Dear Lovely Simplerista,
Welcome to 2015. I meant to write you on New Year's Eve, but frankly I wanted to celebrate more.
Moving to a new server and getting the last little things ready for EU VAT ended up taking longer than I was hoping. That's how it often goes, isn't it.
But we're there, and the move went really really smoothly, and the new setup is really awesome, well structured, well documented, and we've got two live database backups going. That's how I like things. Last time we moved to a new server was three years ago, and let's just agree that a lot has happened in that time. This time has taken a lot of effort and new learnings and books read, but in the end it's so worth it.
I bet you've experienced something similar in your life.
2015 theme
What are your rituals preparing for the new year? Resolutions are popular but not my thing. Instead, I've taken quite a bit of time to reflect on where I'm at and what's important for me going forward.
I started by coming up with a theme. I like the idea of a theme much better than resolutions. With a theme, you come up with a short phrase that will shape the year ahead. You check in with this theme every day, or at least every week, and you let it shape your thoughts, your feelings, your decisions, your actions.
My theme for 2015 is "step directly into the biggest version of myself". Why? Because I realized (and not for the first time!) that I've been working under the assumption that I had to prove myself before I was worthy of my dreams. That I had to create an even bigger business, even more success, before I can have the relationships I want, before I can create the Conscious Startups accelerator I'm dreaming of, before I can teach and coach others. That if I struggled and worked hard enough, I'd somehow get there eventually.
Well, after 40 years of trying it that way, I'm ready to throw in the towel and commit to trying something different. So that's what this theme means to me. I know who I really am, and I don't need to prove it to myself or anyone, I just need to be it. Now. Today. Every day.
What's your theme? If you haven't, I encourage you to set aside some time to reflect on it. It's definitely worth it.
It's the first time I'm doing this exercise. I've come across it before, but never actually done it. Thanks to Bill Baren, this time I did. Thank you, Bill!
2015 planning
Based on this theme, I've started looking at the things I want to nurture in 2015, and the things I want to drop.
I've put together a project plan with all the things that I want to do something about in 2015. It's the first time I've ever taken the time to do that. It feels good. Doesn't mean I have to do everything, but it's clear now which projects haven't been moving forward and why.
One of the big areas that I want to focus on in 2015 is me as a spiritual mentor and coach. I got started in this business because I wanted to work as a spiritual mentor to entrepreneurs. In the past few years, I haven't really done it, because I've told myself that it was a better use of my time to focus on the software business. I always knew it was a lie. The truth is, I've been scared of it, and I let my life lessons get the best of me. The old "who am I to teach anything" song was playing in the background, and it's time to call bullshit on it. So 2015 is going to see me take a much more active role as a mentor and coach.
Simplero meetup in New York
I'm going to be hosting monthly Simplero meetups in New York, with the first being January 30th at 4pm. If you live here, or you're visiting, stop by and talk Simplero, talk to me, rub shoulders with other Simpleristas, and share tips for how to make your business even better.
Details and RSVP here
I'll be in San Francisco Wednesday and Thursday next week (14th and 15th).
Email me if you want to join a Simplero meetup there as well, on the 14th or 15th.
New Features in Simplero
Well, we have a new server now. So that's exciting.
You can now add an internal name for your lists, and lists are sorted by that name on the main Lists page.
SMS's had problems getting through. For now, we've had to add a couple of new sender numbers, but shortly we'll change again to using a short code, which should be a permanent solution.
We're now recording when sending login information.
Honor account's time zone in Incoming this month on dashboard.
Fixed sorting of products by purchase count and participant count.
Added information about how to wake me up to the Settings > Basic settings page.
Triggers on unsubscribe now only fire if the customer was already subscribed.
Random Links from around the Interwebs
First has to be a big shout-out to TitleCapitalization.com. My strategy has always been to capitalize what seems to be the "big" or "important" words, which I know isn't correct. Or to only capitalize the first word, which also isn't correct. This site to the rescue. I could learn the rules, but first I'd have to learn what nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and subordinate conjunctions are. I grew up in a country that insisted on using their own terms rather than the words that come from latin and which every other language I've wanted to learn seem to have agreed to use, and I've never gotten around to it.
This trend of thinking we need to protect every little aspect of our children's lives is crazy. Glad someone's writing about it.
The cyberattacks on Sony have been super interesting to follow. Basically, unless the CIA and NSA have intelligence they're not talking about, there's no reason to believe North Korea had anything to do with it. But cybersecurity is hard, and figuring out who did something and why, is harder still. Last night Simplero had an outage, which was due to a DDoS attack against Hover, who hosts our DNS (used to). In a situation like that, there's nothing I can do, but even Hover doesn't know who did this or why. Perhaps someone was hosting content on a domain hosted by them, which someone found objectionable, and then they mounted this attack. Who knows. We'll probably never know.
The best resource I know of on this is Bruce Schneier. He writes about security at all levels and is very very smart about it.
This letter, purportedly real and sent by an 86 year old lady to her bank, is pitch-perfect. The relationship between us as individuals and some of the big companies that are only too happy to take our money, is so off-kilter, it's not even funny. You have to navigate minutes of phone menus and annoying wait music, and if they call you, they'd never put up with the same. It reminds me of what Louise Hay says: People treat you the way you train them to treat you. Time for us to train our suppliers to treat us better.
That's it for this week.
See you in San Francisco next week?
Love,
-Calvin