GarthBox

Tomorrow might not arrive. Your idea may face an environmental force that shuts it down. Your tribe could move on. You may keep procrastinating that task that’s been on your plate for weeks.

There’s a lot of uncertainty around tomorrow, which tends to make one anxious and fearful and all the sudden paralyzed.

You can also view tomorrow as one mile of a longer marathon. That you’ve shaped it to be better than today, but not as good as the day after tomorrow.

You could make your connection to others stronger than ever by caring more. You can do what you need to do today to have more time to do what you love tomorrow.

Perspective on tomorrow has as much impact on tomorrow (it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy) as it does today.

 

Stay Positive & <—

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There’s a highly successful beer bar in Kansas City that refuses to pause operations to accommodate any sort of private event. “I’ve made a promise to my customers when I’d be open. I don’t care if the bar is empty, I will not close,” the owner told me.

To put things in perspective, by hosting a private event, he could make out with more than a daily average profit from remaining open to the public. Alas, he made a promise.

He understands that the promises we break, add up.

A party is for a day, but that one customer he would have neglected could have been a customer for a lifetime.

The same goes for closing early. Opening late. Not answering the phone. Not responding to an inquiry on social media right away. Choosing to staff poor talent. Selling terrible product because you don’t want to bite the bullet of throwing it away. The list goes on; there are hundreds of ways you can break the promise you make to your customers and it adds up.

What’s your promise?

 

Stay Positive & Stick To It

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It makes sense to stay in your same lane while driving, there’s less of a chance of you making a mistake by switching.

Same goes for the work that you do, the exercise you perform, the type of books you read.

Transitions bring only aches and pains… at first.

Then you begin to adapt, get better, and all the sudden you’re rocking and rolling again.

It ought to go without saying that the best way to shorten the aches of transition is to go all in, to welcome transition with resilience and determination to be better at this than you were at that.

And it all starts with understanding that 1. You’re going to be forced to transition, anyway. Such is life. And 2. Aches are often your muscles growing faster than normal.

 

Stay Positive & Worth It?

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Quadrant analysis is a method to classify tasks and whether they are low effort/high effort and low importance/high importance.

The method is often used to prioritize addressing the low effort high importance tasks, but too often one gets curtailed into addressing the low effort and low importance because they are easier; because all those things add up don’t they?

Pro tip: Easy to do? Let someone else do it. Pay a friend,  intern or personal assistant to do it.

Then you can put your attention to where it matters most, where it’s exhausting work but ultimately worth it.

Don’t make the same mistake with your work projects as you do with your personal to-do lists.

We’re all attracted to what’s easy, but it’s not where the real value is.

 

Stay Positive & It Won’t Get Easier, But It’ll Always Be Worth It

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The most important (and sadly the most unnoticed) action you can take for your business is to tell your customers, “We listened and now we’re doing X.”

Curiously, though, the reason your improvements based on target insights go unappreciated is because it took too long to get there; it took too long for them to feel they were listened to.

It begs the question, how long are you willing to wait before you act on what you’ve heard from your customer?

When they say the process is too slow or the mobile experience doesn’t get them where they need to go or when they say something tastes funky about the beverage on the back-end? How responsive are you?

If you’re quick to respond, then I ask this? Are you listening enough?

 

Stay Positive & There’s Always A Way To Improve (By Listening)

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1 – Why would they purchase from you instead of your competitor?

2 – Why would they purchase from your competitor instead of you?

 

Stay Positive & Time To Make The Coin More Valuable Than The Sides

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It’s not so much about finding your passion; it’s more like fostering it.

Through tinkering, testing and trying everything you have the slightest interest in.

Over time, passion is developed and shaped based on the experiences you had with those interests.

In shorter words: Passion isn’t just there; It’s created by taking an interest and wanting to practice it consistently.

 

Stay Positive & It’s Less Of An Ah Ha Moment And More Of An Oh, Duh

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