How to Start a Side Hustle - Sample Chapter

In my latest book, How to Start a Side Hustle, I condense almost 20 years of entrepreneurial experience into practical tips and guidance to help you take the first step towards your own side hustle.

Here’s a sample chapter to get you inspired;

Chapter 8

CHOOSE YOUR AUDIENCE

You cannot be all things to all people. You need to find your niche and then cater for them. If you are targeting all people between the ages of 20 and 60, how on Earth do you know what each separate age demographic is interested in? If you find out, how do you build a single product or feature to cater for such a diverse group of people?

You can’t possibly be targeting all men or all women with your product. They’re all different. So think carefully about your audience. Plan it out and be specific. 

Many founders like to start by solving a problem they have. This ensures that the audience is one that you understand and are familiar with. You, you are the audience in this scenario. 

I have mentored a lot of entrepreneurs who are just starting out and when asked, most struggle to identify clearly who their potential customer is. One person told me that she was targeting 20-30 year olds but she also had a product and feature set for the 40-50 year olds and then she was about to launch a new product for the older demographic. Her business was a few months old and there was no way that she could scale to give every customer the best experience. 

Pick a niche, find your tribe and cater for them with vicious focus. Don’t get distracted by the potential of other markets until you have fully understood and captured the one you set out to target. 

1000 TRUE FANS

Speaking of choosing your target audience, in 2008 Kevin Kelly wrote a blog post titled “1000 True Fans”. In it he proposed the idea that you don’t need millions or even hundreds of thousands of clients, customers or fans to make a living. What you need is 1000 true fans. 

I absolutely love this idea for side hustles or businesses that are just starting out. You don’t need to think about your 100 000th customer, you need to think about and focus on the first 1000 and make damn sure that they all become your biggest fans. 

You know what happens when you find and cultivate 1000 true fans? They tell people about you and spread the love. If your product is good enough and the attention to detail is there you can almost guarantee that they’ll pay you and set you on your way. 

Do the math with me here. If you get yourself 1000 true fans and each fan pays you $2 per month for whatever you are selling then you’ll be making $2000 a month with your side hustle. 

Is that enough to satisfy your definition of success? 

THE 3 F’S

So how do you find your 1000 true fans? You start with the 3 F’s. 

When you have a clearly defined idea you need to start talking about it. This is not the standard advice. Usually, your gut tells you to keep your idea close to your chest and hide it from the world. That's the wrong advice. You need to tell anyone who will listen and you need to start with the three F's: Friends, Family and Fools. 

These are the three groups likely to buy your first products. 

Your friends want you to succeed, your family feels obligated to get behind you and the fools are the early adopters who love trying new things and are willing to put up with a bit of pain to get their fix of the latest, greatest startups or side hustles. 

Talk to them about your idea and gather their responses. They are not going to steal your idea from you, they have their own ideas, I promise. 

Sit with them, pitch them, talk to them, engage with them about your idea or business and then start turning them into believers. 

You can also start to expand your marketing efforts into blog posts, Facebook posts and guesting on podcasts or Youtube shows. Doing one thing is better than zero as Gary Vaynerchuck once said. 

Do lots of one thing and they all add up but do nothing and it’s still zero. 

FRIENDS PAY FULL PRICE (FPFP)

There is this weird, awkward, unspoken situation that exists between friends and family: When using a friend’s service or buying their products you should get a discount.

Most people default to giving a discount to friends. I think this is wrong and here’s why:

Friends should want to pay full price. Friends should want to help you succeed, grow your business and empower you to be better at what you do.

Over and above everything else, if your friends want to buy something from you, you should want to give them the best you can. If you are discounting your product or service, you will immediately want to treat them differently to a full paying customer. That’s not right.

My motto is:

Friends Pay Full Price (FPFP).

I’m happy to offer loyal customers value. Whether they are friends or not, if you support me, I’ll support you.

More businesses should take this approach to billing friends and family. Full price or nothing. Imagine going into Vodafone or PWC and saying: “I know the CEOs brother really well, please can I get your product with a friend's discount of 20%.”

You’d be laughed out of the building. So if big business can take this stance, why can’t small business?

Let’s put a stop to this behaviour. From today, right now, if a friend or family member wants to use your product or service, make them pay full price.

How Can Small Business Prepare for COVID-19?

As the world heads towards a global lockdown, every business owner is rightfulling in a flat panic.

My very smart friend, Sam Beckbessinger and I hosted a live stream this week to discuss what small business owners can and should be doing to try and get in front of the coronavirus economic fallout.

Here’s the entire livestream in full:

In this Q&A session, Sam Beckbessinger and I discuss the things that small businesses should start doing to prepare for the incoming economic fallout of the ...

The Time for Us to Lead Is Now

Today I want to talk directly to the leaders. 

If you lead a business, a team, a family or even just yourself, listen up.

In this time of crisis, you need to lead with conviction and compassion.

In these trying times (and from today, always) you must communicate openly and frequently. 

You must lead with care and decisiveness. 

You must engage on a human level and grasp that people are scared and feel alone. Understanding and patience go much further than aggression and instruction. 

You must trust your team to do the right thing at the right time for themselves, for you, your company and their fellow humans. If you don't think they can do the right thing then you are working or living with the wrong people. Now is the time to figure this out.

You must take a breath.

Take a deep breath and realise that everyone is going through this together but in their own way. 

There is no right way to be scared. There is no right way to feel alone. There is no right way to survive.

The only right thing to do is no harm.

Uncertainty is now part of our daily lives. As a leader, you need to figure out how to live in uncertain times and adapt.

It is a difficult time to be a leader but leaders thrive in difficult times.

The DO. FAIL. LEARN. REPEAT. Entrepreneurship Course

After many, many years of building businesses, learning, failing and getting up to try again I have finally launched an online course.

The course is built off the back of my debut business autobiography titled DO. FAIL. LEARN. REPEAT.

In the course you will learn how to deal with failure, how to kickstart your ideas and everything inbetween. I’ve learned the hard lessons so you don’t have to.

If you have been thinking about building a business or a side hustle, if you are looking to build some extra income or just really have an idea that you have wanted to turn into reality then I suggest you sign up for the course asap!

Don't Let Your Side Hustle Become Your Side Hassle

Photo by Temitayo Aina on Unsplash

Recently I was facilitating an entrepreneurship workshop and someone said: “Don’t let your side hustle become your side hassle.” 

This immediately struck me and made me pause. 

What a brilliant way to sum up how to build something while you are still full-time employed. Your side hustle should be something you do that is fun, engaging and will eventually make you some money on the side. 

Your side hustle should not become a permanent hassle in your life. 

It shouldn’t drain you, it should engage you. 

It shouldn’t make you sad, it should inspire you. 

You shouldn’t have to carve out time to force yourself to sit and work on it, you should be thinking about it all the time and have to stop yourself from working on it. 

If your side hustle has become a hassle then it’s time to stop and reconsider why you started out in the first place. What are you trying to achieve? How much time do you want to allocate to building out your side hustle? Do you want it to be your full-time gig eventually? If so, when?

Once you have reconsidered all of these questions you can ask yourself if it’s time to throw in the towel or double down on your side hustle. 

But don’t let your side hustle become your side hassle. 

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Nic Haralambous is an obsessive entrepreneur and keynote speaker. You can book him for your next conference, sign up for his newsletter or follow him on Twitter.

Different Doesn't Mean Bad

We can all like different things without them being bad

I like Taylor Swift’s music. 

There, I said it. I’m a huge fan. OK, fine, I’m one of the Swifties. 

The other day I was minding my own business doing my work while listening to music. All of a sudden, the song that was playing was broadcast across our office Bluetooth speaker. I was playing Maroon 5 at the time. Someone in the office laughingly scolded me that Maroon 5 should never again be played through those speakers. 

He was kidding, but not really. 

Generally, we don’t like it when other people don’t like what we like. We believe it’s some kind of accusation about the thing we like. Because I like Taylor Swift, I have bad taste in music and offend people who like System of a Down. 

I like Maroon 5. I like Justin Bieber too. I also like Seether, Nora en Pure, Rage Against The Machine, Marilyn Manson, Eminem, Jay-Z, Chance the Rapper, Beyonce, Bach, Robyn, Queen, Adele, Interpol, Hozier, Lizzo, Billie Eilish and a mass of other genres and artists. You can follow me on Spotify and see that this is true. 

The Juggalo face paint.

Fans make or break an artist. Without fans, you have no one attending concerts and no one buying your music. Fans also promote you to their friends and then the group becomes a unit of fans who identify themselves via their musical interests. 

Humans like to feel like they belong to something. The most extreme example of this that I can think of is the Juggalo community. Juggalos are fans of the Insane Clown Posse. “[Juggalos come] from all walks of life — from poverty, from rich, from all religions, all colors. […] It doesn’t matter if you’re born with a silver spoon in your mouth, or a crack rock in your mouth.”[6] Juggalos have compared themselves to a family.[7][8]

It is because of this unity that we believe that things we don’t like are bad. 

That is a fundamentally flawed concept. Just because you don’t like something doesn’t make it bad. Saying this out loud and berating other people for liking something is about you and your insecurity not about them and their tastes. 

This applies beyond music. It applies to everything. Just because you don’t like onions doesn’t make onions bad. The most violent example of this throughout history is religion. We believe that religion is a zero-sum game. Yours is wrong, mine is right, ours can’t exist together. 

The more accepting we are of this basic concept, the more we’d all get along.

Different doesn’t mean bad. 

What It Takes to Be an Entrepreneur

Don’t shy away from the discomfort in life, embrace it, face it head-on and learn how to overcome it.

More than just about anything right now, South Africa needs entrepreneurs to start building businesses. Sure, we should also consider not killing each other too, but let’s focus on the entrepreneurs for the time being. 

Building a business is difficult. It’s meant to be difficult. If it was easy then no one would take it seriously. 

My partner has a saying: It’s OK if something is difficult. It’s not OK if something is bad. Starting a business in South Africa is a bad experience, not a difficult one. This is a major roadblock for many people because registering a business can be costly, time-consuming and takes way too long to have a positive effect on the nation. Socially, it’s hard 

There is a global ranking of the best countries to start a business in. 

Singapore often features in the top five of this list. Singapore imposes no dividend or capital gains tax, flights to neighbouring countries are affordable and if you know what forms to fill in you can have your business registered and active within five days. This is a triumph. Other countries that feature on this list include New Zealand, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong and Mexico. Mexico has implemented extensive business registration reform and thanks to these changes you can now register a business and start trading in eight days. 

It’s easy to blame our government for failing us right at the start of an entrepreneurial journey but this is futile. Blame gets us nowhere so let’s discuss what needs to be done to prepare us to be better entrepreneurs.

What can our government do?

Honestly, very little right now. 

At this point, all we can ask for is the bare minimum: electricity, water, a safe environment to build and the freedom to do so without onerous regulations and corruption. 

We cannot rely on our government to build the future we want, it’s up to us and our entrepreneurs. 

What can our schools do?

When I was at school the academic focus was primarily about preparing students to get into university. This is an outdated way of thinking. University is great for some people but higher academic education is not a one-size-fits-all measure of success. 

The most memorable academic exercise of my 12 years at school was my grade 10 business competition. I was 16 and this was my first experience building a business from zero to revenue. We had to sell something for one term and we were competing with everyone else in our class. This experience changed the course of my life. I wish I was given the opportunity to build another business after that project ended but that was it for entrepreneurship in school. One project and done. 

We also had “business economics” as a subject which was a weekly class that tried to teach cash flow management and business accounting to students who had never experienced revenue, profit or expenses before. This was a completely theoretical course that was a waste of time. 

What schools don’t realise is that anyone who has a passion is a potential entrepreneur if they are guided in the right way. If you love music and want to start a band you are going to have to understand how to sell tickets for a profit, market yourself and manage cash flow. If you are a rising tennis star you better understand how to make money from sponsorships and employ people to manage your brand while you practice and play. If you are a rugby player on track to become a springbok player you are going to have to plan for the inevitable day that you hang up your boots. If you’re on track to become a doctor then you’re going to have to understand how to run your practice for profit. Schools have budding business people all around them but they ignore the talent because entrepreneurship isn’t traditionally academic. 

In short, schools need a small business curriculum for students who show promise early on and want to learn how to take a product to market. With the Internet, drop shipping and social media there is no reason that 14-year-olds shouldn’t be generating income while they’re studying history and geography. 

What can our parents do?

My parents always wanted the best for me. In their experience of the world, that meant that I needed to studying mathematics and science and go to university to become a doctor, lawyer or accountant. My parents wanted me to live a secure life without the entrepreneurial worries that they had to endure. 

They didn’t realise that for me the worries of entrepreneurship were not something to be endured but embraced. They believed that a better life for me was the stability of a career that was reliable. Unfortunately for them, there was nothing that they could do to stop me from starting my own businesses and taking the leap into the world of entrepreneurship. My father is an accomplished entrepreneur but sadly never invited me into his world to learn the tricks of the trade. I had to grow up and dive in headfirst on my own. He was trying hard to protect me from the hardships and I understand that now. What I needed at the time was a mentor who could help ease the suffering that all entrepreneurs go through, instead, I was left to fend for myself. 

It’s important for parents trying to guide their children in today’s fast-paced world to remember that what is big in their world is not big in the world. Just because you sucked at selling doesn’t mean your kid will suck at it too. Just because you want the stability of a corporate job definitely doesn’t mean your kid will want the same thing. 

When I started coding at 10 or 11 years old my parents had no idea what I was doing. Today you might not know what TikTok is but your kids could make a substantial living through the platform. The 16-year-old Fortnite champion won $1m at the inaugural world championship and I bet his parents initially worked really hard to get him to focus on his studies and put the controller down. 

If you see your kid has a flair for selling, storytelling or business in any way then I urge you to embrace it and help them start a small business. It could be a lemonade stand in your neighbourhood or they could be trading Pokemon online or you could help them build a website that sells a product they’re obsessed with. You are never too young to start a business and it’s never been easier than it is right now to build a small business and start trading with the world.

What can we do to help ourselves?

There are a lot of reasons not to start a business; fear, ridicule, lack of capital, lack of time and even a lack of knowledge or experience. 

If you have considered starting a business but haven’t yet because of one of these reasons, I get it. It’s tough out there but let me tell you right now that there is never going to be a good time to start your business. There is never going to be the perfect moment. You are never going to have enough capital and you are certainly never going to have enough time. 

What you need to do is stop making excuses and just get started. Sure, when I say it like that it sounds easy to just jump right in and get started. I know it isn’t. I know there are complications. I know, I know, I know. There’s always going to be a reason not to do it.

If you’re wondering what it takes to be an entrepreneur then let me break down a few of the traits that I believe you’re going to need. 

I want to be clear here, these aren’t the only things you need to make it and if you don’t have some, many, any or all of these traits you can still start a business because we’re all built differently and the path to success is different for everyone. 

Here are a few things that I’ve needed to be an entrepreneur over the past 20 years: 

Resilience

You are going to fail. Once you understand this you can become the entrepreneur that you need to be. Fear of failure is likely the biggest reason that most people don’t start their own business. But here’s the thing, failure is part of the journey. 

Statistically, if you start a business, you are almost guaranteed to fail at some point. The more times you get up and start another business, the more likely you are to succeed. 

Success is not in the starting of your first business, it’s in the starting again once you’ve failed. 

Resilient entrepreneurs are the ones that succeed. 

Risk

Building a business is definitely a risk. Understanding how much you are willing to risk is imperative to your general happiness in life as an entrepreneur. 

If you risk everything then the upside is likely to be massive but the downside will probably break you eventually. 

The pressure that comes with risking everything is not for everyone. You don’t have to risk it all on a single bet. You can build a side-hustle that you work on for a couple of hours every week and put very little capital into. Or you can take your life savings and plough them into your next venture. This really depends on your risk appetite. 

Take time to figure out what you can financially afford to risk. Carefully plan out what you are willing to risk every day; a few hours, your relationships, your car, house or eating out. It’s different for everyone but you must have a clear idea of your risk appetite before you bite into the entrepreneurial journey. 

Hard Work

Anyone who says that you can build a thriving business without hard work is lying. I am not saying that you need to sleep less or sacrifice your mental or physical health to build a business but you are going to need to work consistently hard to get your business off the ground. 

If you are serious about building a business then something is going to have to give. You can’t party all night, read your favourite books, play with your dogs, take your kids to school, watch 3 hours of TV every night and then expect to build a business after hours while you work a fulltime job and still get 8 hours of sleep and an hour of exercise every day. There just aren’t enough hours in the day. 

Hard work comes with sacrifice and it’s up to you to decide what you choose to work on and what you choose to give up. If you decide to build a business and work on it every day for an hour then commit to that and work hard every day to perform at that level.

Mental and Physical Fitness

Entrepreneurs have an odd quirk that I’ve noticed over the past decade. We believe that putting ourselves first is a bad thing. We believe that we should work 20 hours a day and neglect everything else in the name of our business. 

I think we have this all wrong. 

There is a difference between self-care and selfishness. 

It is not selfish to go to the gym. It is not selfish to eat properly. It is not selfish to sleep an adequate amount. It is not selfish to see a psychologist who can help you with your mental fitness. These things are all self-care. 

If you put yourself at the top of your priority list and become the best version of yourself then the people around you will be happier too and want to work with you to achieve anything. 

If you neglect your mental and physical fitness you will become a fat, unhealthy and mentally unstable jerk. No one wants to work with that person. 

Discomfort

As I’ve mentioned already, building a business is difficult. It’s meant to be difficult. If it was easy then no one would take it seriously. You are going to be uncomfortable and it’s going to be tough. But real change, real progress only really happens in the discomfort. It is in moments of discomfort that we really figure out what we’re made of. 

Most people shy away from feeling discomfort. I have spent my life embracing discomfort and understanding how it can help me become better. 

Don’t shy away from the discomfort in life, embrace it, face it head-on and learn how to overcome it. 

Nic Haralambous is an obsessive entrepreneur and global keynote speaker. You can book him for your next conference, sign up for his newsletter or follow him on Twitter.

Five Things I Do to Improve My Life

Small changes make a big difference. Big changes are difficult but necessary.

There is a lot of advice that you can read if you want to be happier, slimmer, smarter, richer or anything-er for that matter. I’m not here to tell you how to live your life, I just want to tell you about a few things that I do to make my life a bit better. In the end, you can do whatever you want or make excuses to not do the things you know need to be done. 

I spend an unusual amount of time thinking about my time, my days, weeks, months, years and decades. I agonise over decisions I’ve made, people I’ve met, things I’ve said and the ways that I’ve acted in the past. Most of it makes me proud and some of it makes me cringe. Regardless of the outcome, I am always testing and experimenting with ways to improve my life and gain more out of my time. 

I have found that the below five things have added immense value to my existence and that of those around me. 

1. Cut people out

Over the past 15 years, I have worked tirelessly to remove assholes from my orbit. 

Here’s the thing that they didn’t tell you in school about your friends: You don’t have to be friends with people forever. Just because you once had something in common with a friend doesn’t me that you always will. People change and move on and that’s OK. 

You are allowed to break up with friends. It’s not easy but it’s a necessary function of growing up and evolving. 

This applies to your family too. You don’t have to be friends with your family. You don’t have to like them. Hell, you don’t even have to love them. That’s the stuff of movies. 

Your family is made up of completely fallible humans who are exactly the same as the stranger who cut in front of you in line that one time. The difference is that you share DNA with your family. Fundamentally though, your family can be (most likely are) assholes just like anyone else. More often than not, you put up with their shitty attitude because “blood is thicker than water”. That cliché is one of my family’s favourites. I’ve had that shoved in my face more than I care to remember. It usually followed some kind of bust-up where I was on the receiving end of some outburst. Sure, it’s true that blood is thicker than water but to me, that just means blood stains worse than water does.

Cut people out when they treat you like rubbish. Move towards people who support your dreams, who treat you like an equal, who challenge you in a positive way and who know how to respect you and your opinions. 

2. Be more curious

I am obsessively curious about the world, life, love, the universe and everything. There are no boundaries to what one person can learn. We don’t need teachers to teach us anymore, we have the Internet. YouTube is filled with helpful people who have put tutorials online for just about anything and they’re completely free. 

If you have a mobile device, an Internet connection and time, then you can learn anything. 

The more curious you are about the world around you, the more interesting and interested you will become. People will notice this newfound energy and gravitate towards you. Your curiosity doesn’t need to be in support of anything other than your interest. Follow random paths down a rabbit hole and expand your knowledge base. You’ll be amazed at the conversations you can uncover because you took a pottery class for a few weeks, or learned about the migration patterns of a certain bird, or even just watched a show you never thought to watch before. 

I’m all-in on the concept of curiosity. So much so that I am writing my second book about the most curious people and businesses in the world. 

3. Get comfortable looking stupid

Feeling stupid is liberating. I promise. 

In the beginning, I hated the feeling but over time it has become one of my favourite things in the world. I love listening to smart people explain things to me as if I’m really, really stupid. There is something so elegant about hearing an eloquent explanation about a difficult and complex topic laid out in the simplest way possible. 

The interesting upshot to being the dumbest person in the room is that you can also weed out the actors. 

If someone cannot explain a complex theory, problem, solution, argument or issue to you in the simplest way possible then they probably don’t understand it well enough. 

That’s OK, but they’ll probably never admit it to you because their ego wants them to be the smartest person in the room. I used to suffer from this complex; I always had to be the smartest person in the room. Once I realised that the smartest people in the room are usually the ones listening and learning, I started to listen more and talk less. This helped me drop my ego (see below point) and learn from the really smart people around me. 

4. Drop that ego

I have seen ego destroy businesses. I have seen ego shatter friendships. I have seen ego rip relationships apart. Ego is the most destructive and pervasive human trait that I battle with on a daily basis. 

In every part of my life, I have tried to get rid of ego as much as I can. You may think that you don’t have a problem with ego but you probably do because we all do. When you’re fighting with your partner and you refuse to apologise when you’re wrong, dig your heels in and prepare for a week-long fight, that’s ego. If you are angry with someone who corrected you in a meeting (even though you were wrong), that’s ego. 

Everything is simpler without ego. I urge you to spend a week thinking about and removing your ego from the equation when interacting with people. You’ll immediately notice how much simpler every interaction becomes. 

Try it, I dare you. 

5. Shut up and listen

I have struggled with this one for years and years. I like talking. Not because I think I’m right but because I am obsessively curious about everything and read a lot. I have a lot in my brain that needs to get out!

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Just because I have a lot to say doesn’t mean I should say it all. Resisting the urge to be the loudest and most talkative person in a group means that I am able to learn from and listen to the smart people that I surround myself with. Tough lesson to come to terms with when I like talking!

This is partly a jump back up to point one; it’s important to listen to people around you and even more so when they are people that you have carefully curated. If you have surrounded yourself with yes-people or morons then it’s likely that you won't want to listen to them. If the people around you are experts, achievers, have no (low) ego and are happy to look stupid too, then you’ll want to listen to them talk all the time. 

You might read the list above and think that these changes don’t apply to you. You’re wrong. Everyone with an ego believes they don’t have an ego or that they deserve to have their ego. Everyone who talks too much believes that they have the most valuable points to make. Everyone who is trapped by their friends and family will tell you that they have no choice but to be around those people. 

You always have a choice. You can’t control what other people do and say, but you can always, always control your own choices. 

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Nic Haralambous is an obsessive entrepreneur and keynote speaker. 

You can book him for your next conference or sign up for his newsletter.

What Is the One Metric That Matters to You?

Photo by Harry Sandhu on Unsplash

Have you ever thought about the one measurable thing that matters most to you?

I read a tweet recently that asked the following questions:

The question caught me off guard in its simplicity and clarity. I often think about my own “victory condition” (hat tip to Rich Mulholland for introducing this concept to me) for certain scenarios in business but very rarely do I hear people talking about this in their personal lives. 

Life is a big experiment. Every day we do things that we aren’t sure of. We make statements that could end well or badly. We get into a car that is statistically likely to end up in an accident eventually. We fly in planes, exercise, eat, drink and are merry. We experiment. 

But experiments are only effective if they have a desired outcome or are being analyzed. I don’t think that we analyze our experiments (life) often enough. 

We plod along eating what we eat, doing what we do, living the life we live without much introspection or review. 

When I invest in or consult with startups I often ask them for a single true metric that represents their business. It could be revenue, it could be a viral coefficient, it could be user retention, staff retention or any metric that moves their needle. Most often the startup has no idea which single metric matters most to them. This isn’t unusual at all but there is a definite correlation between clarity of thought, execution and understanding a single true metric that matters in a business. Thinking about your daily work right now, do you have a single metric that you can look at come the end of the day to decide if your day was successful or not?

I believe the same can be said for your day to day life. What one true metric matters to you? It’s OK if that metric is something simple or complex or if other people scoff at it or copy it. There are no right or wrong answers here. 

I’m more interested in the existence of any answer in my life. 

I value time. 

Time is the one metric that matters to me. 

Do I have the time to do the things that I want? Do I have the time to enjoy the thing I am doing right now? Or am I rushing off to the next meeting/event/sight without taking it all in? Do I have the time to spend with the people that matter to me most? Do I have the time to sit and think about the things I want to think about?

From this one true metric, everything else emerges. 

To have sufficient time I need to have sufficient resources. To have sufficient resources I need sufficient experience to gain the resources. To have the experience I needed to take the time to learn, experiment and gain experience. It all comes back to time for me. 

I’m not sure if this will always be my one true metric, but for right now it makes sense. 

A friend of mine, Rob Hope, replied to the above tweet with a pretty simple answer that I loved: Freedom. 

Freedom is a fantastic true metric to align your life to. However, jumping back to the victory condition, you can only be free if you have defined what freedom means to you in your daily life. Take the time to think about what matters to you and how you define victory in your day, week, month, year, life. 

Then answer me this question: What is your one true metric?

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Nic Haralambous is an obsessive entrepreneur and keynote speaker. You can book him for your next conference, sign up for his newsletter or follow him on Twitter.

An Honest Conversation with Aisha Pandor, SweepSouth co-founder

I am obsessed with getting the real, honest story from smart people building difficult and interesting things. Last year I hosted a series of conversations with a variety of people. Below is the conversation that I had with Aisha Pandor, the incredibly smart and talented co-founder of one of South Africa’s top startups, SweepSouth.

Aisha is one of those rare finds, an Expert Generalist who has studied microbiology, biochemistry and a has a PHD in human genetics. She then decided to build a business. She has a wide breadth of knowledge and a deep set of skills that make her an impressive startup founder to listen to and learn from.

The Best Customer Service in Three Simple Steps

This is the easiest way to offer the best customer service

There is a lot written about customer service. There are books, talks, videos online and courses you can take. Just about everyone is an expert on the subject because everyone has experienced bad customer service. I am not a customer service expert. I’m one of the people who have experienced bad service and thought long and hard about what good service to me and my customers.

In my career, I have had to deal with customers online, in retail stores, end-consumers, CEOs as clients, event managers and everything in between. I have serviced customers well and I have serviced customers terribly.

Here’s the simplest method that I have learned to ensure you are offering up the best service to your customers:

1. Define what you are going to give your customers (internal)

2. Set their expectations (external)

3. Deliver (internal ➩ external)

That’s it.

These three steps a customer service strategy that just about anyone can deliver on.

Step 1: Define what you are going to give your customers

The first part of the three-step process is internal.

This is not as simple as you might initially think. Everyone assumes that good customer service always looks the same but that’s not true. For some businesses that means delivering fast service. For others, it means answering a call in a minute or two. For many brands, “always-on” is key and they ensure that you can get hold of them at any time in the day. For a fast-food delivery joint good customer service could mean delivering food while it’s still warm.

The internal process of defining exactly what you are going to give your customers is fundamental. I’m shocked at how few businesses can clearly tell me what they offer up to their customers. This is such an important part of the method because it helps you outline your internal processes in relation to the desired victory condition for your customer.

If you are going to decide to answer calls from customers then you need a phone number for them to call and a person to answer. If you’re going to ensure that your website has 100% uptime then you need sufficient infrastructure to make this happen.

When defining what you specifically want to deliver to your customer in the way of service it’s imperative to look at your internal resources and think about how you’ll deliver the same level of service in the future. Not all customer service is made equal.

Is your plan in line with your brand? Maybe being polite isn’t the best route to represent your particular voice? A great example of this kind of thinking is a cellphone case and skin brand called dbrand.

“overpriced electronic tape…” dbrand knows themselves.

Their social media is filled with what other brands would consider horrible service. Cheeky responses, aggressive replies to irate customers and straight-talking, no-bullshit honesty with a tongue firmly planted in someone else’s cheek for good measure.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

This is precisely what I mean when I say that you should define internally what kind of service you are delivering.

Make sure that everyone in your business knows what success looks like and then get ready to rumble!

Step 2: Set their expectations

Setting expectations is very much an external process. This means that much of the work required is telling the customer what they can expect from you. It’s important that your team is constantly made aware of the expectations too, but this is mostly covered in step one above.

The key part of delivering on my three-pronged customer service strategy is setting your customers expectations right from the start. Do not ease into it, do not renege on your promise, do not waiver from your goals. Everyone needs to get on board and go for the goal, every day.

It’s also important at this point to actually state openly the kind of service you expect to deliver to your customer. Use your FAQ page, use blog posts, use your social media bios and literally spell out what you’re going to give customers.

“Expect a cheeky reply from us within 5 working days.” If customers see this then that’s what they expect, no more, no less.

This part of the method requires external communication that is clear, consistent and repetitive.

Tell them what you’re going to give them. ➩ Give it to them. ➩ Remind them what you said you were going to give them.

Simple.

Step 3: Deliver

Once you have publicly stated what kind of customer service you’re going to deliver, you better damn well deliver on exactly what you promise. Anything less than that and you’re in trouble.

dbrand goes to great lengths to consistently deliver on their promise. They rarely waiver, if ever, and their customers shower them with love, RTs and fan frenzy.

The Delivery step is broken out into two parts: internal and external.

Internally you need to ensure that you are geared up to deliver on your promise in whichever way is required. This is why the initial step is so key. Figure out what you’re going to deliver in the most minute of details and then deliver exactly that. Realign your company if you have to. Do whatever it takes to make sure that you are able to deliver on your initial promise.

Overall, customers just want to be treated the way they expect to be treated. So set their expectations in line with your abilities. Do not over-promise, that’s a rookie mistake. Always, always under-promise and over-deliver.

—

Nic Haralambous is an obsessive entrepreneur and keynote speaker. You can book him for your next conference, sign up for his newsletter or follow him on Twitter.

Photo by Chromatograph on Unsplash

The Five-day Workweek Is Dying

There is nothing new about wanting to work less.

This is probably a concept that started almost as soon as the first sentient human came into existence. Humans don’t like to do things that we don’t like. We also don’t like to do these things too often. Unfortunately, many people work in jobs they hate with people they dislike doing things that infuriate them. That makes a five-day workweek almost impossible to cope with. Marketing rallies around this concept. There is a restaurant called TGIF (Thank god It’s Friday) and I can’t think of an alcohol brand that hasn’t launched a campaign targeting the weekend party we all long for. What started off as a made-up way to plan our days has turned into a very real hatred of our time and how we are forced to manage it.

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of a five-day workweek and by extension, the seven-day week in general. The concept of time, as we currently measure it, is a man-made concept. Obviously there are natural occurrences that dictate how long a single year is or a month should be (the revolution of the earth around the sun and the phases of the moon respectively) but there is absolutely no naturally occurring event that dictates a seven-day week. It’s completely made up.

In a very detailed article about the origin of the seven-day week, The Atlantic explains:

“The roots of the seven-day week can be traced back about 4,000 years, to Babylon. The Babylonians believed there were seven planets in the solar system, and the number seven held such power to them that they planned their days around it. Their seven-day, planetary week spread to Egypt, Greece, and eventually to Rome, where it turns out the Jewish people had their own version of a seven-day week. (The reason for this is unclear, but some have speculated that the Jews adopted this after their exile in Babylon in the sixth century B.C.) At the very latest, the seven-day week was firmly entrenched in the Western calendar about 250 years before Christ was born.

The earliest recorded use of the word “weekend,” Rybczynski notes, occurred in 1879 in an English magazine called Notes and Queries.”

Let me reiterate that last sentence: The earliest recorded use of the word “weekend” occurred in 1879.

That is only 141 years ago.

We are all slaves to a 141-year-old tradition. That’s around the same time that the incandescent light bulb and barb wire were invented. The seven-day week is as old as barb wire.

In a 2014 article, the Daily Mail stated that “Professor John Ashton, president of the UK Faculty of Public Health, said that shorter hours would allow workers to spend more time with their families and help reduce unemployment. Reducing the standard working week from five days to four would also help combat medical conditions such as high blood pressure and mental health problems.” In the same year, Larry Page (one of the co-founders of Google) threw his support behind the idea of a four-day workweek.

I believe that a shorter workweek would give people the time they need to exercise, see their families more, pursue their hobbies and passions and come back to work rejuvenated and ready to give their employer 100% when they are at work. When I talk to young startup founders who are grinding away doing 18 hour days, seven days a week while they are building their business I always ask them if they are looking after themselves. The answer is generally a combination of a laugh and a cry. It’s strange to me that so many people believe that they belong at the bottom of their own priority list.

The irony here is that if you place yourself at the top of your priority list, you will perform better across the board. If you exercise, eat well, take time to walk your dogs, see your family more often and pursue your hobbies then you will be a happier and healthier person. I haven’t done research to back this up, but my gut tells me that happy and healthy people are better at their jobs. Humans are not built to work every day, five days a week for 9 hours a day with no choice but to plow ahead. We are not machines, in case you had forgotten.

This relates directly to a four-day workweek and the balance required to be the best version of yourself.

Yet, unsurprisingly, we are all still working a five-day week and most of us don’t even have the option of flexible hours in those five days. This is unsurprising because humans do not like change. We don’t like change even if the research supports change. We don’t like change even if the benefit is clear to everyone. We don’t like change even if going to the gym would mean you feel better throughout the day. We don’t like change even if it means that meditating will lower your anxiety levels. We just don’t like change.

Employers are the most resistant to the idea of a reduced workweek. Many that I have spoken with believe (just by a gut feel mostly) that if they reduce the hours a person works then they will receive less value from that person. In their minds, time spent at work is directly correlated to performance and output. In short, bosses don’t believe they can build big, profitable, sustainable businesses with a four-day workweek.

The founder of Treehouse, Ryan Carson, believes otherwise and stated the below figures in a 2014 article:

We work a 4-day week, and in just 32 hours per week, here’s what we’ve been fortunate to achieve:

Over $10,000,000 in yearly sales

70 full-time employees

Yearly revenue growth of over 120%

$13,000,000 raised in venture capital

Over 70,000 paying students

It can be done.

Recently, the newly elected 34-year-old Finnish Prime Minister was rumoured to have proposed a four-day workweek for Finland. She sadly had not actually put the idea forward formally but the suggestion seems to have sparked the debate anew in progressive circles around the world.

Microsoft Japan, however, actually did trial a four-day workweek in their local office. They found that offering their staff the gift of a three-day weekend boosted productivity by up to 40%. Microsoft gave their team five Friday’s off in a row while keeping their salaries unchanged. They also reduced meeting times to a maximum of 30 minutes. By closing on these five days, Microsoft also reduced expenses dramatically with electricity costs coming down and paper printing falling by 59%.

It’s probably not going to happen anytime soon, but I believe that employers are going to have to change the way they think about building their businesses in the future. People are not looking to work long hours every day for five to seven days of the week anymore. We’re going to demand a better balance and I believe that many people would take a slightly decreased salary for an extra day off. Even this is unnecessary as many studies show that a four-day workweek increases productivity.

I am of the mind that the future of work is outcomes-based, not time-based. Hire the best people to do the best work, give them interesting problems to solve and the freedom to solve them and watch the magic happen.

Here’s How to Grow an Authentic Business Network

Cash is often the most sought after type of capital in startup land. Real, authentic networking is a severely underestimated skill for founders and entrepreneurs to cultivate. One of the most undervalued resources for a startup founder is social capital. The wider and deeper your network is, the simpler you will find fundraising, hiring, and business development.

It’s easy to act like you’re the shit. It’s easy to treat other people as stepping stones towards your summit of success. It’s very difficult to build a real network of people who believe in you and are willing to assist you, no questions asked. This is a key point; building a network of people isn’t that hard. Building an authentic network of value people who can actually help you reach your lofty goals, now that’s a talent.

Here are a few tips to help you build an authentic network of people around you:

1. BE PATIENT

Building a real network of people takes time.

I’m not talking about days or months, I’m talking about years. To really be able to lean on your network you have to build and nurture relationships over many, many years. You’ll be surprised how quickly you move from a coffee meeting to a warm business connection to a friend and then on to someone that you can really rely on. Before you know it, you’ll have known some of the people in your network for more than a decade.

These people, the ones you have deep and meaningful conversations with over a coffee, walk or meal are the ones you can lean on when times get tough. These are the same people who make the most life-changing introductions because they believe in you and your cause.

It takes a long time to build up these relationships and this is my number 1 tip for building an authentic relationship; you cannot rush authenticity. I’m going to repeat this point throughout the article. Networking cannot be done at a single networking event hosted at a co-working space.

2. GIVE WITHOUT ASKING FOR ANYTHING

There is no such thing as altruism. Even Mother Theresa gained joy from helping people, defeating her altruism. I learned this in my first year studying philosophy. Mother Theresa wasn’t altruistic and nor are you. When you meet someone and strike up a business relationship they will absolutely expect you to ask for something. So don’t.

Meet with them. Buy them a coffee. Have engaging questions prepared. Ask them about their story. Ask them how they managed to build the thing they built. Ask about their family and how they balance their life. Ask about their co-founders. But don’t ask them for something that you need.

Asking someone that you have just met for a favor is condescending and frustrating. For many people, just meeting with you is a disruption in their day so acknowledge that by being polite, engaging and prepared.

3. SUPPORT YOUR SUPPORT

As you try to grow your network, remember that the person you are talking with is probably also trying to grow theirs. Even if you are a young founder just starting out you are going to have something valuable to offer. You may know other founders in a vertical that is interesting. You may know a friend who is the best salesperson in the world and would be a great fit for someone in your network.

It’s important to always offer up support wherever it may seem valuable. Don’t just take. Give support freely, even if it sometimes costs you.

4. BE HONEST

Don’t bullshit. Smart, savvy and experienced people will see right through you. Don’t come with a hidden agenda. In fact, send an agenda through to the person you are meeting so that they know what they’re walking into. Even if that means your agenda looks as follows:

Agenda for our 30min coffee:

• Introduction — I’ll tell you a bit about myself

• A quick funding question (starting my angel round)

• Someone I think you should meet (a good friend who is in your vertical)

That’s it. That’s a good, straightforward agenda that helps to lay out the 30 minutes.

5. LISTEN MORE, TALK LESS

Once you are sitting with this new person whom you’d like to bring in to your network, do me a favour and shut up.

Introduce yourself and then start asking questions that help the other person talk about themselves and their experience, life, and interests. It’s like being on a date; your potential partner doesn’t just want to hear about how amazing you are, they want to tell you how amazing they are too. Very few people will pass up the chance to talk about themselves and something they are passionate about.

Be sure to make this a conversation, not a presentation. Both of you should engage in a meaningful way to get to know one another and figure out as quickly as possible if you’re a network match.

The best way that I have found to quickly disarm people is to be brutally honest with them about something. Often I’ll mention something important or personal and show them that I trust them enough to open up.

Many people believe that trust is earned. I do not. I give trust freely at the beginning until I have a reason not to trust you. Go into first engagements this way; Trust people until they give you a reason not to trust them.

6. DO NOT PITCH

This should be obvious. Do not meet someone with the intention of expanding your network and then pitch them out of the blue.

Nobody likes to feel like they are being used. See point #1 above.

7. STOP GOING TO NETWORKING EVENTS

Networking events are not for networking. They are for busy founders who want to look more busy than other founders.

Networks are not built at networking events. They are built in the daily grind of sifting through contacts, engaging with your existing trusted network and having one on one meetings that are authentic. I can’t think of a single person that I met at a networking event that I still hold as part of my network today.

Stop wasting your time trying to look busy and network en masse. It can’t be done.

8. EMAIL CAN WORK

As long as you are not emailing someone out of the blue asking them for money, advice or some form of support, email can work. If you are emailing someone to thank them for an article, tell them how they’ve inspired you or just to introduce yourself, that’s fine. See point #1 above.

9. NURTURE NOT NATURE

Relationships like the ones you are trying to build for your professional network are not natural. They don’t just appear as part of life. They are hard work and take a lot of care, time and attention. You need to nurture your network constantly.

I have a simple trick to help me engage more frequently with people in my network that I care about. Once a month I go to the bottom of my contact list in my chat apps (Whatsapp/Telegram/Skype) and I start to messag the people from the bottom up. The bottom is obviously the people I have not spoken to recently so I start there. Some reply, some don’t, everyone is busy and that’s fine. But just drop them a message saying “Hi, How are you, long time!” and then go on about your day.

10. CHOOSE PEOPLE YOU MIGHT LIKE

Money is easy to find. Networks can be simple to grow and map out. Finding the right kind of people is more difficult. You need to carefully curate who you let into your network.

In the beginning, it will seem like anyone would be good to bring in to the mix, but the truth is much more complex. Some people have money but are bad. Some people are good but distracting. Some people are right for right now but not for the future. The right people will eventually present themselves and when you find them, you’ll know.

11. BONUS TIP: DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH #DYOR

Do not rock up to a first-time meeting with someone you are trying to build a relationship with and ask them to tell you about themselves. You should be prepared, you should know who they are, what they do, where they came from and how they got to where they are.

If you don’t know these things then why are you even interested in meeting with them?

I have a strict double-opt-in policy for introductions. This means that if I believe two people should meet up for whatever reason, I make sure to ask them both if they want to be introduced. I explain where I think the value is and give each person a short background on the other. Most introductions don’t come as clean as this so it’s up to you to investigate.

Don’t be creep, of course, but do know your subject and show them that you’ve taken time to find out about them and plan your engagement.

12. BONUS TIP: DO NOT MAKE ME SIGN AN NDA

The number of times I have arrived at a meeting with a young founder who is looking for advice or funding from me or my network and have been presented with an NDA is laughable.

Please, take note; NO ONE SIGNS NDAs.

If you ask me to sign an NDA in a casual coffee/drink/lunch meeting I will get up and leave. If you respect me enough to want me in your network then please respect me enough to assume that I am not going to rob you of your bazillion dollar idea.

The advice above can be filtered down into the following simple statement:

Be yourself for long enough that people like and trust you enough to want to help you.

Celebrate Your Victories Like A Football Team Celebrates A Goal

There are two very specific things that football teams set out to achieve in a football match:

1. Score as many goals as possible

2. Do not let the other team score any goals

This is literally the point in every football match. Yet in every football match that I’ve ever had to sit through, I have witnessed the manager and players go absolutely apeshit when they score a goal. Any goal. Not only the great goals. Literally, any time they get the little white ball to cross the little white line into the back of the net, they go nuts.

These people celebrate as if they are playing the first football match in the history of football and their team has just scored the first-ever goal in the history of the sport. It is something to behold. Football celebrations became so intense that there are now rules about how players can celebrate and players can actually receive a yellow card for celebrating too much. FIFA Law 12 penalizes excessive, time-wasting, and choreographed goal celebrations. Incredible!

While at the gym this morning I caught a glimpse of a very average football match being shown on the screens that are plastered all over the place. The skills on display were average, the players were average, the entire experience was average. Even the fans knew it was all pretty average. But then someone scored a (pretty average) goal and everyone lost their minds. The goalkeeper, the manager, the coaching staff, the players, everyone just lost it, running onto the field, then to the corner flag, then back to the team seating area where the reserve players were sitting. It was the best performance of the game thus far.

As I continued to do my thing on the elliptical machine I found myself berating the team for celebrating so hard. I was actually irritated that they were celebrating when they were clearly a sub-par team.

Then it hit me: We don’t celebrate enough as entrepreneurs and startup founders. We should all celebrate like a football team when they score a goal.

We should be celebrating the small things more consistently. These players are galvanized in their fight to score a goal and prevent the other team from scoring. So when they do actually score a goal, they should celebrate their achievement, no matter how good or bad the goal was. They achieved the one thing they need to do to win the game.

Watching the team that conceded the goal was interesting too. As the celebrations took place, they look dejected and defeated. The celebrations reinforce the goal and the leverage that had been gained. Mentally, one team had the upper hand and the other team needed to fight back to just break even.

Celebrations matter. Ambitious startup founders often only want to celebrate the massive achievements; The billion-dollar exit, the huge fundraising, the insanely profitable annual performance. We should be celebrating when we sign a new client, a new team member joins, a new revenue milestone is reached or a new feature or product goes live.

There is, of course, a limit to how much you should celebrate. For example, I don’t believe that every child should receive a participation trophy at the end of a football match. That’s just crazy, it’s not an achievement to participate, it’s life.

When I sold my first company I didn’t celebrate at all. I was young, the exit was difficult and there was some conflict in the team. When I received the sale agreement, I hunched over my coffee table and signed the agreement, tossed it across the table and lay back on the couch and watched TV. That was it and I regret that moment immensely.

Your team thrives on success and despises failure as much as you do. So when there is something real to celebrate just take a few minutes and celebrate like you all just scored the first goal in the history of football.

The Sacrifice Fallacy - You don’t need to suffer to build a successful business.

Many people start a business because they want a better life for themselves or believe they can regain their freedom from their corporate job. Occasionally they’ll also try to make the world a better place. Building a business is not an easy task. Anyone who says it is must be lying or has never tried to build a business. A lot of effort, angst, frustration, and grind goes into creating something where there was once nothing.

Unfortunately, a scary trend in entrepreneurial spheres exists that I call the Sacrifice Fallacy and it has to stop.

Entrepreneurs believe that the only way to build a successful business is to sacrifice everything for it. This is simply not true. I know entrepreneurs who are unhealthy, never sleep, don’t have any relationships outside of their company, haven’t taken leave in years and haven’t exercised since they started their company. I know entrepreneurs who have been divorced, neglected their kids, pets, families and everything else in an attempt to build a successful startup and gain freedom from the slavery that is corporate life and a paycheck. The irony of building a business at the cost of everything you love to gain back everything you ever wanted is glaringly obvious from outside.

There are different kinds of businesses that exist, they aren’t all made the same and they aren’t all trying to achieve the same thing. This is where the problem comes in. Most people leave their jobs because they want freedom and then start building a business without ever defining what success looks like to them or what freedom means. How do you know when you’ve arrived if you never define your destination? How do you know you’ve succeeded if you’ve never defined success?

I am always shocked at how few people who start a business have thought about what they want out of it.

Are they looking for fame? Wealth? Societal improvement? An improved lifestyle? Oftentimes they don’t know the answer when I ask the question. This leads the entrepreneur down the most hyped path, which today means sacrificing everything in the name of work.

18 hour days, no weekends, no holidays, no exercise, terrible diet and worse sleep. This is what many believe it looks like to build a business today.

I don’t agree with this. I used to agree and I worked extremely hard to make this insane method work for many, many years. But the more I work in startups and on businesses that are scaling, the more I realize that sacrifice isn’t always necessary.

Entrepreneurs believe that the stories they read in the media are the only path to building a business. They watch The Social Network and think that every business is filled with backstabbing politics, cofounders who throw laptops at one another and growth at all costs on the path to becoming the next Zuck.

Young entrepreneurs buy into the hustle narrative that fake entrepreneurs, celebrity entrepreneurs, and the crazy few outliers spout on the daily. They believe that to be a successful entrepreneur all they have to do is work long hours and aggressively pursue relentless growth. These entrepreneurs have never stopped to think about what they want from their business and how to go about achieving that particular goal.

Sure, there are times when you need to work 80 hour weeks and hunker down to hit a deadline, but this should be the exception, not the rule.

If this becomes the rule at your company then there is something fundamentally wrong with your business model. You know who works 18 hours a day, seven days a week? Robots. Machines work those kind of hours. It’s unsustainable for human beings. If you require your team to ignore their lives and work full-on for you, non-stop, all day, every day I can promise you that something is going to break if it hasn’t already.

Your staff will begin to leave and you’ll find it increasingly difficult to hire the best people as word travels about your company culture. With high staff-turnover comes high an increased operational cost that is required to constantly onboard new team members. With a constant need to recruit new staff you will lose focus on the core model of your business, which likely involves actually making money, not just hiring, firing and hunting for staff.

The Sacrifice Fallacy, often driven by the leaders in the business, will trick you into thinking that because you are enjoying downtime, you are not working. I want to challenge this flawed theory. The smartest people I know need downtime to rejuvenate their creativity and drive. They need time to be curious about the problems they are trying to solve. They need to meet with other people who edify and engage their brains and help them think through their work. The smartest people do not need you to tell them to work 18 hours a day because their brains are constantly thinking about the work that they love.

Basecamp is a shining example of a company that embraces balance and reasonable growth at a reasonable rate. The business launched in 1999 and ever since has gone to great lengths to promote sane deadlines and good, solid, profitable business practices. They even wrote a book about this topic called “It doesn’t have to be crazy at work”. Here’s how they describe the book:

Chaos shouldn’t be the natural state at work. Anxiety isn’t a prerequisite for progress. Sitting in meetings all day isn’t required for success. These are all perversions of work — side effects of broken models and “best” practices. This book treats the patient, calls out false cures, and pushes back against ritualistic time-sucks that have infected the way people work these days.

To inspire the best people to work hard, you need to give them a difficult and interesting problem to solve and then leave them to solve the problem. Sure, deadlines are an important part of solving a problem but insane deadlines are a result of bad planning and bad leadership. I absolutely believe in Parkinson’s law, the adage that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. If you let sub-par team members peruse the problem with no real deadlines or performance metrics, they will screw around and contribute to Parkinson’s law. But give your best people a really interesting problem and a reasonable deadline that everyone agrees to and they’ll work tirelessly to solve it. They’ll work (in their minds) while they play with their kids, walk their dogs, go for a jog and sit at their desks in the office. You just have to trust them to do their best work.

Here’s the thing: You don’t need to sacrifice everything to do the best work.

I predict that companies of the future (and the smart companies today) will urge their staff to take leave, to get exercise, to eat proper meals, focus on mental health and to engage with their friends, family, and network because the best companies know that you don’t have to sacrifice your life and who you are to build something amazing. The best companies know that it is who you are that helps you solve problems more effectively.

That important, urgent or potentially amazing business you are building is going to fail or succeed. When one of those outcomes arrive, you will need to be squared away with the sacrifices that you made to get there. Don’t succumb to the Sacrifice Fallacy. You don’t need to suffer to build something incredible.

The Unicorn Is Dead. Long Live The Zebra

This article was originally published by The Daily Maverick.

Do you know what a Unicorn is? Of course you do. It’s a magical creature of mystery and fiction that likely doesn’t exist. In business terms, a Unicorn is basically the same creature of mystery: a privately held startup that reaches a valuation of $1bn. There are about 200+ of them out there and all across the globe founders are raising ungodly amounts of capital to be part of the Unicorn club at any cost.

I am not a fan of the Unicorn club or the concept of a business Unicorn in general. I have tried to build this kind of business in South Africa and it’s extremely difficult for a variety of reasons. In general, Unicorn startups have proven themselves to be negatively disruptive, toxic and self-serving enterprises that make very few people a ton of money while damaging society in their wake. I do believe that some Unicorns (like SpaceX, Stripe, and Spotify) do more good than bad but they are the exception, not the rule.

If you don’t believe me, let’s take a look at some of the companies that proudly wear the Unicorn badge:

Facebook — used to manipulate elections, track users and invade privacy at every possible turn.

Uber — knowingly ignored laws to launch its service in key markets globally. Under fire for toxic workplace practices and stock price completely cratered after IPO.

WeWork — late in 2019 was scheduled to go public at a $47bn valuation. Within weeks the questionable founder was fired (receiving over $1bn to leave) and the company was sold off to one of its investors for $8bn.

Lyft — stock price cratered after IPO and not profitable.

Twitter — unable to manage the trolls, vitriol, and abuse from its users on the platform. Used to manipulate the public and spread fake news by organisations such as Bell Pottinger on behalf of the Guptas.

South Africa doesn’t need Unicorns. We have enough people spouting lies, destroying society, making magical statements, and promoting corruption that to throw startups into this mix is a recipe for further economic disaster.

I prefer the Zebra startup. What South Africa needs is something we are already very familiar with. We need Zebras. We know Zebras. We like Zebras. They are real, tangible and glorious creatures to protect and nurture.

In March of this year, I am attending a conference for the founders of Zebra startups. The term was coined back in 2017 by Jennifer Brandel, Mara Zepeda, Astrid Scholz & Aniyia Williams who are the founding directors of Zebras Unite in an article they published which explained why they chose the Zebra and what a Zebra startup is.

They wrote: “We believe that developing alternative business models to the startup status quo has become a central moral challenge of our time. These alternative models will balance profit and purpose, champion democracy, and put a premium on sharing power and resources. Companies that create a more just and responsible society will hear, help, and heal the customers and communities they serve.”

And here’s why they chose the Zebra:

• To state the obvious: unlike unicorns, zebras are real.

• Zebra companies are both black and white: they are profitable and improve society. They won’t sacrifice one for the other.

• Zebras are also mutualistic: by banding together in groups, they protect and preserve one another. Their individual input results in stronger collective output.

• Zebra companies are built with peerless stamina and capital efficiency, as long as conditions allow them to survive.

So much of this makes sense in a South Africa context; real businesses that are mutualistic, benefit society, make a profit and are capital efficient.

South African entrepreneurs understand how to be frugal and capital efficient. We understand how to build and grind away every day to eke out value wherever we can. But I have watched over the past decade as we have become enamored with the Silicon Valley method of building businesses. That method includes raising an extreme amount of money, blowing it quickly on vanity metrics and ignoring profitability or societal impact.

This business model is dead. Unicorns are dead.

Zebras are the future and are easier to build than one might think. Here are a few things to consider if you want to build a Zebra business right now in South Africa:

Go out and sell rather than pitch to investors. Selling is the best form of funding.

Be kind to your team and your suppliers. Don’t work them 20 hours a day, pay them a pittance and withhold payment because you can. Pay on time, every time.

Do not strive for success at any cost, it’s not a zero-sum game. I don’t have to lose for you to win. A rising tide lifts all ships and then more we think about business in this context, the more chance we have of saving our dire economic situation for future generations.

Building a Zebra startup doesn’t mean building something small. It means building something meaningful, valuable and sustainable. Paul Graham, the founder of one of the most successful startup incubators called YCombinator, has said in the past that to build something big, start by building something small. You don’t need to rush into a billion-dollar valuation for your business. Build something small and valuable, scale it over time and if you happen to hit a billion-dollar valuation, good for you.

We need to shift our victory condition from gaining extreme personal wealth from a startup to the creation of value for society that might lead to personal wealth along the way.

DO NOT wake up at 5am.

Waking up at 5am is not a magic method of becoming productive.

Waking up at 5am is absolutely a way for busybodies to make you feel shit about the time you woke.

Waking up at 5am can promote a burnout culture that pushes people over the edge due to an unhealthy routine and aimless wondering in the dark early in the morning.

Waking up at 5am is not for everyone.

But shit damn do I love waking up at 5am.

Nowadays I actually wake up before my alarm goes off. This is not a humble brag (although it does sound like one), this is a truth. I am so excited to start my day that I ping myself awake and get right to it. But I wake up with a plan every day. I wake up with a goal and various things that I want to achieve that day.

Waking up at 5am without a victory condition is like playing Monopoly but removing the money

To be able to wake up that early every day has taken me a long time to get right. I’ve had to change my diet, change my nighttime habits, change my sleeping habits and basically reorganize my life accordingly. This is not for everyone. Most people do not want to be in bed and sleeping by 21:00 every night and that’s absolutely fine.

The main reason that I wake up early every day is because I have taken the time to figure out what works best for me to achieve my victory condition. Let’s break this out into two parts:

What is a victory condition?

Every game has various mechanics that make gameplay possible. These mechanics control how the players win the game. In life, I like to think of victory conditions as the mechanics that you define that will lead you to successfully win your game.

Most people I know have never defined the mechanics of their own life. This means that they have never defined their own victory condition either. They have no idea what success looks like or if they’re doing the right things every day to achieve the success they have yet to define.

Waking up at 5am without a victory condition is like playing Monopoly but removing the money; You just end up going round and round the board for no real reason until someone flips the board over in frustration.

Defining a victory condition can be difficult so I suggest you start small. Wake up an hour earlier than you do now and try to achieve something in that hour. Write an article, read part of your book, go for a jog, meditate, walk your dogs or make your partner breakfast in bed. Whatever it is, set yourself a condition that determines what victory will look like. Then after you have successfully made this condition a habit, expand it a bit.

Right now my mornings are jam-packed full of things that make me happy and make my life more full. I go to the gym, walk the dogs, meditate and write. I do these things first thing in the morning because they are the things that work for me, energize me and fulfill me.

What works best for you?

Once you have defined your own victory condition you are going to have to figure out the best way to achieve victory. For some it’s waking up early, for others it’s staying up late, for you, it may be best to do things over the weekend.

If you don’t know what kind of person you are when it comes to waking up, sleep, exercise and diet then you can start experimenting. Don’t do it all at once though, humans have finite willpower. So waking up early, changing your diet and starting an exercise routine at the same time will break you.

Start with sleep and try to get to bed before 10pm, don’t set an alarm for a week and see what time you wake up. This will help you figure out how much sleep your body naturally needs. It’s likely between 7 and 8 hours per night.

Then start to eat less crap. Make yourself a salad for dinner. Then the following month start to exercise.

Over 12 months you will start to figure out what works best for you. It’s going to take you at least 12 months to work through the experiment but if you’re serious about this, you’ll work through it and then know what is best for you.

If it isn’t waking up early, that’s great! If it is, that’s great too. There is no right answer here. The only thing that matters is that you work towards your personal victory condition every day.

Fuck 5am wake up calls if they make you want to throw up. Just do what you need to do every day to be a little bit happier.

2020 Will Be The Year Of Mental Health

I’m calling it; The new year will bring with it a focus on our minds. For years I’ve watched people preach about physical health to anyone who would listen. It’s time we broaden our focus to include mental health. We shouldn’t talk about them separately anymore. Health must, by default, include Mental + Physical health.

You can’t have physical health without mental health. The two go brain in skull.

It has taken me many years to understand that placing myself at the top of the priority list is important. You need to start putting yourself at the top of your priority list, especially when it comes to mental health. I have spent the past few years talking openly about seeing a psychologist, battling with physical illness caused by stress and a severe struggle with anxiety.

I believe that 2020 will be the year that Mental Health finally becomes the missing puzzle piece for most people.

Right now, mental health is something that people talk about in the corner of the room, in the dark alley or in private chat messages just in case anyone catches on that you might be having a tough time. It’s time we welcome the conversation about our mental health, good or bad. I wear my mental health improvements as a badge of honour. I can’t stop talking about what I do to keep sane and healthy both physically and mentally. I want to hear more people discussing their version of mental health and what works for them.

Things that are going to be cool in 2020:

• 6-8 hours of sleep every night. EVERY. SINGLE. NIGHT.

• Working reasonable hours

• Enjoying downtime to rejuvenate your mind and creativity

• Eating a healthy meal every day

• Daily exercise

• A calm mind and meditation

Things that are dead in 2020:

• Ego

• “Killin’ it”, if you’re struggling, talk about it

• Stress-induced panic

• Work-induced anxiety

• Lying about how busy you are

• Using “Busy” as an answer to the question: “How are you?”

In particular, men are very against asking for help when it comes to mental health. I know very few men who even acknowledge that your emotional state exists, never mind needs help. 2020 must be the year that we start to seek help and speak openly about our successes and difficulties in overcoming our problems.

Everyone who lives a high-pressure life (most of us) needs an outlet. Find yours. It could be pottery, team sports, walking your dogs, painting, reading, cooking or anything else that moves your mind into a new paradigm when you get home from work.

On that note, go home more often. If you answer one more email, you’ll get one more reply. The cycle is literally never-ending so you may as well wait until tomorrow when you’ve had a good night's sleep to get back into it.

Nothing is that urgent. That email can wait until tomorrow and if it really can’t, they’ll call you.

We all know that one person who makes us think we’re not doing enough with our lives. They manage to run, meditate, work, read, write and play with their kids/dogs/friends. How do they do it? They put themselves first.

2020 needs to be the year that you put yourself first and prioritize your mental health.

Rules Are Made By People Just Like You

There is a film that I try to watch once a year at least. That film is called Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

The film was released in 2011 follows an 85-year-old sushi master and owner of Sukiyabashi Jiro, a Michelin three-star restaurant. All this man did or wanted to do in his life was to make sushi. Eventually, this led to the three Michelin stars. Ironically in November 2019, these Michelin stars were taken away from his restaurant because they seem to be overbooked and stopped taking reservations. Here’s exactly what they said on their website:

“Unfortunately, as our restaurant can only seat up to 10 guests at a time, this situation is likely continued. Please note that we will not be able to accept telephone reservations until further notice.”

Due to their success, they have to stop taking reservations and are unable to be open to the public. This caused Michelin to drop them for their recommendations. Which makes sense to some degree. If you can’t eat there, then they shouldn’t recommend people visit.

Jiro did not begin making sushi to earn Michelin stars. Their rules do not apply to the way that he does anything. Removing the stars because your rules prevent him from qualifying makes sense but does not define Jiro.

I am certain that Jiro is not going to open a larger restaurant or change the way he does things. He created his own set of rules and stood by them, adapted them and refined them to become the best in the world. The most talented and successful people in the world understand the rules of the world and then create their own set of rules to live by.

This got me thinking about rules and the arbitrary nature of them.

As we step into a new year and new decade, I want to highlight the flimsy nature of rules. Every day we are guided by a set of rules, our own rules, the government’s rules, our parent’s rules, school rules, unspoken rules, family rules, business rules and always more rules.

There are rules everywhere.

These rules were created by people.

The rule-makers are the rulebreakers of the past.

The rule-makers become “The Man” over time.

The rules are the roadblocks that force the unexpected trips.

The rules are the constraints that force creative thinking.

The rules force some of us to think outside of the rules.

For the most part, though, the rule-makers are the ones with the control over the masses.

This year I’m going to spend my time thinking about the rules that I choose to live by. The ones that I agree with should stay in place and the ones that are holding me back should be broken forever.

The rules I’m talking about are the ones that prevent you from quitting the job that makes you unhappy, or the rules that we follow without thinking — the ones that have become habit. The ones that make you angry, critical, mean, unhappy, depressed or worst version of yourself.

There is no reason to live by rules that drag you down.

Remember that rules in this life are created by other people, just like you. These people just arrived a bit before you did.

We thought that gravity would bind us to Earth forever and then someone decided to travel into space. You can decide to change the rules if we can defy gravity.

There is no single rule that can define you and if there is one that is preventing you from leveling up, then reframe that rule as someone else’s method to keep you down and do something different today.

How To Live A Curious Life and Find More Happiness

I believe that the key to a happier life is obsessive curiosity.

I am part of what I call the Curious Cult. I’m so obsessed with the concept of curiosity that I’m writing my next book about The Curious Company.

Curiosity might seem simple but this basic concept is wrapped in deep complexities that you can’t imagine until you start to become curious.

My curiosity started at a very young age.

When I was seven or eight years old my parents took me to church one Sunday morning. I was born into a Greek family and at that time my parents were “practicing” Greek Orthodox followers. I vividly remember watching people walk into the church entrance hall and kiss a painting of Mary on the left side of the hall and then walk over and kiss a painting of Jesus on the right.

My mother ushered me towards the painting of Mary and lifted me so that my lips could kiss Mary’s. I point blank refused. She insisted. I refused more aggressively. She whispered aggressively that I was embarrassing her and to just do it. I continued to refuse (see point 2).

She put me down back on god’s Earth and I was then ushered towards the painting of Jesus where I watched a very old Greek woman slop her smooches all over Jesus. Again, my mother picked me up and insisted I kiss Jesus. You can guess what happened next. I refused.

I won but only because the line of Greeks behind us had backed up and the church ceremony was about to be delayed because of my rebellion.

I don’t remember being intentionally rebellious. I wasn’t trying to irritate anyone or offend the believers. I was looking for answers (see point 1). I was curious about why I was being forced to kiss some painting that resembled a person who lived 2000 years ago. Being in the middle of church and pissing off my parents wasn’t the ideal time or place to have my curiosity satisfied but that was the day I remember first noticing that I lived by a slightly different set of rules than the people around me. From as young as I can remember I have questioned absolutely everything. “Why” is probably the most used word in the history of my vocabulary.

Curiosity is my default method of existence. I always ask “why” before I do anything else. I have always been hungry to learn more, dive into the things that interest me and dig as deep as I can go to acquire knowledge.

When I was 9 I started to write prose and jot down my emotions. Looking back, I was trying to understand my emotions by writing about them. I was curious about why I felt the way I felt and if anyone else felt that same way. When I was 10 I started to code because there was a computer in our house with an Internet connection and I wanted to know how it worked. I found other people like me online in chatrooms around the world and spent hours talking to them about coding (see point 7). When I was 13 I started to play the guitar because I wanted to learn how to express myself through music. I made model cars and airplanes so that I could figure out how to stick things together and then pull them apart. I wasn’t precious about things and was always happy to break things open and inspect them.

I couldn’t stop myself from discovering things. I listened intently to adult conversations so I could soak up as much information as possible and tried to pick up tips, tricks, information, and knowledge wherever I could from anyone who would talk to me.

Curiosity is a way of life and this article lays out a few things you can start with to become more curious in your own life.

1. Ask more questions

Every single day we make choices that we are not aware of making. We choose which street to walk down, which lane to drive in, which route to take to work, which partner to stay with (see point’s 2, 6, 7), which colleague to hate or love and everything in between.

Unfortunately, we make most of these choices without thinking about them or questioning them. The simplest way to start living a more curious life is to genuinely question your decisions. You can start with the small ones and deal with the answers that you can cope with but I promise that very quickly things will escalate and you will be asking a lot of questions almost constantly.

Here’s an example of how one simple question can lead you down a fantastic path:

• Why do you wake up at the time you wake up every day?

• What would happen if you woke up two hours earlier?

• What would you do if you had two more hours in your day?

• Would you write a book or learn to play an instrument?

• Would you work on your side hustle and try to grow it into a fulltime business?

• Why would you want to do that if you are happy at your job?

• Are you happy with your job?

And within a very short time, we’ve gone from waking up to questioning your career.

2. Question everything

There are absolutely no sacred cows in my life.

When you start to ask more questions about the simple things in your life, you’ll feel the need to question everything.

Your instincts will tell you to stop and not poke the bear.

Your instincts are wrong. You will need to fight them to continue living the Curious Cult lifestyle.

You must take a good look at your reasons for the big things. It’s the big things that we fight for and the big things that we use to define ourselves.

A few things you should be asking questions about:

• Your relationships

• Friendships

• Religion

• Career

• Family

• Finances

Question everything. Leave nothing untouched. Once you understand the reasons behind your most tightly held beliefs you will start to become a happier person.

If you are scared to question the big things, maybe start by asking yourself why you are scared to question these things.

3. Strong opinions loosely held

I am a passionate person and I do a lot of research on topics that I am passionate about.

I like facts. The world lives and dies on cold, hard, scientific facts. But if the facts change, I believe that it’s OK to change your opinion too.

The world was once flat. And then the facts changed. Sadly there are still people on our round planet who hold strong opinions tightly, even when Pythagoras and Aristotle proved that the Earth is, in fact, round. Duh.

It’s OK to change your opinion of things if the facts have changed. It’s a sign of strength to be able to admit you have learned something new.

4. Read more

Reading is great.

Reading a single source forever and exclusively is problematic.

The liberal left believes that only reading liberal media is a balanced view of the world. It’s not. The conservative right believes the same. The “balanced” middle believes the same as the other two extremists.

The truth lies in diversity.

Reading different views and opinions will keep your own in check and help you see other sides with more clarity. Being blindly ignorant of other opinions will not make you happy. Understanding them will.

Read different things, read things you like and read things that piss you off. Read things you believe in and read things that try to knock down your beliefs. Read authors you love, read them a lot but remember to re-visit the authors you may have hated in the past.

As a good friend of mine, John Sanei once said to me:

If you change your input, you will change your output (see point 6 below).

5. Listen more

I used to believe that I was smart and had a lot to say about a lot of things. The more people I meet the more I realize that I know very little. This is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.

To combat this ego-driven (see point 8) view of the world, stop talking. Most of the time what you have to say is going to be less interesting than what you have to hear.

It’s almost impossible to listen while you are talking. If you’re not listening then you are likely not learning anything from anyone.

Listening is not waiting to talk. Which is something I used to do a lot; prepare my answer while I was “listening” to the other person. This is not listening. This is waiting to talk. There is a big difference between the two.

Photo by Mohammad Metri on Unsplash

In the next conversation you have after reading this I’d like you to actively listen to the other person. Don’t try to respond until they’ve finished talking. Don’t plan your next answer.

I believe that the key to a happier life is obsessive curiosity.

Learning about other people, what they know, and who they will make you more curious to learn from more people. This is also a great way to broaden your knowledge of the world very quickly. People (see point 7 below) are interested in different things and can help you find new things to be curious and obsessive about.

6. Change your input and you change your output

Doing the same thing every day can be satisfying. Routines are a great way to get through the day, week, month, year, decade, life. In a blink, a routine can move you through time without you noticing.

Routines can be good but they can also be very bad for your output.

If you consume the same things every day, talk to the same people every day, see the same paintings, listen to the same music, debate the same points and read the same book every day then you are going to eventually have the same answers to everything. You’re also going to have the same experiences in the world every day. That is mundane and mind-numbing.

Even if you’re a millionaire and think that living in the same penthouse with the same food, watching the same TV shows is going to make you happy forever, you’re wrong.

You need to change your input.

Change the media you consume and you’ll change your opinion ever so slightly. Change the food you eat and you’ll see something new and different happen if you’re paying attention. Why should you bother to change anything? See point 1.

If you can keep your input fresh and frequently switch up your routine within comfortable levels, you‘ll start to feel more curious about the world around you. You’ll start to understand other people just a little bit better. Hell, you may even find yourself becoming a little bit happier.

7. Meet different people

The older I get the more difficult I find meeting new and different people. This is frustrating because the most life-altering experiences of my life have always started with a person.

I don’t believe that keeping the same circle of friends forever is a smart way to be happy. Sure, you should have friends from your past if they make you a better person but you shouldn’t feel obligated to hang onto old friends because they’re old friends.

Photo by IB Wira Dyatmika on Unsplash

Meeting new people doesn’t only apply to your personal relationships. It applies across the board. In business, it can completely change your perspective to meet someone with different experiences to your own. You don’t have to see that person again or strike up a business friendship but you do need to make the effort to broaden your network.

New people bring with them new opinions, challenging world views, different experiences of the world, relationships, food and everything else. To extract all of this value you’ll need to dump your ego and listen (see point 5).

8. Dump your ego immediately

Every prolonged fight or argument I’ve ever been in could have been resolved with a simple apology.

We don’t apologize because our ego won’t let us.

One of the most powerful things I have learned to do is apologize and mean it. The power of a real apology is underrated. If you can master it you will gain much more than if you double down on your egotistical need to beat everyone all of the time.

There is a time and a place for victory and celebration, just as there is a time and place for an apology and a loss.

Losing (or being beaten) is a humbling experience and if you dump your ego, you can learn and be better off. Every lesson you can learn will help you grow as a person as much as any lesson learned with an egotistically driven victory.

9. Stop being embarrassed

Embarrassment is for your next go at life (btw — this is the only shot we get at it). While you’re still in this life, you must stop caring about what other people think or might say and just go for it.

You have to be brave before you can be great.

You have to take a fucking leap and hope the water below isn’t filled with sharks. And when you get down there and it is filled with sharks then you fight for your damn life, maybe lose a limb, write a book, sell the film rights and let Brad Pitt play you in the movie. What a story!

Embrace your hobbies and passions and don’t let anyone make you feel shit about them. If you’re interested in them and curious to know more then dive as deep as you can and become an expert. Find like-minded people and join their community (see point 7). In the age of the Internet, there is no excuse to be alone in your misery and passion.

Charles Darwin had an insatiable curiosity about the biology of living things. He did not set out obsessing because he wanted fame or fortune. He was simply curious about something and followed his curiosity wherever it would lead him. There are thousands of examples just like this. Follow your curiosity wherever it takes you.

Curiosity is the birthplace of innovation.

Curiosity is the start of your improved happiness.