Matthew Kimberley

These are my own rules for the new year. How many of them resonate with you?

1. Shut The Fuck Up

Enough with the pontificating and pratulations and post-experiential “lessons learnt’ blog-posts, Twitter chats and backslapping, circle-jerking, profuse fuckwittery masqerading as work.

Get on with the work. Shut up a bit. Nose. Grindstone.

2. Sell Sell Sell

If you’ve started your business, and 90% of your time is currently being taken up with product development, process-fucking-aboutery and “networking”, then you haven’t started your business.

Until you know where the next client is coming from and how much they’re going to spend with you, and how long your existing clients are sticking about with you, and what you’re going to sell them next so that they’ll love you even more, then you haven’t got a business.

3. Selective Hero Selection: Choose Your Heroes Wisely

You can’t do it on your own. And you shouldn’t. Problems shared pale, and strengths combined soar.

But be cautious: everyone’s a fucking expert.

Never a trust a man who tells you endlessly on loop how good he is before you have the chance to find out yourself.

Pare down your list of “thought leaders” to zero. Pare down your list of those who are catologing their post-adolescent journey to freedom to those you’d share a beer with, or look out for like a kid brother.

Then, identify somebody who’s had what you want and hound them until they share how they got it.

4. Spades Are Spades

Skive off. Muck about. Enjoy. Kick back. Drink beer.

But call it what it is.

Not everything you do is about your inner journey, your personal development, your life lessons or your “biz”. Sometimes you’re just fucking about. That’s OK.

Only those guilty of underwork reframe fun into work.

5. Simplify

Cut out 80% of your good ideas. Lock them in a jar for your retirement.

Get a red pen out and go over your last six months of software purchases, memberships, subscriptions, bank statements and “must-have” apps.

Pare, excise, cannibalize, streamline.

Take the single thing you do: the thing you’re known for, the result you deliver, and deliver it better.

Ask the insurance broker who lives at the end of your street how he’s managed to take his wife and six kids to Cabo three times a year for the last eight years without running his own company or finding his passion or joining Twitter or mastering mobile affiliate marketing.

He did it by doing his job, which was selling insurance.

Anything to add?

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