Hi Lovely Simplerista,

It's decidedly summertime here.

The next two weeks I'm going to be summer vacationing with my kids.

Yesterday I went for a long (long!) walk in a beautiful park north of the city with my wife Phoebe, her dad, his girlfriend ('novia' in Spanish ... I've been learning using Duolingo), and two of their dogs. It was quite a journey.

Even though it's summer and my business is doing great, I find myself falling into the habit of needing to work, to feel productive, to get shit done. It's how I feel worthy. It's how I feel valued. It's how I feel like I'm in control of my life and ensure that I stay safe.

But the reality is that my income is not determined in any way, at least in the short term, by how much effort I put in today. And we all know that effort is not directly proportional to results.

But the habit of working hard can be hard to break. I find myself latching on to issues and problems so that I can fix them so I can feel good about myself. Even though there are bigger fish that I want to fry, another part of me is happy when there's some minor crisis I can fix so I don't have to do the more emotionally tough work.

So yesterday, instead of succumbing to the urge, I allowed myself a long walk in nature with the family, even though it was a Tuesday. And I'm so grateful that i did.

My invitation to you is to notice the patterns that have you running in your business, and to make sure you take time for the important inner work.

If you're running an online product business, then the same is true for you as for me: You don't necessarily make more money just because you work harder. You can make really nice money with just one or two big product launches per year, and leave it at that. But most of us aren't able to leave it at that. We want to keep working to feel important, worthy, or to avoid feeling those little feelings of unhappiness, or something unfulfilled, of "something needs to shift and I don't know what".

Why are we working? Why are we doing this? If it isn't so that we can take time to be with loved ones, preferably in nature, then I don't know why.

Latest from the blog

Nothing new from the blog. Nada. Zilch. It's been summer and my wife's birthday.

But if you haven't watched the interviews from last week, they're still well worth watching.

New features in Simplero

Not too much deployed here. We're still working on Zapier, and have the ability to add custom fields for contacts almost ready to go.

Other than that, mostly small things: We upgraded the video player we use, we changed how we show activities for emails ("show who"), and a handful of small fixes.

Fun stuff from around the interwebs

I've been playing a bit with my numerology calculator this past week, so it now handles multiple names, hyphens, and accents properly.

I loved this post by Seth Godin about the children's menu - even though it's there doesn't mean we have to take it.

Derek Sivers' post on customer service is great, too.

Have a great next couple of weeks!

With love,
-Calvin