Think about 1957 and Russia put Sputnik into space and it orbited the Earth. The thing about Sputnik compared to what the USA was doing is it was very simple. And I had this Russian client once. He was buying black S-Classes. I never asked him what he actually did. I was too scared to find out.
And he says, you know James, (he was sort of Italian-Russian) the thing with Russian things is they’re very simple but they work. You put gun in water, you pull out, you can shoot bullet. And so I never upset this guy. But I really liked that concept.
So if there’s a general way to describe what’s happening in my business, it’s that I’m simplifying things. And, you know, Russia beat America in that space race because they just had a simpler approach. And I’ve covered this less more formula, you might recognize this as being an Araldite distributer. It has two parts that when mixed together are very strong.
I think this has been the secret for what I’m doing, it’s doing less of some things and more of others. Would you like to know what I’m doing less of and more of? Okay. So, one morning I came out to my garden and my entire garden had been vandalized. I was quite upset by it. All of the plants have been destroyed. I shared this with my next-door neighbor, Lupo, who’s Italian. He’s an interesting guy, he says hello, my name is Lupo. It means wolf. So I was always very careful around this guy. It’s not the same Russian-Italian guy, different Italian guy. And I said, Lupo, someone has destroyed my garden. He goes, Oh, James, I did this. I said, What happened? Did I run over your garbage bin? Did I upset you in some way or have I forgotten to put the blinds down? Or something in the house, you saw something you shouldn’t have or what? He says, no, no, this is very good. You prune back hard and then it come back good.
And I learned from that that sometimes if you prune back the dead buds and all the branches that are just taking the nutrients from the soil, there’s nowhere else for it to go except for the brand new buds. And this is a little flower that I have in my house and this is the sole flowering petal. I trimmed off all the old ones but I know it’s going to come back good because Lupo assured me that it would and he showed me and demonstrated it. So this is what I’m doing my business is less.
Luckily for me, all my stuff got stolen at Halloween in America. I got the full Halloween experience. As you know if you’ve been listening to the podcast, they stole everything including my pants, which is always fun. At least it was a quiet place like LA and so they did leave me a Turkish towel, flip-flops, a t-shirt, and a cap. And I’d luckily hidden my passport but they took everything else. They took my watch, my wallet, my credit cards, my cash, my phone, my luggage, and my pants. and I was walking along at Hertz, LAX. And this islander-guy was coming the other way. And he had a skirt and a thing and he did some customarial bow-thing like, I’m just blending in here. But what happened is I didn’t replace some of the things that I lost.
I took an opportunity to do just like we learned about in the December challenge that Barry started about trimming back and purging. I actually didn’t replace my iPad, I just got a Mac Air instead of a MacBook Pro because I’m not processing computer programs anymore. I’m mostly running my phone as the the way to operate the internet. I hardly even stand at my stand-up desk anymore. So just that phone and the laptop that’s running this presentation is it. That is my office now. So wherever that is, is where I can connect to the internet. And it’s been very liberating so I encourage you. And you know, if I go back a few years, I had several computers and monitors and screens and all the bullshit. It’s a great distraction to get tied up in tools and hardware, but it’s not really helping you.
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