Coupon codes are a terrible idea! It’s time to re-evaluate your marketing.

Whether you celebrate Thanksgiving or not, it’s impossible to miss the massive frenzy of “black friday” and “cyber monday” discounts and deals that first started appearing a week ago and are disappearing as this post goes out.

Here’s something to ponder if you’re running a business: coupon codes are a terrible idea.

I mean this in two ways:

Seasonal discounts are a terrible idea.
Coupon codes are the worst way of doing discounts.

If you’ve just run a Thanksgiving sale, it may be time to rethink this for the New Year. I appreciate this probably isn’t what you want to hear, but whilst there are some exceptions (and we’ll come to them later), hear me out on this.

Seasonal discounts are a terrible idea

“Discounts punish your pre-existing customers and train future customers not to by until you have a discount.” – Sean McCabe

I’m not a fan of discounts. They tell people who’ve already bought from you “you should have waited for a discount” and potential customers “don’t bother buying until we have a discount”.

Thinking of it like this shows discounts to be disincentivising purchases, the very opposite of what they’re supposed to be doing.

Here’s a quick case study: last week I purchased a bunch of Mac software. I thought it was a bit expensive at full price and the purchase was desirable but not urgent, so I just waited until the Black Friday sales I could see from Googling happen every year.

There is space for doing discounts within this framework, and this is more or less the only space I think they’re worth doing: launch discounts to reward early customers that are never repeated.

Launch discounts are an effective way of creating urgency and driving early sales, but for these to work the launch discount price needs to be the best price you ever offer. Those early adopters need to be rewarded by having the best possible price, not mocked/punished by seeing a lower price in six months when you run out of marketing ideas.

You could argue launch discounts are just a temporary lower price and there’s no discount at all, but the semantics are mostly irrelevant. The important point is when you do discounts you’re telling current customers if they’d waited they could have had a lower price and future customers to wait for a discount before purchasing. You’re disincentivising purchases.

Coupon codes are the worst way of doing discounts

The second line of my argument is coupon codes are the worst way of doing discounts.

Here’s why:

I’m buying something from your shop.
I decide what I want and add it to my basket.
I go to pay. I’m ready to buy.
I see a box for a coupon code. I don’t have one!
I search for a discount and click an affiliate link to reveal a discount.
I add the coupon code and purchase, with a 20% saving made.

You should never offer discounts once a customer has made a purchasing decision. Discounts should be used to ensure a purchasing decision is made, but offering them after that decision is just throwing money away.

By showing a coupon code box at the checkout, you’re telling customers who have already decided to buy that they can get a discount when they were literally about to purchase at full price. It’s not just me saying this btw.

When you offer the option to enter coupon codes at checkout, a decent proportion of your customers will now proceed to Google your site + discount and pocket whatever discount they can find.

What’s more, most sites collating coupons will then demand you click an affiliate link to reveal the discount – so you suddenly lose the x% on the coupon code and x% in affiliate payout. This could quite easily be 50%+ of the original price, lost totally unnecessarily.

You see what I mean when I say coupon codes are a terrible idea?

The solution here, if you are going to do discounts, is to do discounts without coupon codes. Append a query to your site’s URL instead, so the discount is only available to customers specifically coming from the place the discount was intended for. SellwithWP has details on how to do this with EDD and here’s how to do it with WooCommerce.

Other mooted solutions include conditionally displaying a coupon box, but the URL method is easier to implement. How you do this doesn’t really matter, what’s more important is you are doing something to hide the coupon box.

There are exceptions to this

And I’m not just saying this so friends reading this won’t think I’m being too much of a dick about it. There are some scenarios where discounts make sense and some ways of doing discounts better if you really want to do them.

The type of product is important. Are you selling a commoditised product or a luxury one? You can probably make a strong argument that commoditised products – where price is one of the main competition points – need discounts to keep sales up and customers expect to see occasional discounts. I’m not going to make such an argument, but I can see it could make sense. You cannot, however, make such an argument for luxury products.

You can avoid problems by keeping discounts quiet. Discounts disincentivise purchases as future customers can see lower prices are available and they should wait. If there’s no way of future customers finding your discounts, there’s no §disincentive. In practice this might mean offering exclusive discounts to your email list or perhaps to current customers on an additional purchase.

Note this rules out running big promotional discounts and posting to your blog or social media; I still maintain these are a bad idea.

Truly seasonal discounts are probably okay. I get I’m British and don’t really understand Thanksgiving. If you really want to do a Thanksgiving sale and be part of the community and all that, you can do, but make sure they’re truly seasonal sales and not run with the regularity that future customers can just wait for the next sale before purchasing.

You can mitigate some of the problems with coupon codes. If you really want to keep your coupon codes available to everyone, there are some things you can do to mitigate the problem:

Keep tight control over what codes are available. Make sure “finished” codes expire and sites can’t collate dozens of possibly working coupons.
Only offer codes to new customers, or for SaSS products for the first x months. This makes sure coupons work as lead generation.
Dominate the search results for your own coupons. This is my favourite! Avoid paying out affiliate fees by making sure customers come to your site when they search for coupon codes. This is as simple as making a page on your site with a list of available coupon codes. Namecheap does this really well, as do WPZOOM.

Of course, the easiest way to avoid problems with coupon codes is simply not to use them 😉

I maintain coupon codes are rubbish

My thesis here is strong. Coupons tell potential customers “wait until we do a sale” and current customers “you should have waited for a sale”. Furthermore, the coupon box at checkout throws away a huge chunk of revenue in discounts and affiliate fees to customers who were just about to buy at full price.

If you really want to do discounts, there are ways of doing them better, but for most products I just don’t see the value.

So, in sum: coupon codes are a terrible idea.

P.S. If you’re reading this, nodding along and thinking you should change your marketing strategy but don’t know how… drop me an email.

Secrets from writing, editing and publishing 1,000+ blog posts

I write a lot of blog posts. In the last eight or nine years I’ve written over one thousand posts on WPShout, the old incarnation of this site, a video game review site I used to run with friends and assorted places like the Miniclip Blog.

These days I write here every week, I’m constantly writing for MasterWP and writing is an integral part of my freelance work.

In this time I’ve tried out more or less every writing trick and “hack” in the book. I’m always looking for ways to improve, but at this stage I’m pretty happy I’ve gotten the writing process well optimised.

If you’re writing anything — regularly, occasionally, or less than you want — then there’s likely something here that can help. This is what my writing process looks like, a thousand posts later.

Coming up with good ideas is the most important step

A lot of writing advice is “write more” or “just start writing 1,000 words per day”. This is only partially helpful. It’s misleading to suggest you can just sit down and write 1,000 words before breakfast; you first need to know what to write about.

In my experience, coming up with ideas is the most difficult part and once you’ve got a good idea the rest is pretty straightforward. Once you have a good idea, the rest is straightforward – but start with a bad or unoriginal post idea and you’re probably wasting your time.

I have two ways of coming up with ideas:

Brainstorming: set aside an hour, sit down with a blank piece of paper and come up with ten blog post ideas and an outline for each. You’ll probably get to four or five fairly easily, but the rest will be tough: spend long enough sat there and you’ll eventually come up with the ideas.
Randomly: the best post ideas come randomly. In the shower, on a run, doing some other work – for these stop right away and note down a title and outline. Any note-taking method will do, but I like Simplenote for its fast multi-platform tools.

The best post ideas come from experience. This is absolutely vital to understand. If you’re struggling to come up with ideas, think of things you’ve struggled with or solved in your own work. What new approach did you take that was helpful? How did you solve the problem? Write this up and you’ll have a great post.

On the other side of the coin, mediocre blog posts come from leveraging other people’s experiences.

I’ve been guilty of this in the past: if you’re heavily quoting other public work (i.e. other posts, books, talks etc) then you’re not contributing anything new, you’re just collating other opinions. The vast majority of posts that rely on block quotes for authority and to advance argument just aren’t that great. Where these quotes are original interviews we can make an exception, but these are a minority of cases.

The best posts are straight-up new ideas or old ideas done better. Write something new, write something interesting. Don’t just regurgitate what other people have said already.

Writing faster by using a dedicated writing app

I publish everything in WordPress but do all my writing elsewhere for maximum writing productivity.

I’ve tried a lot of unreasonably expensive writing apps and the best I’ve used is Ulysses. If you’re on Mac this is almost certainly the best option (see The Sweet Setup for more).

Ulysses’ distraction-free UI is useful for deep work when writing – it leaves you with your writing as the only thing on the screen and no space for distraction. I use the Yosemite theme for a nice dark background.

The word count goal is also useful: I’ll typically write posts in a couple of sittings, so I can aim for 1,000 words each time I sit down to write.

The hybrid markdown writing process is another strength. You get all the benefits of markdown but in a slightly more user-friendly way. Ulysses also has really good autocorrect that will fix even the most egregious typos and spelling mistakes. This is a huge time saver and lets you “keep the flow” when writing, instead of backspacing to fix errors.

Once I’m done writing in Ulysses I’ll copy the post as HTML and paste into WordPress. This retains all the formatting and links. From there you can optimise and add images. We’ll cover those later.

Quick note: if you’re using PC, sadly there’s not the same range of writing apps available. I used MarkdownPad for a long time and think that’s still the best available.

Editing

I’ve written about the importance of the editing process before. If you usually don’t edit your blog posts, read that first.

A lot of what I talk about in the editing process post is making writing web-ready. This involves using styling and paragraph breaks to highlight key points and generally being concise. After you’ve been doing this for a while it becomes something you do as you’re writing, so typically I don’t need to spend a lot of time editing.

That said, there are two types of post:

Posts that are good and just need checking over. For these I’ll run After the Deadline (part of Jetpack) and read through the post in preview mode. This usually catches everything.
Posts that need to be improved. These generally require improving arguments and reworking structure. Just gotta put the time in with these.

It’s much more preferable to get to editing and have a post which fits the first description. The best way to do this is to plan properly and read what you’ve written as you go through (effectively self-edit posts as you’re writing). I spoke about planning posts properly at WordCamp London.

I’ve also started working with a professional editor on larger freelance projects. I’m hoping this will further tighten my arguments and writing, but only started doing this very recently so the jury is out on recommending this. For regular blog posts self-editing as described above is perfectly adequate.

For bonus points on this, building a custom layout for your post can make it really engaging. Karol does a great job with this on codeinwp, and with a page builder (or Gutenberg!) this is pretty easy to do. WPShout reviewed Beaver Builder and highly recommends it, and I’m inclined to agree.

Writing good titles

Once a post is finished I’ll look again at the title. I used to follow formulaic guidelines on writing titles, but I’ve found very little merit in doing this; you just get the same kinds of shitty clickbait titles everyone else has. These are no good.

The best technique I’ve found for coming up with good titles is to just come up with three of four different versions of the title. With each iteration, the title gets better. Here’s what I had for this post:

Tools I use to write, edit and publish blog posts
Tools I use to write, edit and publish blog posts quickly
How I write, edit and publish blog posts efficiently
How I wrote, edited and published 1000+ blog posts
Secrets from writing, editing and publishing 1,000+ blog posts

The first title is what the first draft of this post was written as. It accurately describes the content in the post, but isn’t very exciting. I kept on revising until I had something which adds intrigue (the “secrets”) and authority (I’ve written a lot of blog posts). The resulting title is a lot more exciting than the original.

Optimising images

Image optimisation is an important part of the editing process. If you’re writing in WordPress it makes sense to add your images as you go, but I prefer to do them all in bulk at once at the end.

This is not just a case of throwing some images into your post. I highly recommend using images to illustrate examples, but not just for the sake of it. You’ll note posts on this blog are virtually image-free – in part as an aesthetic choice and in part cause they’re only necessary in very few cases.

Alright, so once you have good images you can add them in. I run images through ImageOptim (Mac only but lists PC alternatives) to cut down files sizes. This little app does a great job (I’ve even started using it to compress my photo archive – you can preserve EXIF data and image quality) and can hugely cut file sizes. I generally don’t worry about resizing images as Jetpack handles this.

This isn’t hard: just make sure you’re doing it.

There’s more to publishing than pressing publish

Publishing is obviously just a case of hitting Publish in WordPress, but if you just do that chances are nobody will read your post. Promoting a post really doesn’t take long, but you do need to actually do it.

I have a set promotion plan for blog posts. I’d strongly recommend formulating one of your own and just repeating it every time you publish: this makes it a much faster process. Here’s what I do:

Automatically tweet the post. I use Jetpack for this.
Post on a minimum of two social sharing sites. Typically find an appropriate subreddit, ManageWP if it’s WordPress-related, Hacker News for tech/productivity stuff and GrowthHackers or Inbound for marketing content.
Contact anyone I’ve mentioned in the article and give them a link. I don’t do this a lot, but if I’ve heavily relied on a source or given someone a nice mention I’ll drop them an email or tweet with a link. I don’t ask for anything – just provide a link. They’ll share if they like it. Hunter is great for finding email addresses.
Outreach to relevant weekly link roundup emails or posts is great. Find these by Googling industry + weekly roundup but set the results to only show in the last month.

None of this is difficult, but because it feels like your post is “done” once you hit publish, seldom is enough time spent on promotion. Not every post will be a social hit, but don’t worry about; keep producing really good content and keep sharing it and eventually people will take notice.

Content promotion also isn’t an open-ended task: see above for what I do, but make a list of what’s best for the kind of content you produce and stick to it every time you publish a post.

Finally, I have a bunch of statistics I track which I enter every Monday morning. This lets me see how last week’s post did, how the site is growing (or not) and how changes in the last week fit in with the bigger picture.

A couple of tools I use here that are useful:

Jetpack (again) for site stats. I also have Google Analytics installed, by Jetpack is fine.
Serplab for checking keyword rankings. I enter the keyword for that week’s post and note any changes to other posts.
Majestic for checking backlinks. I just make a note of the total number and see how it’s changed from last week.

Other than this, I don’t check stats; scheduling it for once a week stops it being a procrastination task but makes sure you’re on top of what’s happening. I wrote more about my targets a couple of weeks ago.

Write more, write faster and keep publishing

You don’t have to write a thousand words before breakfast, but writing regularly is useful. Publishing regularly is even better. I’ve found when I get out of the habit of publishing putting any work out there becomes more difficult.

Not everything you write is going to be earth-shattering, but publish once a week and you’ll become a much better writer for it – and maybe then you’ll write something earth-shattering.

It’s also important not to overcomplicate this. Don’t feel you need the perfect writing app or the perfect post idea or the perfect title before you start. The “secrets” here are the things I’ve gotten better at in the last eight or so years, they’re not essential prerequisites for starting out now.

There’s a lot in this post. Don’t treat it as a must-follow blueprint, but take advantage of the things I’ve learned and use the ones which suit you to become a better writer. And, if you write a post that changes the world, do let me know 🙂

Here’s what you should do to escape the social media echo chamber

Nobody expected Donald Trump to become President-Elect Trump, not even his own team. The polls were wrong, the pundits were wrong but one of the most incredible things is 55 percent of Democrats and 58 percent of Republicans have very unfavourable views of the other party. Over half of both parties are “fearful” or “afraid” of the opposite party.

This last statistic is almost as incredible as Mr Trump winning the election: most voters on each side regard the other as something to be feared.

This is certainly a sentiment I’m familiar with: in May 2015 I found it inconceivable anyone could vote for David Cameron’s Conservatives (they won a majority) and in June this year I found it very difficult to see Brexit as an appealing option (that won as well).

The 2015 General Election election, Brexit and now President Trump has left me in no doubt the failure to understand the effect of the social media “echo chamber” is a serious cause of our collective failure to understand the opposition’s point of view.

There’s been collective outpouring in the media in recent days navel-gazing about how we got into this mess, but the more important question here is how do we get out of this mess?

Enter the echo chamber

Whilst I just gently mocked media navel-gazing about how we go to this state of affairs, to understand how to get out the echo chamber we need to understand how we got in the thing in the first place.

The idea of the echo chamber has been around for a long time (this paper was published in 1966), but social media has amplified its prevalence. An echo chamber is:

A phenomen whereby groups of people in possession of homogenous ideas exist in isolation to those who think differently from them.

This becomes a problem when:

People have Facebook friends who agree with them on political issues.
Facebook becomes people’s number one news source.

If you get your news from Facebook and everyone on Facebook agrees with you, you can see how easily you could think the opposing party are outright dangerous.

The problem is heightened by Facebook’s news feed algorithm, which prioritises the most outrageous and click-friendly stories, rather than the “best” or most accurate.

Facebook’s news feed algorithm prioritises clickbait (if other users respond well to a post you’re more likely to see – so clickbait does best). Publishers quickly realised the best performing clickbait is the most outrageous articles.

Traditional publishers push this as far as they can: Vox and Daily Mail feel their feeds with fairly low quality stuff. This is annoying at best and mildly negative at worst, but at least content published in mainstream media outlets is true most of the time (mind the Mail is hardly a bastion of the truth).

False stories are the best clickbait

All links show the same on Facebook, and similarly all news sources all show up the same way, regardless of their credibility, so new pages and sources have sprung up, unrestrained by inconveniences such as “the truth” and happy to post the most outrageous clickbait possible.

Turns out the most outrageous clickbait possible is stories which are made up.

Buzzfeed found three large right and left wing Facebook pages published false stories 38 and 20% of the time respectively.

When Facebook is your primary news source, every third story you see being false becomes a problem. Buzzfeed cites these pages as one of the leading causes of Mr Trump’s rise:

The right-wing pages [and their false stories] are among the forces — perhaps as potent as the cable news shows that have gotten far more attention — that helped fuel the rise of Donald Trump.

Another Buzzfeed story epitomises the mess we’re in as entrepreneurial teenagers from Macedonia launched over 140 political blogs where they publish false Trump stories “for a easy way to make money” through ad revenue. One group of teens reported their sites launched this year have been averaging a million views a month.

When your news consumption has evolved to clickbait that’s evolved to stories trying so hard to be outrageous they make up the most outrageous thing possible, we have a problem.

Facebook produces homogenous thinking

Is Facebook to blame here? It probably needs to take some responsibility for offering partisans on both sides:

A limitless, on-demand narrative fix, occasionally punctuated by articles grounded in actual world events, when those suit their preferences.

Facebook has been roundly criticised, but it seems unwilling to change. Mark Zuckerberg said last week “the idea that fake news on Facebook… influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea”.

I’d argue it’s utterly implausible that fake stories on people’s primary news source doesn’t influence their thinking. Facebook must be treated not solely as a technology company, as it would like, but as a technology/news distribution hybrid. It’s got to start taking some responsibility for what people share on their platform and can’t keep rewarding false reporting.

Apparently Facebook was concerned about this but declined to change anything, for fear of a backlash. News this morning has surfaced of movement towards action, but blocking the worst offenders still doesn’t fix the underlying echo chamber problem.

So – if Facebook isn’t going to help, how can you and I get out of this mess?

How do we get out of this mess?

Escaping the echo chamber requires recognising its existence and actively fighting it. It’s actually pretty straightforward from there. Here are some things you can do:

Stop using Facebook as a news source. Seriously, this mostly solves the problem in one stroke. Go back to seeing pictures of babies, parties and cats instead. I’d even argue you should just outright turn off your news feed. Use News Feed Eradicator and messenger.com.

Don’t use Twitter as your only news source. Twitter is still good for breaking news and doesn’t feature the same popularity algorithm, but it can still be bad if you’re only following people you agree with.

Actively look for people you disagree wth. Replace your Facebook news consumption with a range of quality news from a range of reputable outlets. This is harder in that it’s less convenient than just loading up Facebook, but bookmarking two or three sites isn’t especially burdensome. Podcasts are a convenient way of getting news, too.

Here are some sources I’d recommend:

Liberal

Vox’s The Weeds podcast (subscribe to this on iTunes: an hour a week of really good analysis).
Stephen Bush’s Morning Call (from New Statesman; UK-focussed daily politics email. Very good and concise).
The Guardian (best for what’s happening now, also a good app).

Conservative

The Economist (classical liberal rather than conservative; the magazine is very good and worth considering).
National Review (seen this recommended a lot recently).
Manhattan Institute (again, only recently picked this up; describes itself as a free market think tank).

Others

BBC The World This Week podcast (BBC World Service is probably the most balanced you’ll find).
Jacobin (straight-up socialism).

(You may be able to tell: I’m not a conservative. I’ve been trying to find who the really good Conservative commentators are. Still on the look out, but added a bunch of people to my reading list using this Quora question. Let me know if you have recommendations).

This is definitely a fixable problem

So, things are pretty bad.

Fortunately, whilst this is a serious problem it’s also easy to fix. Diversify your news consumption away from Facebook and you go a long way to fixing this.

Hopefully the options here can continue the Facebook conversation and start a movement in the right direction. Until then, we’re left with President Trump and an incomprehensible political opposition.

Enjoy.

Asking the right questions for accelerated productivity, clarity and growth

I’ve been self-employed full time for the last three months now (minus a bit of time in Japan and I’m starting to appreciate the importance of asking the right questions in life and in business – but mainly in business.

“Asking the right questions” is a key theme in any business book. It’s a genre one should generally err on the side of caution and skepticism with, but there are some very good examples.

One mostly good example is The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. Ries basically spends the whole time startups need to be “asking the right questions”. Furthermore, Ries argues if only managers were better at asking the right questions, there would be more innovation and fewer missed opportunities.

I think Ries has a point: asking the right questions is a way of getting the feedback you needed but perhaps didn’t know you wanted.

So what are the right questions? These are the queries I’ve been using to frame my thinking, split into different categories.

Targets

What are my goals? This is simple to the point it risks being vacuous, but this is a legitimate question to be answering: what are you trying to do? You’ll often see “10x your goal”, but you can’t do that if you don’t know what your goal is in the first place.

We all know this, but if you had to write down goals for three months, six months, two years right now, could you do it? I’m willing to bet you couldn’t answer it straight away.

Goals need to be specific and measurable to be of any use. Again, probably know this but there’s a difference between knowing something’s a good idea and putting into practice.

My “quantifiable goals” tracking for keyword ranking on this site. Progress to be made.

So how do you put this into practice? I cribbed a great idea on this from Nat Eliason, I like to update a spreadsheet of “quantifiable goals” every Monday morning to see how I’m progressing vs where I need to be to meet goals. This keeps you laser focussed. Here’s Nat’s spreadsheet for doing this.

How do I go bigger on my goals? It’s so much more important to spend the time on what your goals are before you move on to thinking about how they can be bigger. Very clearly set your goals in the first place before you start doing this.

One of these is very clearly 10x bigger. Requires a different way of thinking.

Sketching out “what would this look like if it was 10x bigger” is a useful exercise: you’re forced to adopt a different mindset and think of how what your doing would work on a much bigger scale. You’ll often think of tactics which will help you reach your original goal faster.

You’re unlikely to get to 10x, unless your original goal was wildly wrong in the first place, but this kind of thinking can help you make sure you do get to the original goal. Anything over that’s a bonus.

Work

How would this work if it took half the time? This is a great one! Radically reimagine your workflow and only get the important things done.

I’ve long subscribed to a thesis somewhere between Basecamp’s four day week, Tim Ferriss’ four hour week and John Maynard Keynes’ Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren (written in 1930, argued only 15 hours of work a week would be necessary). Basically, if you have less time you’ll:

Generally work faster.
Spend less time on less important stuff (rather than the deep work).

Asking how your work could be done in half the time again forces the big thinking: you might not get to half the time, but 80% of the time would be a great result. Do that for everything and you can have an extra day a week off!

Reading other people’s advice

These absolutely applies to this post, just in case you’re wondering.

Is this post on Twitter/Reddit/Hacker News good, or just relatable? I have a new thesis that the content that gets the most shares is typically good and highly relatable, rather than excellent in its own right.

Good content is fine, but excellent content is better. I’ve found reading from high quality weekly newsletters is a much better option than checking Reddit or Twitter (I’d recommend Pocket Hits, Hacker Newsletter, The Modern Desk, Nat, Femke, Sean and… me).

Is this good advice? This is highly related the previous question. Bullshit advice, to quote an excellent piece by Henry Wismayer, is the stuff that:

“is utterly vapid, offering nothing beyond a few nauseating blandishments designed to appeal to the reader’s individualism and thirst for success”.

Great advice goes beyond throwing in a couple of statistics, a click baiting title and please enter your email to discover these AMAZING techniques. It also doesn’t fall foul of survivorship bias. Great advice is actually practical, explained in such a way you can properly understand it and is transparent about potential pitfalls.

Understand what the underlying lesson is and take out specific ideas, but recognise most advice doesn’t directly transfer.

Getting the right answers

A lot of this is relatively obvious, but sits in the hole between “things we vaguely know” and “things we actually apply to our work”.

Get my point about the intersection of useful things and things we know?

Nothing here is especially groundbreaking, but I hope it’s though-provoking and you’ll start to put these into practice.

When I spend the time working out what I need to be working on, what needs to be done to get there and how I’m doing along the way, I’m a lot better at getting there. I very much doubt I’m alone in this.

The key takeaway here should be you’ll get huge benefit thinking about “the right questions”, and it’s well worth the time it takes to do this. Time to get the thinking hat on 🎓