Complacency Kills

October 15, 2021 Nate Anglin

Here’s the latest edition of The Optimized Report newsletter, a collection of actionable ideas to help small business teams improve their performance, profit, and potential without sacrificing what's most important.

Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen complacency at its peak.

A pandemic that exposed weak global supply chains. A blocked Suez canal that gets 10 percent of all international maritime commercial traffic to flow through it. The Facebook shutdown.

You think billion-dollar brands and countries would have the resources to peek around the corner, but threats are often ignored. It’s business as usual.

The lesson? Don’t let complacency seep into your soul.

Now, on to this week’s optimized ideas: 👇

1. A Key Business Lesson From The Facebook Outage

“A single point of failure (SPoF) is a problem that leads to the shut down of a company’s source of revenue.”

Small businesses are riddled with threats.

One large customer, a critical employee, or an over-reliance on a critical supplier are all threats. When things are goods, they’re good. But complacency kills.

Just think, the pandemic exposed an over-reliance on Chinese manufactured goods. The massive cargo ship cost the global supply chain over $400 million an hour. Facebook lost $79m in ad revenue in less than 8-hours, but untold amounts for the companies who rely on these ads to fuel their business.

Leadership teams must spend every quarter noticing and pushing back company threats.

2. Imitate, Then Innovate

“The more we imitate others, the more we discover how we’re different.”

Mimicking isn’t the same as imitating.

David Perell makes the case whenever he finds a writer he admires; he mimics their style in his next article. He imitates, then innovates. He doesn’t blatantly copy their style for an indefinite period. Instead, he imitates, which helps him discover how he’s different.

He learns, adapts, and lets it fuel his uniqueness.

3. Don’t Take Things Personally

“Personal importance, or taking things personally, is the maximum expression of selfishness because we make the assumption that everything is about ‘me.’”

It’s a lifelong lesson we should all continue to learn. Here are a few more quotes from the book, The Four Agreements:

“Nothing people do is because of you. It’s because of themselves.”

“All people live in their own dream, in their own mind; they are in a completely different world from the one we live in.”

“Even when people insult you directly, it never has anything to do with you. What they say, or do, and the opinions they give are all based on their mental programming.”

“Their point of view comes from all the programming they received during domestication.”

“Taking things personally makes you easy prey for all the predators in the world. They can easily hook you with a little comment of opinion and begin to feed you whatever poison they want. IF you take it personally, you’ll happily accept their poison.”

“If you live without fear, if you love, there is no place for any of those emotions. If you don’t feel any of those emotions, it is logical that you will feel good. When you feel good, everything around you is good.”

“You don’t need to trust others as much as you trust yourself to make the right choices. You are only responsible for your actions, no one else’s.”

4. You Are What you Consume

“People who watch craploads of TV are generally unhappier, unhealthier, and more paranoid about the world.”

Television is a mindless medium.

So are your social media feeds. Its mindless passivity, which makes you suggestible to the information you’re consuming, suggests Mark Manson. Think about all the times you’ve been sucked into the endless void of nonsense.

Reading is a much better medium.

“Reading makes us more empathetic, improves our attention span, enhances logical reasoning, and so on and so forth.”

So, watch less and read more.

But don’t just read junk. Instead, read, learn, and test your hypothesis. Don’t learn in a silo.

5. Advice For Entrepreneurs

“Cognitive biases come in all flavors. They are the result of time-saving and energy-saving shortcuts our brain takes in analyzing the flood of data coming in through our senses.”

But there are six biases plaguing entrepreneurs.

Confirmation bias is the most deadly. It is when you listen to data that confirms your pre-existing beliefs. “Through this bias, people tend to favor information that reinforces the things they already believe.”

This is why Elon Musk relies on his “BEST” friends to give him “the most brutal criticism.”