Chris Worfolk's Blog

Ego Is the Enemy is a book by Ryan Holiday. It made for rather uncomfortable reading for me, which means it was important. I wish I had read this book for ten years ago.

Holiday discusses the role that ego has played in important historical figures, the people around him, and in his personal life. The effect is almost always negative. Ego is a destructive force and one of the biggest factors in whether you are successful in your life is whether you can keep it under your control or not.

Even those who seem to use ego, are ultimately laid low by it. Steve Jobs, who many regard as an egomaniac, really did his best work when not driven by his ego. His ego led to him being fired by Apple the first time around. It was only when he put it aside and started working again from the ground up that he built something amazing.

He holds Howard Hughes up as the ultimate cautionary tale of ego getting the better of you. We do not see most of the people who fail because they disappear without a trace. However, Hughes inherited so much money that he could just keep going in his folly. He built the Spruce Goose, it flew once, and then he stored it in a warehouse at a cost of $1,000,000 per year. For 15 years. A period that only ended with Hughes’s death.

You can be successful and have an out-of-control ego. But this is the exception. Take Kayne West for example. He is one of the greatest rappers of all time. But, after all of that, he is in huge personal debt because he keeps trying to launch a fashion label; something he knows nothing about.

Contrast this to those who shun the limelight (as much as you can when you are successful). Angela Merkel in her third term as the Chancellor of Germany. Bill Belichick, who has taken the Patriots to the Super Bowl six times, and won four of them.

Success is built upon:

• Staying humble
• Getting out of your own head, and not wasting time thinking how great you are
• Being willing to put in the work
• Always learning, and knowing that there is more to learn

It also gave me a new favourite quote, from John Archibald Wheeler.

As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.

When I look back at my own life, ego has been a destructive force. Looking back, I can see plenty of incidents, especially in my charity work, that were clearly driven by ego. More often than not, these situations played out badly for me.

It also matches up with what Dacher Keltner writes in The Power Paradox. When are are successful, the success quickly rises to our heads. We become the authors of our down downfall, because are unable to keep our ego in check.

This book is an essential read and one that I will be coming back to again and again.

Choose Yourself: Be Happy, Make Millions, Live the Dream is a book by James Altucher. In it, he advocates that working in a corporate environment, or indeed working for anyone but yourself, does not work in the Choose Yourself era.

I had not read anything of his before and his style quite different to most writers. It is manic. It reads like he wrote it while on cocaine. He rants about how the system is broken, university is pointless, buying a home is a bad idea and we are all going to be replaced by robots. Some might find it engaging, though personally, I found it a little inaccessible.

Once you get around the style, the underlying content is interesting. It clicks with a lot of the things I have been reading recently. There is stuff in here about self-care, thinking positively and making changes. It seems sensible. He thinks gluten-free is a scam, for example. He talks about oxytocin too, though does not cite any sources.

He gave a talk about this at TEDx.

Here are the top takeaways from the book:

• Brainstorm 10 ideas per day: the more you brainstorm, the more your ideas muscle will be will be built-up
• We can choose ourselves: we do not need a book publisher to say yes to us anymore, we can self-publish (same for anything: YouTube has replaced music labels, eBay has replaced chain store buyers)
• Honest makes you more money: eventually, Bernie Madoff got caught, and it turns out there was no money

My new book, Why Restaurants Fail – And What To Do About It, is now available. Here is the blurb:

Why do most restaurants close within three years? What secrets do the successful chains know, that the independent eateries do not?

The answer has almost nothing to do with how good the food is. In this book you will:

• Learn the big 10 predictable and avoidable mistakes restaurateurs make
• Discover the real reasons consumers choose one restaurant over another
• Find proven strategies for increasing diner satisfaction, and revenue

For restaurant owners and managers, this could be the most important investment you make all year. For everyone else, it will be a fun read.

You will not get bored. At 52 pages, including the appendix and glossary, this books contains only good stuff; no filler. You will love this book. If not, use your retailer’s return policy to obtain a full refund.

It started appearing in stores late yesterday, and should be out everywhere by the end of today. It is available in paperback from Amazon and in eBook format from Amazon and Apple iBooks.

We moved into our apartment three years ago. We are on the fourth floor, but the building goes much higher. For years, we talked about going up to the top floor and seeing what the view was like. But we never did. I am not sure why. It felt silly to schedule it in, but we never felt like a spontaneous trip.

Until now.

Turns out that the view up there was not that exciting. It looks a lot like the view from our balcony, but with a slightly better overview of the car park. Probably not worth the three-year wait… You can at least see the town hall in the way we used to be able to become MPEC built more of their offices.

SEMrush is a competitor analysis tool for online marketing. Specifically, they focus on Google. You can enter a keyword and it will bring up a report that shows you:

• Volume of traffic
• Related keywords
• What the search results are for it
• Who is running paid ads
• Copies of the ads they are running
• A history of the ads for that keyword

Then, if you want to look at a specific competitor, you can bring up a domain report. This shows you:

• How much organic search they are getting
• What keywords it is coming from
• Copies of the adverts they are running
• What keywords they are bidding on
• How much they are spending on paid advertising
• Where their backlinks are coming from
• Who their main competitors are

They also have a projects feature where you can enter your website and SEMrush will track it. This includes crawling it to find broken links and other bugs, as well as offering SEO advice: does a specific page have too little text or too many keywords?

It is super-useful for marketing. However, it also expensive. Their lowest package, which only allows you to create five projects, is $70 per month. They offer a free 30-day trial (for the pro account, the guru account trial is only 14 days) if you search around for it, which is time enough to evaluate if it will deliver enough benefit to cover the cost.

Email is a word of trouble these days. Most of it spam. So everyone, ISPs and users alike, put up huge defences against the spam. These are typically so aggressive that a huge amount of legitimate email gets caught in the net. For example, gMail categorises anyone emailing Anxiety Leeds as spam. Most ISPs block any email from Leeds Skeptics also.

However, email is still really useful and probably the most powerful form of online communication, so everyone is still using it. You have to find a way to make it work. One of the important ways of doing this is protecting your reputation. You cannot be sending emails to the wrong accounts, or accounts that do not exist.

When I started a course to teach IT contracting, I had a problem. I was giving away my first set of lessons, and a book. All you have to do is register and you get it all for free. But people were registering with fake email addresses or other people’s email addresses. To stop this, I put in a double-opt-in system, in which you had to click the link I emailed to you.

However, still meant I had to send an email to a possibly fake email address. Not to mention that people started using disposable email addresses.

So, I integrated BriteVerify. They have an API where you can check whether an email address exists or not. They check the MX records of a domain, filter out disposable email addresses, and does a few other checks.

Does it work? Mostly, yes. It passed on all the test email addresses I gave it. In the real world, it is not perfect, but it does provide an easy way for me to automatically screen out obvious fakes. They maintain a list of disposable email address providers for example. I have my own blacklist, but there’s is much more comprehensive than mine.

The downside is that a) it costs money ($0.01 per check with no free tier) and b) that it will slightly slow down the response times of my page while I am speaking to their API. Given that registration is a one-time process, though, so far it has proven worth it.

Unbounce is a WYSIWYG editor for building landing pages. If you have no coding skills, you can whip up a landing page for your business by dragging and drop elements onto pre-built templates.

I have been wondering whether approaching everything as a coder is a distraction from building my businesses online. Maybe I should use more tools like this and concentrate on building the business, not the website code. It certainly does allow you to get up-and-running very quickly.

It also has some good integrations: I can easily drop my MailChimp account in there, for example. It also supports building a desktop version and a mobile version at the same time. As you drag elements in for one version, they appear on the other. You can then toggle between them and adjust each one individually.

Some things I found frustrating. For example, centring text. When coding, I would make the box 100% width, and therefore it would be in the centre regardless of the screen size. However, Unbounce requires you to create boxes with a specific size and then adjust the size for the different breakpoints.

Also, I did not feel it added too much value. Yes, it allowed me to create a page, add some integrations and create A/B variants. That is all useful stuff. But, I could do that myself. It does not provide step-by-step funnels and chain-linking pages that some of the competition seems to offer. I enjoyed my free trial, but ultimately, I have decided I can do without it for now.

On Friday, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States. Unless Obama resigns tomorrow, and Joe Bidden takes over, in which case Trump will be the 46th president. That seems unlikely, though.

It has been a hard time filling the bill. Celine Dion, Charlotte Church, Elton John, Moby and Rebecca Ferguson (and possibly many others) all declined offers to perform. Some because they wanted to make a political statement that they do not like Trump. However, for others, it could simply be that they already had plans.

Here is what Trump is expected to say in his inauguration speech…

Over the holiday period, Freakonomics Radio was rebroadcasting old episodes. One of which was how to be more productive. I had already listened to the episode once, but it felt like the kind of topic you could always use a refresher on.

On the episode, Dubner interviews Charles Duhigg (great surname, right?), author of The Power of Habit. In the book, Duhigg tries to boil down what are the universal aspects of people who are successful in achieving their goals.

Interesting, he starts by dismissing an idea many of us may consider important: having one goal and solely focusing on that. Duhigg explains that he only wanted things that everyone agreed on. A single goal was not one of them. Many people would say “you have to focus on one goal: it’s essential.” But others would say “you have to be flexible, you cannot commit yourself to one goal.”

So what does make the list?

1. Self-motivation: making a decision to do something helps trigger this
2. Focus: training yourself to focus on the right things and ignore everything else
3. Goal-setting: you need a big stretch goal which is your ultimate objective, and then a short-term goal that you can action tomorrow morning
4. Decision-making: think probabilistically, considering the outcomes and weighing how likely they are to occur
5. Innovation: take cliches and mix them together in new ways; being interdisaplinary can help with this
6. Absorbing data:
7. Managing others: give the problem to the person closest to it
8. Teams: who is on a team matters more than what the team does

Those are the eight characteristics Duhigg finds consistent across successful people.

As for how many projects you should be working on, the answer seems to be enough to make things interesting, but not so many that you cannot devote enough time to each. The people who are most productive work on 4-5 projects. Critically, these should all be different so that it teaches you new skills.

Earlier this month, I trialled OptIn Monster. It is a set of lead generation tools designed to help you convert visitors into return users. I have been using it on my personal blog, as well as the Leeds Restaurant Guide.

For my blog, I used their footer bar. As you scrolled down the page, a bar would appear to ask you if you wanted to get the blog posts in a weekly email. I like this because it is a not intrusive way to offer some extra value to visitors. It does not stop you reading but lets you know my newsletter is there. The problem was that when the bar loaded in, it changed the font of my titles.

By the way, if you did want to sign up for that newsletter, it is still available: you can find it at the bottom of each blog post page.

With the guide, I used exit intent offers. These are dialogues that appear just as the visitor is about to close their browser tab. In this case, I offered them the first three chapters of the guide for free. Again, that is still available on the guide’s website. In this case, I couldn’t seem to get the offer to trigger.

The toolset itself is a great idea, but the implementation is not perfect yet.