Hey everyone,
If you're new here, welcome to Never Enough, where I brain dump interesting stuff that has been on my mind over the last week.
Today's edition is brought to you by Write of Passage.
Last week, I shared how writing online has been a game-changer for my career and mentioned David Perell's writing bootcamp as a fast-track to supercharging your writing skills.
It’s no walk in the park. It's tough, and that's what makes it great—it weeds out the casuals and cultivates a community of folks who are serious about getting better.
But hey, don't take my word for it. David's made it easy for you to look into the program and its community by connecting you with some of his past students.
So, if you're committed to taking your writing to the next level this year, I'd strongly recommend chatting with a Write of Passage alum and getting a first-hand account.
Go here to setup a chat with a Write of Passage alumni.
Now onto this week’s issue…
- My hairline is receding and I’m going gray. For the first time in my life, I’m feeling…old. At 38, I’m around my life’s halfway point and I decided to reflect back on some lessons I’ve learned over the past 38 years.
Here’s a list of 38 things I’ve learned in the last 13,952 days of my life so far:
- If you’re nice to someone, they’ll probably be nice back.
- Criticizing someone’s ideas will only cause them to double down.
- Find out what someone loves to talk about, then ask them questions about it. They will light up.
- People generally do what they’re incentivized to do.
- If someone seems upset, repeat back what they just said. They will usually calm down.
- Don’t let people you dislike give you gifts or do favors for you. You’ll feel like you owe them something and end up inadvertently helping them.
- Everyone is too busy thinking about themselves to notice the pimple on your nose.
- Every time you say something out loud, your brain pounds it in a little further. Be careful what you say.
- If someone gossips with you, they’re probably gossiping about you with others.
- Everyone other than your closest friends and family subconsciously want to see you fall in the mud. It’s not intentional, it’s human nature: the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.
- Don’t tell, storytell.
- You will want the things your ten closest friends want. Choose friends accordingly.
- The things with the greatest mental payoff are generally the same things that would have made a hunter gatherer happy: exercise, being in nature, laughing with friends, sex and companionship, eating delicious food, focusing on a task, watching your kids play.
- Humility always wins over extravagance. Don’t count your poker chips at the table.
- Nobody wants to hear about how bad your day is going.
- Be nice to people on your way up. You might meet them again on your way down.
- Half of having friends is just being reliable. Say “yes” at least 70% of the time. Be on time. Respond to texts and calls.
- Leave some money on the table. You don’t need the last dollar.
- Want to get invited to cool parties and dinners? Host them.
- Beware of people who are rude to waiters and service staff.
- Email people you admire. Sometimes they’ll respond and good things will happen.
- The best way to avoid mistakes is to read about the mistakes of others.
- Planning is usually just guessing.
- Bad sleep, bad life.
- Never expect people to change. They rarely do.
- Alcohol and drugs are like an elastic band. The harder you pull it up, the harder it will whip back down the other way and hurt you.
- Think of psychopaths and narcissists like poisonous spiders. You don’t want them anywhere near you, especially not your bedroom.
- Take off your sunglasses when you meet people.
- Always default to picking up the bill, especially if you can afford it.
- Whales only get harpooned when they surface. If you don’t want to get harpooned, stay quiet.
- Ideas are like tiny embers. They require immediate oxygen to turn into a fire. Take action.
- Don’t judge old people for having views you disagree with. In a few decades, your liberal views will seem conservative, and that will be you.
- Going back thousands of years, every generation thinks the next generation is weak and the world is doomed. Keep that in mind when you read the news.
- When a child is upset, get down to their level, validate their feelings, and touch their face with the palm of your hand. Works with adults too.
- When writing emails, less is always more. Most people don’t read past the first sentence. If worried about appearing too brusque, use a smiley face :-)
- Every personal strength is shadowed by a corresponding weakness. In yourself and others. Accept and work with this.
- There’s no such thing as problems, only people problems.
- The days are long, but the years are short. Especially with kids.
Saved for posterity on Twitter, here.
- A few years ago, Basecamp’s David Heinemeier Hansson shared a terrifying story about an incredibly boring but scary thing nobody thinks about. He built his dream house, and a few days after moving in, his wife started feeling violently ill then collapsed. They soon learned that she was suffering from severe formaldehyde poisoning. After investigating, it turned out that their super energy efficient passive house, which used as little energy and electric ventilation as possible, didn’t have enough airflow. Formaldehyde and volatile organic compounds from new furniture, paint, construction materials, and carpeting were filling their home with toxic fumes, which due to the energy efficient HVAC system wasn’t being cycled frequently enough.
When I heard David’s story, I was about to move into a new home. I immediately installed a bunch of air quality sensors and it turned out that my then-infant son’s new room was filled with crazy high levels of volatile organic compounds. This was especially concerning given that small children are particularly vulnerable to VOCs.
This is one of those profoundly boring, pernicious things that nobody thinks about. We obsess over plane crashes and falls, but we ignore the boring stuff like slow but steady exposure to toxic chemicals over the course of decades which could result in cancer, allergies, or learning disabilities. Air quality really matters.
Here’s what I do:
• Install Awair sensors in the rooms my family spends the most time in (especially children’s bedrooms and playrooms).
• Keep windows open or ventilation fans running at all times, especially if you’re seeing high levels of VOCs.
• Place HEPA filters in each room you spend a lot of time in. I am a huge fan of the Dyson Big + Quiet BP04, which tracks Co2 and filters formaldehyde, while looking like a beautiful robot from the future. An excellent cheaper option is the CoWay Airmega.
- I used to hate executive recruiters and refused to use them. Why would I pay someone $60,000 to connect me with an employee I could find myself on LinkedIn?
But I was wrong. Recruiters can be a tremendous asset. Here’s why.
When you run a business, you’re distracted. And most entrepreneurs are like me, high pace, distracted, and trying to put out fires. One of the biggest fires is often hiring. You need someone to run X, Y, Z initiative at your company, and every day you don’t have them hurts. It either means you need to run it or it doesn’t get done poorly.
In the past, I tended to do a blitz. I’d go on LinkedIn, find a bunch of candidates, then, because I was busy, I’d do a half assed interview of 3-4 people and hire the best one, even if I wasn’t 100% sure about them. Sometimes, the whole process would just sit idle for months because I was too busy, then I’d panic and impulse hire someone months later, damaging my business in the process.
It turns out that hiring a new executive is insanely time consuming. For each candidate, it’s at least an hour of your time, so as a busy CEO, the last thing you want to do is spend 8 hours interviewing 8 candidates, most of whom you will never hire. This, it turns out, is a perfect opportunity for delegation.
Now, when I hire an executive or CEO or exec, I always hire a recruiter. There’s three key reasons I do this:
1. I have the recruiter conduct all the initial interviews and record the Zoom videos. This means that I can quickly skim each video and do a quick vibe check. Do I think I’d click with them? Do I like the way they present? This is a massive time saver. We all know what it’s like to get 10 minutes into an interview only to realize the person is a dud, then feel obliged to stay on and ask them more questions to avoid being rude. This solves that. The recruiter spends the time, you skim the videos.
2. The recruiter keeps the ball moving forward. The recruiter doesn’t get paid in full until they find you your person, so they naturally keep the process moving behind the scenes, even if you get sidetracked. Something you might let sit for months, will often take far less time because the recruiting is pressing ahead even when you’re not paying attention.
3. The recruiter widens the funnel. Yes, we often hire candidates that we found ourselves, but the recruiter often adds additional candidates that we never would have found. For example, when we were hiring a CEO for AeroPress, the recruiter found us Gerard Meyer, who was 5x more experienced than every other candidate. He just wasn’t on our radar.
Let’s think about the cost of a recruiter. Say you’re hiring a CEO or top level executive for $300,000 per year.
The cost of the recruiter will be around $60,000 (20% of first year salary).
For that, they will:
- Widen the funnel and give you more optionality
- Save you 10-15 hours of interviewing people you’d reject within the first 5 minutes anyway
- Keep the process moving, even when you’re busy.
In the case of a high level hire, the cost of a bad hire is millions, or even tens of millions of dollars, and the cost of delaying can be equally expensive.
Because of this, I’ve come around to recruiters.
One note though: most recruiters are really annoying. They want to do weekly update calls and don’t record their Zoom calls. It’s a very old school industry and you need to ensure you work with modern firms that will be scrappy and take up as little of your time as possible.
My two favorite recruiters are:
Tighe Burke from SRCH Partners for large CEO/VP hires.
Matt Hollingsworth from Align for SMB CEO/VP/Exec hires.
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