People in business get used to handling criticism. But encouragement is a different can of worms.

Not only does it bypass the muscles we grow to deal with challenges, it hits extra hard precisely because of all those challenges. Sort of like how even bad fast food tastes good when you haven’t eaten all day.

Finally, some kind words! Finally, somebody recognizes that my idea is good!

When encouragement comes from people who know us and support us, it’s easy to absorb. Of course my friend wants me to succeed. He wouldn’t be saying my business concept is great if he thought it would blow up in my face and I’d lose my life savings. But wanting what’s best for someone and actually giving helpful advice are two different things.

The encouragement of people who don’t know us is powerful in a different way. They come across as objective observers with nothing to gain by being nice, which makes them seem more credible. But a few kind words cost a stranger almost nothing, and taken too much to heart, they can throw you off course.

Friends and family who say, “You bake great cakes, you should open a bakery” mean well but their words should factor very little into such a decision. They’re not thinking about whether you’d enjoy baking 60 hours a week, or the cost of a lease, or what you’d be giving up to pursue it. The encouragement skips straight from “you’re good at this” to “you should build your life around it” with nothing in between.

There’s also a common attitude of “just give it a try, what’s the worst that could happen?” But there are an infinite number of things you could try. That alone isn’t a reason to do any particular one of them. Especially when “trying” means investing a lot of your time and money, not the time and money of the cheerleader. When somebody knows you for five minutes and encourages you to “follow your passion,” this might be pleasant, but it’s not valuable advice.

And once you’ve acted on someone’s encouragement, it develops its own momentum. You’ve told people about it, maybe spent money, maybe turned down other opportunities. Now you’re not just pursuing an idea, you’re defending a decision. The encouragement that got you started has long since evaporated, but you’re still living with the consequences.

There’s also a subtler version of this. Someone suggests an idea you aren’t interested in, and suddenly you’re in the position of explaining why you’re not doing it. “You like Roman history, you should start a YouTube channel about Rome.” Now instead of working on your business, you’re having a conversation about why you don’t want to start a YouTube channel. Other people’s enthusiasm for their idea of what you should do can become its own distraction, even if you never act on it.

Enjoy the kind words. Then make your decisions without them.

Why do projects get stuck? Why is progress too slow?

Sometimes the answer might be complicated and nuanced, but in many cases, it’s simple. Progress often comes down to what gets worked on consistently.

Every morning after going on a run I eat some yogurt for breakfast. Nuts are one of my go-to yogurt toppings. I have a can of almonds that’s nine months old. In that same time, I’ve gone through four cans of peanuts.

The progress toward finishing the almonds isn’t stuck because they are harder to eat, or I don’t know how, need somebody’s help, or they cost more. In fact they’re the easiest choice already because I own them and don’t have to buy anything.

Meanwhile, I got through four cans of peanuts not because I’ve dedicated a lot of time, skill, or effort to the task. I only have a few a day so it’s hardly like I’m pushing to finish them quickly.

It’s simply that I prefer their flavor, so make a little progress consistently. Over time the difference between a tiny bit of daily action and no action adds up.

For everything you do that’s either stuck or progressing slower than you’d like, before looking for any complicated reason, it’s worth applying the peanut test. Are you working on it consistently?

If you are working consistently and it’s still truly stuck, you can now look into the less obvious causes.

But if the answer is that it isn’t being worked on, you’ve found a proverbial can of almonds. The reasons and justifications for not working on it are a different topic. They may be logical or they may be empty excuses. Either way, they don’t change the mechanical fact that it isn’t progressing because it isn’t being worked on.

When people avoid work it’s often easy to spot. But what about using one type of work to avoid doing another type? That can get a lot less obvious and more complicated to address.

Sometimes making progress means we have to do things we don’t like.

If I dread talking on the phone, and getting new customers means more phone calls, I have an incentive to do every type of work other than what will generate new customers.

I could reorganize the office, work on my logo, do some research, and go to bed tired with a long list of things I’d accomplished. None of them brought me closer to getting new customers, but I could supply ten reasons why my work was useful and necessary. Then I’d wonder why business is so slow when I’m working this hard. On some level, though, I’m rewarded because I don’t have to talk on the phone.

This sort of “avoidance work” lets people stay in their comfort zone, while appearing to work at some goal, without making effective progress toward that goal.

Common examples of this behavior include:

• Stuck in the planning, research, and review stage. This one is particularly insidious because these things are very legitimate and useful activities, so it’s easy to hide behind them while looking responsible but avoiding progress.

• Getting sidetracked by graphic design or trivial details. If “We can’t start because the logo isn’t right” means a month-long delay finding a graphic designer, that’s a problem.

• Using fear, perfectionism, or both to keep things stuck. Progress is slowed in the name of being cautious, or for getting things “just right.”

• Constantly generating ideas but not picking something to start. Allows people to say, “Hey I’m working hard being creative” without having to knuckle down and make the idea happen, or risk failing.

• Picking things then regularly abandoning them before they are completed. By picking something there is the appearance of progress, but then there’s always some reason why it wasn’t finished. Might be “bad workers,” bad weather, the economy these days, grandma’s funeral. Something always gets in the way. Eventually, though, because of luck or enough pressure to deliver something tangible, a project might get completed. How can it be sabotaged then? By not giving it the support it needs, or abandoning it at the first real obstacle.

These behaviors are particularly damaging to your business because they combine apparent reasonableness, real work, and unconscious motivations. People doing these things aren’t obviously lazing around. Nor are they doing clearly useless busywork. Nor are they necessarily self-aware that they’re avoiding something.

They are working and have plausible justifications for their actions. They may believe themselves to be really truly making progress, working hard and smart, toward the larger stated goal. And some real progress might get made from time to time!

Here’s a quick story about priorities. I had a client, let’s call him Eric, who was in charge of marketing at a large ecommerce company.

I took part in weekly marketing meetings, where people proposed ideas, discussed current projects, and talked about problems that needed to be solved.

Early on Eric would run the meetings himself, sharing his screen, and would decide on which topics to discuss. As time went by, he had other people write up the agenda for him, and started taking the meeting while driving to the office.

There are a couple ways to look at this. From one perspective it’s being industrious and efficient. Let someone else spend time making the agenda. Maybe the meetings wouldn’t happen at all if they didn’t happen in his car. While some people listen to This Week’s Top 40 on the radio, he’s being productive, holding a meeting.

The other perspective isn’t so kind. People show their real priorities by how they spend their time and attention. If the guy in charge of marketing can’t put aside an hour each week to be at his desk for the marketing meeting, that’s telling us something important about his priorities.

When he can’t see anything being presented in the meeting, and we’re interrupted for his Starbucks order, it sends a message that this isn’t something he takes seriously. Why should anyone involved care more than he does?

It’s easy to judge this sort of behavior and it deserves to be judged. But at the same time it’s worth doing a self-audit of our own “car meetings.”

What is it, as business owners, that we say is important to do, but then gets put on the back burner? Or done in a procedural way, going through the motions just to check it off the list, without accomplishing anything?

Veo and other AI video generators make it easy to bring your wildest visions to life, right?

While they can indeed be good for wild visions, they have a lot more trouble with mundane things you’d think would be easy. Sequences of specific actions tend to come out wrong. For instance, the AI will reverse the order, add unnecessary movements, or show results before causes.

If you’re making videos, this is useful to keep in mind, to keep you from putting too much time and too many credits down the drain, trying to make something work that AI simply isn’t capable of creating yet.

It’s doubly good to keep in mind if you’re starting out, and not too familiar with AI video behavior. In that stage it can be harder to distinguish whether the problem is lack of experience, or the AI itself.

I have a lot of examples in my AI outtake vault of video generations that screw up mundane subjects and get cause and effect backward.

To keep this blog from being 50 pages long I’ll focus here on three examples.

To advertise residential walkway installation, I wanted to show someone with nice shoes stepping into a mud puddle, as if he didn’t see it until too late.

Here’s the prompt I used: “Close up of a man wearing dress shoes, socks, and pants walking along a worn grass trail in a yard. Without hesitation he steps into a muddy puddle, as if he didn’t see the puddle before he stepped into it, and continues walking.”

No matter how specific I got or how many variations I generated, it always put something extra into the act of stepping in a puddle that made it look strange.

For a later scene I wanted to show muddy shoe prints that somebody had tracked into a nice house.

Here’s the prompt I used: “Close-up overhead shot of clean carpeted floor with fresh brown muddy shoe prints tracked across, dirt and water marks from shoes, indoor lighting.”

Instead of showing footprints being tracked in by someone walking, the AI just made them appear on the carpet out of nowhere. Result before cause.

You can see the finished walkway ad here.

For a different project, about staircases for waterfront properties, I wanted a simple shot of someone putting on a backpack.

Here’s the prompt I used: “Close-up shot of hands with short fingernails putting on a green canvas hiking backpack. Man wearing dark jeans and red flannel shirt. Professional lighting, indoor setting.”

I tried a bunch of versions and the AI kept having him fidget with the pack instead of putting it on, or put it on his stomach, or pick it up in some other unnatural way. Eventually I got a clip that was passable, but the backpack straps still phase through his body in an impossible manner.

Most people won’t notice so I used the clip, but it goes to show how a very simple action can be a tough nut to crack.

You can see the finished staircases ad here.

If you’re trying to generate something that involves a sequence of actions, and your AI is struggling, my advice is to set a cutoff for yourself and just pivot to something else if you don’t get what you want by your cutoff.

It’s worth exploring your ideas and not giving up too early, but at the same time, sometimes it really is the AI’s limits that are the issue.

Being able to recognize that will save you time and credits.

How do we know when we’re being too narrow and leaving money on the table, or too broad and diluting ourselves?

This post isn’t directly about writing, but it’s something I think about as someone who helps businesses figure out how to present themselves effectively.

You can specialize what you offer in order to strongly appeal to people who need that particular thing. This might exclude plenty of other business you could do.

But if you advertise everything you could do, you risk coming across as unfocused, and confuse your customers.

The dilemma gets summed up in dueling platitudes: “Jack of all trades, master of none” vs. “The one-trick pony gets shot first.”

Hamburgers and go-karts have nothing to do with each other. But a food court inside a go-kart facility makes sense, because hungry people are already there at lunch time. It’s a valuable add-on that makes sense in context.

The same people who like go-karts also need to do their laundry every now and then, but they’re unlikely to haul their dirty socks to a go-kart laundromat. Putting these things together just makes a bizarre combination.

We’ve all heard the importance of a snappy answer to the question, “So what do you do?”

It is possible to have a ridiculous combination but describe it concisely. “We cater birthday parties and fumigate for termites.”

You can explain it in a sentence, sure, but people immediately wonder what you’re smoking.

Other times, the combination isn’t so obviously out of whack, but the offerings have drifted to the point where they’re hard to describe. You find yourself walking people through how everything connects instead of just saying what you do.

“Well, we started as roofers, but we also do some tree trimming if the branches are near the roof, and we can clean your gutters or install new ones, and sometimes we help people with attic ventilation issues, and we’ve done a few deck repairs when it made sense…”

Rambling descriptions are a sign that things have become unfocused and confusing.

Of course there are mixed messages out there. For everyone who says “you’ve got to be laser-focused” there’s someone else who says, “I want to hire one person to do these five things for me.”

On Upwork, for example, I see people looking to hire one person who can edit, proofread, create the table of contents, design the cover, format the book for Kindle, and help with marketing.

Sure all these are related to making a book, but that’s a lot of unrelated skills. Clearly somebody wants a generalist. It might make you wonder if it’s worth branching out.

I say to that, look closer at who’s asking. Budget buyers who want a Swiss Army knife worker aren’t the same market as clients who value expertise and will pay for it.

The same goes for physical stores or businesses. If a couple people every now and then come in asking for something unrelated to your core business, it’s not worth muddying the waters to please them.

You may have well-meaning friends or family who tell you to combine your interests or skills. You love BBQ! You love ice cream! Why not do both?

The fact that you personally enjoy or are good at two things doesn’t mean they form a coherent business offering.

This advice is dangerous because when it comes from supportive people you know well, who may have also given you useful help or good other ideas in the past, it’s harder to ignore.

Twenty years ago, conventional wisdom said if you had a business and a website, you needed to blog. It would bring in traffic through Yahoo and let customers “get to know you.”

Today, most businesses have blogs. They can seem like obligatory white noise, they have no novelty, and there’s a ton of competition.

What reasons could possibly justify writing a blog to help promote your business today?

• You naturally have something to say that relates to your expertise, product, or service.
• You have industry insights that genuinely help your readers.
• It’s part of a well-thought-out plan, with a clear goal and the ability to measure progress.
• You enjoy writing.
• It helps answer questions customers ask you repeatedly.

If you meet at least some of these points, then a blog could be worth the effort. Research analyzing 912 million blog posts found that longer, more comprehensive content significantly outperforms shorter posts in both social shares and backlinks, suggesting that readers and other sites recognize and reward substantial, helpful content.

Though there are millions of blogs already, that doesn’t matter in your specific case, any more than millions of books existing should stop an author with something to say from writing a new book.

• “Everyone else has done it.” Yes, just about everyone has. So having one, in itself, doesn’t help much.
• “AI will write everything.”
• Just doing it for SEO purposes without any real plan, passion, or consistency.
• Absolutely no interest in writing the blog, not even enough to delegate to someone else.
• Copying what competitors do without understanding why they do it.
• Thinking any content is better than no content.

The world really does have enough of these types of blogs already.

Typos and poor formatting are a pretty regular part of bad blog posts, as they’re typically slapped together by someone who’d rather be doing something else. This sends an unprofessional message to customers because bad writing reflects poorly on your overall business quality. According to Backlinko’s analysis of content performance, poor writing quality is one of the factors that leads to higher bounce rates and lower engagement.

Bad blogs also:

• Waste your time and energy on content nobody reads, and that might not even help your page rankings.
• Frustrate visitors who come looking for useful information.
• Create an ongoing maintenance burden.
• A dead blog with its most recent post from 2022 makes customers wonder if your business is still active.

No matter how good you are at your work, if you get rejected because of mistakes in your proposal, no client will know about your skills.

I’ve hired over 50 freelancers on Upwork for a variety of tasks and read hundreds of proposals. I’ve seen great proposals and a lot of rough ones. Here are some things to avoid next time you propose on a job:

If you won’t write it yourself, how can you expect the client to be bothered to read what’s there? Unless the client has never seen proposals before, AI language isn’t fooling anybody. It isn’t impressive, it’s just more text on a page to wade through. It’s much better to have a short proposal that clearly shows you have read and understood the job post.

(Possible exception: If you use AI to help write your proposal, but you edit it to read like a human wrote it, that can be fine.)

If the client has never hired you before, it feels like a risk to commit to a pay increase, before you’ve started working together. Also, people are cheap and just don’t like this. As there are often a lot of workers to choose from, why not go with the person who is NOT asking for a raise before the job even starts? I recommend selecting “never” in the raise menu. You can always ask for a raise later after proving your abilities; it just won’t be automated.

Clients generally put down what they are willing to pay. Asking for more money will put you at the bottom of the list, if not get you rejected without even being looked at.

This might seem obvious, but people ask for more than the stated budget all the time.

If you think a job is underpaid, instead of asking for more money, it’s probably better to just bid on other jobs that pay what you think is right.

I’ve seen many people propose on voice acting jobs and not send a sample of their voice, and graphic artists not include pictures of their art.

Unless everything that you do can be explained in the cover letter, you must include at least one sample that’s relevant to the job post. Saying “see my portfolio” isn’t good enough either, because now you’re asking the client to search through your profile. Not only is this extra work for potential clients, but there’s no guarantee they’ll find the specific sample you want them to see.

The more specific and relevant to the job post your sample is, the better.

It’s also good to have your samples named in a clear way. For instance, if I was submitting a sample, I might call it “Rozek-Landscaping-Article.pdf” or “Rozek-Editing-Sample.docx.”

When things are named “writing.docx” or “292834892928.jpg” or “demo.mov,” it can easily become lost among samples from other proposals.