Patience Jones: Hello, and welcome to As Built, the podcast from Graphicmachine, about architecture firms, buildings, and how both get built. I'm your co-host, Patience Jones. With me is...
Brian Jones: Brian Jones.
Patience Jones: Your other co-host. Thank you for joining us. Today, we're asking ourselves and asking you, how are your New Year's resolutions going? By the time you're listening to this, it will probably be close to the end of February. It's our first episode in a while, not the first episode this year, I don't think, but the first episode in a while. Our resolutions are not going the way we thought, because nobody's do. So we want to talk to you about how yours are going. Sometimes people assume they're doing worse than they thought. You feel like, "I'm not getting anything accomplished. I didn't do these 16 things." But then you take a step back and you see, actually, you did get a lot further. How are you tracking progress?
Brian Jones: One of the big challenges is that people expect to see immediate results.
Patience Jones: Oh, yeah.
Brian Jones: And it just doesn't work like that, not ever.
Patience Jones: It doesn't work like that, so why do we think that it does?
Brian Jones: Well, I think we're impatient, and we live in a world where everything happens immediately, at the click of a button, or so it would seem. So when something takes a series of steps to get to the end result, we lose hope and patience and everything in between.
Patience Jones: We have been watching the show “Traitors” - I promise that there's a point to this - on the recommendation of our colleague Eden (it was a very good recommendation), and it makes me think about where this kind of sense of immediacy comes from. Because the show is an hour long, and it spans 48 hours, probably. I think there are 10 shows in the season. It takes them three weeks non-stop to film it. And we were actually talking with Eden about the show and how the reactions of people just seemed so bizarre, and she was explaining to us the filming schedule of it, and that the people who are the contestants in the show, although it looks like they're going to bed at 10 o'clock or midnight on site, they're actually being schlepped to a hotel. They often don't get to sleep till 2:00 in the morning. If they're lucky, they get four hours of sleep at night. And all of this, I think, starts to inform where we get this feeling that things should be easier, that things happen faster, that there isn't a lot of waiting, there isn't a lot of drudgery that you have to put into things, that somehow, miraculously, in 60 minutes or 90 minutes or two weeks, everything turns around.
Brian Jones: I think that AI has only made it worse. We have this expectation that everything's super easy, and, yet seems to take forever.
Patience Jones: And if you're on social media at all, you're constantly getting pelted with these messages about, "Hey, were you experiencing this problem? I turned it around in 90 minutes. I turned it around in three weeks, and now I have a totally new life, and everything's great." And that's all designed to sell you things and make you feel bad, because when you feel bad, you buy stuff. But it also makes us feel like, "Well, I've been working on this plan for my business for five whole days now, and I don't see-
Brian Jones: The results.
Patience Jones: ... this miraculous result."
Brian Jones: Yeah. I think shifting from the mindset where you're defeated as soon as you start, it's really kind of important to think: Well, you've made it this far, and now it's time to regroup and figure out how you're going to continue going further, and not get too tied to the to the milestone that you may or may not have hit, that may or may not have been reasonable for the time that you had.
Patience Jones: Or something that you still want. I understand the importance of planning, and we have to do it, setting yearly goals and whatnot, but what you think you want or what you think is a good idea in the middle of November... by February, things may have changed, and that's not what you want anymore, or that's not as good an idea as it seemed, or there's a better thing that has presented itself that makes way more sense for your company. So, while constantly pivoting from thing to thing to thing won't do you very many favors, sticking to something just because that's the thing that you picked three months ago, and you feel like you have to be disciplined, that's not great either. So how do you know if something's working?
Brian Jones: You have to have some sort of measurement in place so that you understand when you set the priority or the goal for yourself, what is the outcome that you expected? How close are you to that outcome if you keep at it for another 60, 90 days? Are you going to reach it? Is it completely unlikely that you will ever reach it? These are kind of the moments of reality that kind of set in and may guide you towards deciding whether you want to continue on the path that you're on or if it's time to make a change.
Patience Jones: It's important to acknowledge that there are different types of goals. There are realistic goals, and there are aspirational goals, and both are good, and you should have a combination of them.
Brian Jones: Yeah.
Patience Jones: If the goal that you're setting for yourself is constantly within reach... If you look at what you did last year, and you say, "Well, if we can just do this again, or if we can do 50% of this," that's a goal you're probably definitely going to reach without a whole lot of effort. So if that's the only kind of goal you have, you're never going to grow, and you're also never going to prove to yourself and your team that you can do more. On the other hand, if the only kind of goals you have are aspirational goals, where you've decided you're going to 10X your firm's growth in the first quarter, or you're going to be named to the best-of list when very few people have ever even heard of you, and you have no projects out, that's a good aspirational goal. And that is something to continue working for, because eventually, you will get there, and you'll go lots of other places along the way. But having exclusively one or the other is just a recipe for both lethargy and heartbreak.
Brian Jones: Yeah.
Patience Jones: So if you're at a place where you feel like, "Ugh, I haven't gotten what I thought I should have accomplished," if you haven't gotten there yet, what do you do?
Brian Jones: Well, the first thing is to not necessarily plan on something that will get you caught up quickly. There are usually very few shortcuts in life, and this is very true in your goals for your business and specifically for marketing. But it's also important to know if you are going to make a pivot, that it's towards something that is helping you in the same way or to the same degree that the other thing would have helped you, had you continued on that path.
Patience Jones: I think something else to keep in mind is, don't throw out the thing. Don't feel like, "Oh, man, you know, it's the end of February. I haven't accomplished this. Just forget it. Forget this, forget all the other goals. I give up." Take a step back and look at, "Do I still want this thing? If I do, how can I still get it? What might need to change? If I don't want it, what do I want instead, and what does it take to get to that thing?" And your point about the pivoting is spot on. I call it the “radical pivot, “which is sort of the Hail Mary that you think will get you caught up. Just as things like immediate gratification are also fueled by what we are presented on TV, on social media, and videos, where somebody has a “story” (and I use story in quotes) about how nothing was working until they made this crazy, radical change. Like, "I used to be an architecture firm, and now I am an alligator farm." I mean, something that is that 180 degrees. "And now everything is great, and I have all this amazing success." That starts to seep into people's mindsets, and they think, "Well, maybe I just shouldn't be doing this thing."
Brian Jones: It's a kind of a version of business FOMO.
Patience Jones: It is! It is, and it's a little bit of lottery mentality. It's a little bit of superstition. It's a little bit of, "This unknown is more likely to be positive than my current situation," and that can go so, so, so wrong. We've seen companies have to unwind themselves from somebody's radical pivot, somebody's Hail Mary, because it isn't planned out. It isn't thought out. There's no consequential thinking. It's done in a moment of panic. It isn't even something you really want to be doing. It’s tempting to throw the baby out with the bathwater and say, "All right, all of a sudden, we're going to become an e-commerce company." But you really have to be careful about doing that.
Brian Jones: I would say the other thing is to think about how sometimes you can get convinced that the amount of time that you have is exactly the amount of time you need to accomplish the goal, and that's a different variant of the Hail Mary, where it's like, "Well, this is how much time I have, so that's how much time it will take to do this particular thing, to get us to this next level." And if that were true, it would be really great, but it usually doesn't work out so well that way.
Patience Jones: Yeah. So what are the takeaways?
Brian Jones: I would say, don't get discouraged is the big one. It's a process. Take time and evaluate where you are on things. Make sure you set up really clear measurements for whether something's successful or not when you take it on as a project or as a goal.
Patience Jones: I think that's good. I mean, that's very insightful of me, I know, but I do. I think that's very good. Just taking a step back and looking at, "How am I going to know if this is a success?" And maybe deciding that early on, instead of when you're looking at the information that you have and then kind of retroactively fitting that into a criteria.
Brian Jones: Absolutely.
Patience Jones: Decide ahead of time. Decide what it's worth to you, and then you can even decide, "Okay, I'll give up when, if I reach this point, and this thing hasn't happened, then here's what I'll do instead." It's kind of giving yourself a lifeboat, that maybe by virtue of having that lifeboat, you may not actually need it.
Brian Jones: Here's hoping.
Patience Jones: Here's hoping indeed. Go forth, do your resolutions, change your resolutions. Don't be beholden to your resolutions.
