Josh Steimle's Linkedin Analytics

I set 5 goals to check off before I turned 50 this year. Here's how it went.

I don’t know an entrepreneur who hasn’t failed. Sure, you might look at an entrepreneur who has a successful company and a billion dollars and say, “This guy isn’t a failure, no way!” but you would be mistaking "failing" with "being a failure." A failure is someone who sees their failings as who they are, rather than something they’ve done. Failing happens due to poor decisions, but just as often happens when someone makes the right decision. Failing is often a key to success. Failure, on the other hand, is entirely our choice. After every setback, I decide what I want to do. I’m not a failure until I give up and stop trying. Edison failed 10,000 times to create the lightbulb but he was never a failure. That said, sometimes we should give up. There no shame in giving up on a bad idea. I don’t become a failure when I stop trying to accomplish a specific task, but when I stop trying to succeed generally, or give up on life itself. Sometimes we allow failing to rob us of hope to the point where we won't even try to succeed, even if success is staring us in the face. That is when we truly become a failure. This is called learned helplessness. During the 60’s Dr. Martin E.P. Seligman was part of the team that discovered “learned helplessness” by exposing cockroaches to tortur…err, experiments…ok, allow the Dr. to explain himself, “We found that dogs, rats, mice, and even cockroaches that experienced mildly painful shock over which they had no control would eventually just accept it, with no attempt to escape.” They then created experiments (without the use of electrical shocks) for humans that showed the same results. People exposed to unpleasant stimuli in one session took action to avoid it, in another would eventually give up trying, and in the third session wouldn't try at all. But what was most interesting to me about Dr. Seligman’s research was that about a third of the participants, both animals and humans, did NOT learn helplessness. How did people resist helplessness? Dr. Seligman found that optimism was the key. “We discovered that people who don’t give up have a habit of interpreting setbacks as temporary, local, and changeable,” Dr. Seligman says. “That suggested how we might immunize people against learned helplessness, against depression and anxiety, and against giving up after failure: by teaching them to think like optimists.” Learned optimism leads to resiliency, or the ability to quickly bounce back from setbacks. Dr. Seligman found that resilient people not only recovered from negative experience, but their performance after negative experiences exceeded prior performance. If someone can take something bad, and not just recover, but say “You know what? Not only am I going to recover from this, but I’m going to be even more awesome than I was before!” then that’s pretty awesome. Be awesome. It's your choice.

This post from Alex Hormozi has generated some controversy for all the obvious reasons, but I think there's a way to look at this that doesn't include him advocating that entrepreneur parents abandon their kids. Maybe the real takeaway here is to reconsider what kind of entrepreneur you want to be, or what entrepreneurship will look like for you. When I started MWI back in 1999, I fully bought into the dot-com mindset that was in style. I worked 100+ hour weeks, I slept under my desk at the office, I missed weddings and family reunions, I didn't go on dates with my wife, etc. I'm lucky I wasn't successful. It still took me seven years of working "hard," including four years straight of no paycheck and living poorer than I did while a college student, before I woke up to the reality that I didn't like this lifestyle. But I still wanted to be an entrepreneur, so I rewrote the rules. Instead of unlimited work hours, I limit myself to 30 hrs per week. I quit work at 5 pm. I don't work weekends. I've done this more or less consistently since 2007. I've been much more successful financially, every single year, than I was during any of the seven years I worked "hard." More importantly, I have a life outside my work. Maybe when you read this post from Alex (who I love, btw, he's got a lot of great stuff, check out his books) you get mad, but maybe it's an opportunity to ask yourself, "Do I really want to work hard, if this is what working hard means?" Maybe this is your chance to decide you don't want the level of professional success you thought you did. Maybe there's something better waiting for you. Or maybe it's a chance to reexamine what it will take to get the results you want. Maybe you don't have to work hard to get them. Maybe working smarter, with less time and effort, will get you to your destination faster. It worked for me.

Google Meet or Zoom? And why?

Any online order, especially a $5 SaaS product add-on, should be easy to cancel within 60 seconds and not require a 25-minute call to a support line.

I was recently on this SEO podcast with Chris Raulf talking about digital PR. check it out!

This is a new image from the James Webb space telescope (my father worked on the Hubble for 10 years so I'm kind of into this stuff). This image contains 1,700 galaxy "groups." Galaxy groups "typically contain anywhere from three to a few dozen galaxies, or in larger galaxy clusters, which can include hundreds or even thousands of galaxies bound together by gravity." Potentially millions of galaxies are shown in this image. The "average" galaxy like the Milky Way has between 100 billion and 400 billion stars. Large ones have several trillion. The average galaxy is estimated to contain 4 to 10 billion Earth-like planets. So in that tiny photo, we're looking at potentially 1,700 x 1,000 x 10,000,000,000 or 17 quadrillion habitable planets. While the exact angular size of the image isn't specified in the available sources, deep-field images like this typically cover a very small portion of the sky. For context, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field covers an area of about 11 square arcminutes, which is roughly 1/13,000,000 of the entire sky. Given JWST's advanced capabilities, it's plausible that this image covers a similar or slightly larger area. Therefore, this image represents a minuscule fraction of the night sky. Do the math and we're looking at perhaps 221 septillion habitable planets in the known universe. That's about 2,000 times all the grains of sand on the entire Earth. And this could be a low estimate. If just a fraction of those habitable planets are inhabited by intelligent life, we're talking about a LOT of people. And yet you still matter. Nowhere in that entire universe is there another being that is you. No one can take your place when it comes to the relationships you've formed or will form. You may not change the universe for everyone, but you can change the universe for someone, and perhaps many someones.

Confession time: Until three months ago, I didn't take AI seriously. I knew it had disruptive potential, but I underestimated how far it had advanced in the two years since its mainstream introduction and how valuable it could be for me personally. When Corey Blake asked me how I was utilizing AI three months ago, I admitted I couldn't quite grasp its utility for me. Initially, when ChatGPT was released to the public, I experimented with it for content creation, but the results were disappointing. Similarly, my attempt with DALL-E for image creation was time-consuming and unsatisfactory. After Corey shared his extensive use of AI in both work and personal life, I felt compelled to give it another chance. Now, three months later, I find myself immersed in AI usage daily, significantly enhancing my productivity. Recently, a project that previously would have taken me 30 hours was completed in just 3-4 hours, thanks to AI assistance. One significant change is using ChatGPT for image creation instead of traditional stock photography, resulting in cost savings, quicker outputs, and more tailored results. By incorporating various AI tools like Claude for refining writing projects and Gemini for tasks in Google Docs and email, I've expanded my AI utilization, even exploring tools specific to my fiction novel project. AI's impact extends beyond personal projects; after AI flagged red flags in a bank loan application, I avoided a potential financial pitfall. The efficiency and cost-effectiveness AI brings to my endeavors will save me tens of thousands of dollars and weeks, if not months, of time in the coming year. If you, like me, have been overlooking or underutilizing AI, it's time to reconsider. Embracing AI tools in your professional endeavors is crucial to staying competitive in today's rapidly evolving landscape. While experience remains invaluable, combining it with AI capabilities is the winning formula for success.

Want to grow your marketing agency? 1. Reach out to all your friends. 2. Invite each one to a 1-1 lunch or, if you can't meet up in person, a video call. 3. Catch up. No pitching. No selling. If your agency happens to come up in the natural course of conversation, talk about it as though there is zero chance the friend you're talking to can benefit your agency in any way. I guarantee that with zero intent on your part to sell anything or promote yourself, about 50% of these conversations are going to lead to something. And 100% of them will be enjoyable.