On the mind.

I was talking with our boys, Max and Kai, one morning this week about what I do for work.

After explaining my job, I told them that there are a lot of people in this world, and to compete, you need to work hard.

There is no denying that it takes hard work to compete in this world, especially if you want to make a statement or effect change. Ask Michael Jordan, ask Bill Gates, or even Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. The Rock is one of my personal favorites! All three will tell you that one of the biggest reasons they achieved success was though hard work.

Ask Guy Raz, the podcast host of How I Built This, who interviews some of the world's top entrepreneurs. At the end of each podcast, Guy asks his guests one question: “How much of your success do you attribute to luck, and how much do you attribute to hard work?” He never skips this question. His one question assumes that the two big factors in success are a combination of luck and hard work.

A component of success is hard work.

But I didn’t just say it only takes hard work when I was talking to my sons. The conversation started with that.

I then mentioned that you should find what you love to do in life. Once you find that, go all in with the hard work! Go all in...

At the root, I’m slowly teaching them one of my favorite Japanese concepts called ikigai. Not the full meaning, but part of it.

Ikigai is your reason for being.

So I made the above statement to my boys. Basically, you should find what you love and then work hard at it. I waited in silence to see how they would respond.

My oldest son, Max, who is five years old, said: “I love drawing! I’m going to work really hard at drawing, but then on the weekends I am going to stop.” He stormed off in excitement to draw. I think he said the part about the weekends because I don’t typically work on the weekends. His comment made me laugh!

Younger brother, Kai, who is three, said: “I enjoy playing with my toys!” and he too then ran off with excitement to play.

I started laughing again with happiness.

They understood it to some degree. My boys are just getting to the age where I can teach them things like this, and it is a lot of fun.

It’s an innocent story between me and my boys, but I enjoyed it.

You’re competing with 7.9 billion people in this world. It takes hard work, but you also need to enjoy what you do. You need to find your why.

Your purpose.

Your ikigai.

Want to dive in more on the meaning of ikigai? There are two videos that I’ve enjoyed. The first video (linked here) is a fun introduction to ikigai, and it’s a Ted Talk. The next video (linked here) dives a little deeper into the concept and has a good method on how to find your ikigai.

Business.

An Internal Story and Some Lessons

I have a story to tell that I am not super proud of. Our team spent close to 70 hours writing, coding, and designing a single newsletter. One email. If we billed this to a client, that would be a $10,500 email.

I wanted a simple message to put out to our partners (our clients) via a newsletter, but we chased unimaginable perfection. Some of you reading this probably received that email last month.

After countless hours and months of time passing, I was brought in to review the final email and discuss a cross-browser compatibility issue that engineering could not code due to design limitations.

For those of you who don’t know, coding emails can be more annoying than you think. First, you mainly have to use tables; it’s like coding in 2004. On top of that, there are many different email clients that render emails differently.

Long story short, the issue came down to trying to achieve perfection. Our design team created an email that was hard to code, we spent too much time on the email design and copy revisions, and then our engineering team spent even more time trying to achieve “Pixel Perfection,” which is a saying we have here at White Rabbit Group.

This is not how we would run a client task or project, but we had some free time, so our team tried to go above and beyond to chase our motto “Pixel Perfection.”

Perfect is not always achievable though. In fact, it’s almost never achievable.

So we were stuck, 70 hours in, with an email we could not send. I called a Zoom meeting with everyone working on the project—a mini all-hands for this newsletter.

In the end, we had to make minor adjustments to the design to make the email compatible. We flattened some design layers and removed unnecessary borders that made it hard to code. On the call, we discussed that there was not enough collaboration between our teams. We also spent too much time on the design and multiple revisions. We should have had a simple template set up so we could write the email and send it faster. There were other small issues happening in the project that could have been better, and overall, we ended the call with four main takeaways:

The Four Lessons / Reminders:

1. Attention to detail.

2. We needed to be leaner, more efficient, and faster. Don’t waste time just because we have it.

3. Better problem solving and better collaboration. Our teams were not problem-solving together.

4. Perfection is not achievable. In my opinion, this was the biggest lesson for us.

This was a really good reminder for our team. It’s a reminder to all of us at White Rabbit Group.

We take tremendous pride in what we do.

We are never cogs in the machine. We’re thinkers, creatives, builders—we’re human.

We do not consume tasks and spit them out.

We express what we're thinking, we push back, we do what’s best.

In the end, that’s why the world will want to work with us.

One pic.

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Thanks for following along!

The Weekly is a newsletter that goes out each week written by Greg Bellinger, currently building and CEO of White Rabbit Group and The Labs.

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