Do it this time, stop postponing for next time

I’m a big fan of Seth Godin and his podcast, Akimbo. In one of the recent episodes, he explained that if something needs improving, we very often tend to say we’ll do it next time, when we should really suck it up, and do it this time. Make the change now, this time, and reap the benefits of the change from now on. Here’s how I see it:

My experience introducing marketing changes at Nozbe this time!

Just after coming from the Nozbe Reunion as I was doing my quarterly review I decided to plan the new upcoming 3-month-period differently. To hopefully get better results.

As I wrote down the ideas and shared them with the team, almost everyone was very skeptical: Do we need to do this now? Does it make sense to do it this quarter?

This also made me doubt myself. Maybe I pushed too far, maybe I am crazy. Maybe I’m just not smart enough to do it.

But I stayed with this. Despite the resistance from others and from myself, I didn’t want to NOT change things. I really believed we needed to shake things up.

We are doing it this time.

“This time” is hard. It’s safer to do it “next time”.

I think that’s why Seth’s podcast resonated with me so much. We are intelligent enough to always figure out an excuse to justify not doing things this time and postponing them for next time. It’s the voice of the resistance shouting at us.

Change is scary. Change is uncertain. Nobody can guarantee it will all work.

Damn, I’ve been given many reasons why the changes I’m trying to implement in our marketing department will not work.

So I made a concession - let’s try the new approach this time for the next quarter. And then we’ll see.

Let’s try this time.

Make sure to listen to this episode of Seth’s podcast: