover someone with a meager follower count who is creating or retweeting fantastic and original content. But it’s not easy to find these people because Twitter and Instagram amplify popular content over high-quality original content. Sometimes popular content is also high quality, but I’d posit that most of the time popular content is the same only unoriginal, salacious stuff that gets repackaged and shipped over and over again.

I know from my own experience that blogging or tweeting can feel like screaming into a pillow. You can shout all you want, most of the time people won’t hear you. It’s lonely out there.

There isn’t a product right now filtering and amplifying quality content that’s tailored to someone’s individual taste. A product that bubbles up stuff that you’ll love but don’t know it yet. StumbleUpon was the closest product to getting this right, and it may still get it right down the line as some other incarnation. It’s also why daily digest emails have seen a resurgence in popularity – people like to get customized, curated and packaged reading lists.

Right now, you’ve got to scratch and peck for these hidden diamonds. Discovering magical content that hasn’t been noticed or amplified, reminds of me of a verse from Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard where he writes about a flower blooming unseen and wasting is sweetness on the desert air.

I hope someone invents a product where quality bests popularity.

Here’s the extract from the poem:

“Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway’d,
Or wak’d to ecstasy the living lyre.
But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page
Rich with the spoils of time did ne’er unroll;
Chill Penury repress’d their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”

Photo by Zack Dowdy on Unsplash

The best time to start a company is at the bottom of the market or at the top of the market.

During a recession and capital scarcity, most people of scared shitless and sitting in the fetal position, hoping they don’t get canned. The tourists have gone home or are enrolling in Business School. Risk-averse people stay in full-time jobs, don’t move cities, don’t sell their house, immigration levels drop, which all means less competition. Overextended companies get obliterated and lay off high-quality people, which means those talented, humble people are looking for a new project. It’s a great time to recruit, find office space, and inspire people who are looking for a silver lining.

At the top of the market, when things are booming is another excellent time to start. At the top of the bull run, people get sloppy and overconfident. They attribute their success to their smarts and not the momentum of the market. They aren’t scared anymore. Everyone is cocky and their risk tolerance has ticked up over time. Risk tolerance builds over time, correction happens instantly. The result is a lot of inexperienced, overcompensated people who think they are good but don’t know the first thing about grinding it out when things get tough. Customer service is shoddy because there’s always someone else willing to pay, and innovation slows down because companies that are overextended lose focus and try to do it all. The top of the market is the perfect time to pay attention to customer service, treat your customers like you’ll lose them tomorrow, build loyalty for when things slow down and build up a rainy day cash fund

Photo by Steven Cordes on Unsplash

We all have many digital subscriptions; subscriptions for music, tv, newspapers, storage, productivity tools, other guilty pleasures, etc. It’s good to do an annual check-up and see what you are really using and what’s just quietly charging your credit card each month even though you can’t remember the last time you used the service. a subscription can be as little 99 cents per month but these little vampires add up. The cull saves you money and frees up space on your phone. Those apps are probably harvesting personal info about you so there are other valid reasons for auditing your subscriptions.

Do the same annual check-in with your social media accounts. Over time lurkers creep into your follow list. They are like an old piece of furniture in the house that you never use but never quite think to remove. Every time you check a social media feed these lurkers bubble up. You scroll past them but whether you do it consciously or unconsciously you still take in what they are posting. It’s taxing on your brain and you don’t even know it.

Unfollow, unsubscribe or mute these people. Free up your time and your brain.

Photo by Ann Kathrin Bopp on Unsplash

There’s a rare breed of people in the world who are good, know they are good but aren’t overconfident. They have mastered their craft, know it, and are quietly confident.

Overconfidence or hubris is the road to folly, and the way is wide and welcoming. Humans flock to overconfident talkers because we conflate overconfidence with competence, and that’s when mistakes happen. Things aren’t checked, promises are made, people get sloppy, and disappointment follows.

Find and work with quietly confident people. Most times, you have to seek them out because they won’t find you.

Photo by Prince David on Unsplash

If someone complains to you about something, then remember to sanity check the statement with some relativity.

The traffic in San Francisco is terrible! Relative to Sao Paulo, Brazil, where it takes 30minutes to go 2 miles, San Francisco traffic is a breeze!

The trains in London are unreliable! Relative to Los Angeles, where subways are virtually non-existent, London public transportation is incredibly accessible and quick!

The air quality Cape Town is low quality on a windless summer’s day! Relative to Sydney during the bush fire season, Cape Town’s air quality is liveable!

Everything is relative. Asking yourself, “compared to what?” is a great way to get some perspective on someone’s complaint.

In 2015 I was at a crossroads in my career. Do I start something on my own, consult/advise or jump into another operating role?

I spoke to a lot of people to get their views. A friend who was a COO at a company in San Francisco gave me the advice that I ended up acting on. He told me to go deep. Go full immersion and dig into a role where I could learn, keep growing my network, and understand a field intimately.

Consulting was shallow work. As someone who started out at an accounting firm, I knew that already. I got to be super good at understanding just enough to get the job done and then move onto the next client – but I never had to implement something. I doled out academic advice and got the hell out of dodge. I had no skin in the game.

So, I took his advice and committed to a long term, full-time role. Looking back, it’s been such a great move. I’ve made more lifelong friends and broken into a new area of expertise that was only possible through brute force time investment, which in turn has opened even more interesting doors that I had no idea were there.

The thing about going deep is that it’s dark down there where the sun doesn’t shine. You don’t know what’s waiting for you so it can be intimidating. You only discover new things once you commit and trust other people.

Down beneath is where the learning, discovery, and magic happens.

Photo by Jakob Boman on Unsplash

The destruction and loss of life from the fires in California and Australia are what happens when fake news hits the buzz saw of reality. Scientists were saying for years that the weather will become extreme. The summers will be longer, hotter, and more fringe, but people wouldn’t face the facts. Junk science and conspiracy theories were taken seriously, and, in some cases, morphed into terrible policy. The result was an underinvested infrastructure and uneducated electorate on the dangers of extreme weather like flooding and fire.

Fake news and conspiracy theories take off because they are easy to believe and provide an escape hatch from doing the hard work. Why prepare for something if it isn’t going to happen? The same thing happened in South Africa in the 1990s when the South African government went into denial about the AIDS epidemic. Fake news and junk science kill people. Even back then in the ’90s, there was junk science and fake news. The difference in 2020 is that fake news is turbocharged by super communication highways like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel. It makes me angry and sad that we have to learn the hard way, but there is the benefit of turbocharged news by super communication highways like Insta, FB, and Twitter is that there’s nowhere to hide the consequences of bad policy and decisions. We’ve all seen the harrowing pictures coming out of Australia. We’ve all read about the rolling electricity blackouts in California. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. If we can document, broadcast, and amplify the consequences and then learn from our mistakes, at least it’s not all in vain.

Against the verdict of history, there is no appeal. I hope we learn and take action.

Start now, so you have momentum at the end of 2030. Exercise, learning, building, loving, leaving, arriving. Start! The longer you delay, the less likely you’ll begin. Feel the urgency.

“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” – Bill Gates

Work with what you got now.

Enjoy what you got now.

Scratch the itch.

What’s past is not prologue. The fires in California and Australia, extreme weather, Brexit, US politics, cryptocurrencies – things are changing fast and nobody saw them coming. If they tell you they did then they are lying.

Listen and watch, but don’t lurk on the sidelines – get in there and play.

Everybody is winging it. Everybody.

A lot has happened in the last decade. In 2030 what will people be talking about? Be curious, dabble, and tinker. Buy some crypto, sign up for the latest social network, play the new hot video game, listen to new music, talk to smart people, follow people you disagree with. Get a little uncomfortable.