Hi Lovely Simplerista,
I've been spending the past couple of days with my two wonderful children, and one of the things that we love doing together is geocaching.
If you're not familiar, it's a real-life-meets-virtual game, where some kind individuals have hidden some real items—film canisters, boxes, and little metal tubes—all over town, and you use an app, coordinates, and problem-solving skills to find said real items ("caches").
Yesterday we went hunting for a couple of caches in Copenhagen that we'd tried to find two years ago, but ended up giving up on. This time, bolstered by a successful streak, we wanted to give it another shot to complete the mission.
At one point, we're at the right spot searching. The app says it's supposed to be easy. Other people's logs say "quick find". Not discouraging when you've spent 15 minutes on a small 10-square meter area looking for it to no avail. We know it's magnetic, which implies it's attached to some piece of metal. We know it's the size of a film canister. We know it's hidden from plain sight as the area sees plenty of traffic during the day. Yet we can't find it.
We're about to give up. "Let's just move on. It's too difficult. Let's give up". But I insist. No, let's find it this time. We know it's here. And so we persist. And suddenly Flora gets an idea, goes looking, and bingo! There it is!
Later that day, I'm helping Flora work through some emotional stuff. She's really good at that stuff. Moves quickly through the different phases and gives words and expression to whatever she's feeling. I'm just holding the space and letting her express it all. But then we get to this gnarly one, and she just wants to call it quits before she's even begun. "But dad, how do I do it? What can I do with this? It just won't go away."
That's when a light bulb goes off in my head, and I realize the geocaching experience we just had is a perfect metaphor: Treat it like we did the geocache. Be curious. Where can it be? What are the layers of this? Be willing to really find it. And don't give up. Stay with it. You know it's there, you know there'll be release when you find it, just keep at it. Use your mind to help you find it, don't give in to the voices that tell you to give up or that say no. That metaphor helped a lot, and we could keep exploring together.
So there you have it: Feelings are like geocaching.
Feelings is such an interesting topic. Seven billion people on the planet. We all have them, and they drive
everything. Yet only such a tiny fraction of humanity actually know how to properly deal with them. Insane! Make sure you educate yourself about this very important topic.
Gay Hendricks' 10 Second Miracle book is a great place to start.
New Features in Simplero
We've added native support for the latest version of Quickpay, v10, which will now let you do subscription payments and auto-charge on Quickpay v10.
At the same time, we've upgraded to the latest version of all payment libraries.
We've implemented a new affiliate payouts screen that makes it much easier to manage affiliate payouts and cross them off as you complete them, when you have to handle payouts manually, like we do (for now).
We've added four new gorgeous embedded opt-in designs, and two new beautiful email templates.
To check out the embedded opt-in form templates, go to any of your lists, click Signup forms, and add a new Embedded signup form.
To check out the new email templates, go to Communication > Email Templates.
We hope you like 'em.
We'll keep working on the design aspects of Simplero. We have an incredible new designer we're working with, and the process has been an absolute joy so far. The results speak for themselves: A distinct Scandinavian aesthetic combined with a deep knowledge of conversion and marketing impact. I love it!
Random Links from around the Interwebs
Turning your anxiety into excitement: This is amazing. Fritz Perls said: "Fear is excitement with the breath held". Exactly! And it's proven every time someone goes for a roller coaster ride.
A movement of people reluctant to kill for an abstraction. We're the majority. We cannot be beaten.
How Malcolm Gladwell got the 10,000 hours research wrong. Simplifying is what he does. It's great to get ideas to spread, but it's helpful to know the details.
Lots of love,
–Calvin and the growing Simplero team