Tuesday Thought: Reloading

Season’s greetings my fellow Thinkers.

Hope everyone is having a wonderful and restful holiday.

Today’s newsletter is about 2024 resolutions.

But first a word from our sponsor…

Craig Cook! Craig’s really a fantastic guy. He heads up mobilads, a great wrapped car company I’ve worked with in the past and seen great results. Hit up Craig if you’re looking to do great work next year, in a spiky or stunty way.

Onto today’s thought…

Tuesday Thought

“We don’t need to rebuild; we need to reload.”

Those words weren’t said by a famous philosopher, thought leader, etc.

They were said by New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers.

Now, I know what you’re thinking.

You’re sick and tired of hearing about Aaron Rodgers as much as I am.

Even as a Jets fan, it’s been a lot from this guy this year.

But I thought the above quote he said last week to Pat McAfee was profound.

Especially in the context of 2024 resolutions.

The New York Jets season this year hasn’t gone the way many had thought.

They were Super Bowl contenders before the season started.

Once Aaron got hurt though, their season went down the drain.

But instead of panicking or making rash, sudden changes in direction next year, Aaron is preaching something different.

He’s telling fans and the team alike to trust the process and stay the course.

It’s welcome advice as we go into the season of wanting to change the course.

Making resolutions is a good thing.

It helps us acknowledge our weaknesses, and create a plan to improve them.

But I think inherently, there’s something wrong with resolutions.

Making new ones ignores the ones, or the grand plan, we’ve made before.

There’s a saying that our (Noble People’s) CEO Greg March says a lot:

People overestimate what they can do in a year, and underestimate what they can do in 10.

We’re all guilty of the former.

We make resolutions that are lofty, extreme, and hard to pull off in a year.

But we also make resolutions that make us change course, without taking into account why we were doing something else in the first place.

Something that might have been a solid plan, but didn’t work out in the short time frame of one year for whatever reason.

And the minute you aim to change course, you’re likely setting yourself up for some sort of failure.

After all, let’s say you’re a company making 2024 projections and strategies off of 2023 performance.

The economy was mixed, but analysts predict a booming market next year when interest rates are cut.

So you make your projections and strategies based off of these external predictions that may or mat not materialize.

Well, more often than not, they don’t.

The New York Times had a great article this weekend about how often market analysts are right about the next year’s market.

Spoiler alert: not often.

Take 2022 for example.

Analysts predicted the S&P 500 would rise 3.9% that year.

It slid 19.4%.

There are plenty of other examples of this.

So if you base your projections or strategies mostly off of last year’s weaknesses or strengths, and adapt them to predictions of next year’s occurrences, you’re likely to be disappointed.

In fact, a great article from 2017 states that the job of being a CEO isn’t about making big, “steering” decisions and executing them for a company.

In fact, the article argues that CEO’s shouldn’t steer at all.

Instead, CEO’s are “orientation locks” keeping a company on its course.

The entire job of a CEO is to keep everyone aimed towards that one goal they set out on when the CEO first started the job.

They bang the table, they keep things simple, they hold up decisions to specific principles and values…all towards that one goal.

Steering decisions, instead, should be left to other employees.

Because if the leadership of the company continuously zigs and zags and steers, it will be too confusing for everyone to stay the course, people will lose momentum, or you’ll attach yourself to fads that might sooner die than help you succeed.

Well, in modern business coaching philosophy, you’re often taught you’re the CEO of yourself.

And if that’s the case, then in the same way a company’s CEO shouldn’t steer, nor really should you.

Instead, you should be an “orientation lock” for yourself - motivating and demanding that you stay the course and follow your aims and dreams.

So, as you approach 2024, it’s OK for your 2024 resolutions to be to do more of the same.

Of course you should figure out what’s working or not within that bigger goal you have.

But you shouldn’t drastically change course, as you’ll overestimate what you can do in the next year and underestimate what you can do in the next 10.

Finally, the same applies to your marketing plans.

It’s a time of the year to look at the next 12 months and scrap everything from the year before and plot a completely new path.

My advice: don’t.

Of course you should be honest about the things staring you in the face that aren’t working. To think otherwise is like telling someone with severe health risks not to try and operate a healthier lifestyle.

But when you make your 2024 goals, keep your 2023 main goal, or the one you made even before that, in mind.

You made that marketing goal for a reason.

Time to stick with it.

Stay thinkin,

Danny