Fussing Around

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Streaming here

This week on Commerce Chefs, Tom and Kyle are taking a slightly different approach… talking to just each other -- the entire episode. Not to worry, this episode features action stories, anecdotes, and knowledge bombs all about our priorities as brand leaders (oh, and outtakes, ‘cause who doesn’t love outtakes?). How to stop being so ‘busy’ all the time and look at what’s really important. At the end of the day, no one wants to be known as the person who fussed around. Leaders need to stay present and focused to have real impact and inspire their teams to do the same.

ep. 3 Transcript

Julia You guys ready to go? 

Kyle Yep, yep, just waiting on those guests, madam producer. 

Julia Kyle, you explicitly said you wanted an episode with just you and Tom, 30 minutes of pure heaven for our listeners, I believe, was your exact quote. 

Tom Kyle, what are we talking about today? 

Kyle We had like 100 ideas of pure genius, of a TK special. We never picked one? 

Tom Uh uh. 

Julia Not instilling a lot of faith here, guys. 

Kyle OK, OK, Julia, just announce us and we'll take it from here. 

Julia Fine. Now, introducing Tom and Kyle. 

Tom Thank you, Julia. 

Kyle Tom, I have a little story to tell you. 

Tom This is your big idea? Well, I love stories, Kyle. Is it about a superhero, an abandoned pirate ship, a haunted house that never lets its guests leave, or a small town girl living in a lonely world? 

Kyle This is a story about priorities. 

Tom OK. 

Kyle This is a story where the hero is awarded a big medallion for winning an epic battle. 

Tom Oh, now you've got my attention. 

Kyle But then he gives it back. 

Tom Yeah, yeah, man, you lost me. 

Kyle But wait, there's more. 

Tom Well, I hope so. You haven't even started the story yet. 

Tom Welcome to Commerce Chefs, a quirky and thought-Provoking show for future focused commerce leaders. We're going to pit the world's most brilliant, inspiring and driven D2C visionaries, the commerce chefs with riveting questions to uncover their secret ingredients at the intersection of passion, performance and leadership and practice. 

Kyle For the past decade, we've led teams of designers, strategists and digital wizards at one of the leading eCom agencies in the country to help brave brands become enduring classics. 

Tom And we're here to indefinitely borrow the strategies and pro tips that will make us all better leaders and make the brands we lead better too. 

Kyle Wow, that gets me every time, Tom. 

Tom It means a lot. Kyle. 

Kyle It's poetry. It's like you're that E.e cummings of Commerce. 

Tom E.e Commerce. 

Kyle That's good. That's really good. 

Tom So, Kyle, it is just you and me today, Kyle and Tom, two best friends, having a chit chat about fussing around. 

Kyle Two peas in a pod cast. Like they always say. I have a story for you. 

Tom Oh, I love stories. 

Kyle And the story goes. 

Tom OK. Wait, wait, wait. Let me get ready for it. OK, I'm ready. 

Kyle Story time. Story goes, there's a commander of an army who is in the middle of a big battle, and what they are trying to do is, of course, as one does in the military, win the battle. 

Tom Mm hmm. 

Kyle And this commander is finding himself, you know, running between bringing ammo, bringing communication, all this like really what seems at the time, important stuff. And, you know, it's like everything's going crazy. I can imagine, you know, things flying,. 

Tom Loud noises. 

Kyle Insert sound effects, all this kind of crazy stuff. And and so he finds himself doing what he thinks is important and his troops are going like this commander's awesome. He's bringing updates, he's bringing us all this kind of stuff running between, and he finds himself exhausted from doing all of this important work and he ends up eventually making the decision to redeploy the troops and the redeployment of the troops in a totally different position in the battle is what ends up being the decisive move that ends the battle. They end up winning the battle, which is like amazing for this story. He gets this big medal after, everybody else thinks it's amazing. Like, you are fantastic. You are wonderful, commander. And so they give him this medal. And when he's getting the medal, something surprising, a twist ending, Tom. 

Tom Ooo! 

Kyle He says, I can't accept this. I can't accept this medal. I'm going to decline it. Because when I reflect, I don't think I was a leader that was needed of me in that time, what I was actually doing was I was basically fussing around, kind of not doing the things that, you know, you need to do the big, important things. And so you kind of procrastinate or get sidetracked with things that kind of perceived as important. Or maybe they are important, but they're not the most important. They're not the real focus. He declines the medal, doesn't take it. And the life lesson, the leadership lesson that came out of it was, you know, how often we can get sidetracked by, you know, sometimes really important stuff or what appears important maybe to our teams and others around us. And it makes us feel good. And everybody thinks we're the best in the world when we actually know that the big brave decision, the redeployment decision, that's what was needed since the beginning. And he knew this at the beginning, but he was not wanting to make the decision. And so how often we get kind of distracted and stay busy instead of making the decisions or focusing on the real priority at hand. So what do you think of this Tom? 

Tom So although things ended up turning out in his favor, I guess really they could have gone quite the opposite way. All that fussing around could have had pretty unfortunate consequences. 

Kyle And it's so easy to do, I think, especially when things are hectic. And I think what's important is to reflect on those and understand why does it happen, why why do these things go on and what do we do with it? 

Tom OK, well, that seems to be the real nugget, the real P to unpack for today's episode. 

Kyle Podcast P, as it were. 

Tom That sounds gross. 

Kyle It really does. 

Tom So we have this concept of fussing around, it's something that everybody struggles with at one point or another. So why does it matter? How do we stop doing it? Let's, uh, let's dove right in. 

Kyle I know neither of us are psychologists, at least by day. 

Tom I'm not. 

Kyle I don't. Yeah. Or by night from for us, I don't think either. So without going into the deep psychology on it, there's a certain comfort in busy, the busyness comforts us from that fear so we can kind of stay in the status quo or stay in the areas that aren't as scary. 

Tom It's interesting you mention comfort in business because I think think about any day or conversation you ever have with somebody. Even your mom we'll use your mom as an example. You know, Kyle, how are things? How you doing? Good. Good. You know, I'm busy. Like, how often is that the first thing that we that we say? Because there's there's reward. There's pride, there's priming in busy. If you're busy, it must mean that you're doing good. We know that that's not the case. We know that when we really look at our day, like, how often do do I tell you, you know. How'd your day go? I think it was good. I actually don't know what I did, like what what I accomplished. But I was busy the whole day. So like this this is this weird tension point where where we're primed to perceive busyness as the truth of of success or contribution. We know it's rooted in a mindset of fear where you're looking to do a lot of really good things because you're really afraid to do that one great thing that you know, you need to do. 

Kyle And it's kind of like this, this busy badge of honor. 

Tom I like that trademark. 

Kyle Busy badge of honor. Trademark. I like. Yeah. And we carry it around. It's kind of like you said, this default position, it's like protective and nobody starts their year end review with like I was busy. Like, that's not what you dream of getting to the end of the year with and being like it was a busy year. It's like you want it to be meaningful or you want to have, like, accomplished things. And choosing means saying no to stuff. And I don't know if this is like a human condition or just my condition, but saying no to stuff is hard. The point is we can't when we say yes to something like inadvertently says no to other things, but somehow we show up and convince ourselves that, like, if we just stay busy, we're somehow able to accomplish everything and say yes to everything. And so it feels like really great. I mean, like it's like, yeah, so many times I've posed this to some of our team at PB&J our digital agency is like a nine a.m. Kyle believes that he's going to accomplish all of these things because he wants to believe that because not him, Kyle is frustrated. There's not going to get all this stuff done. Honestly, it's like you want to believe we're going to get anything done. But, you know, with five pm, Kyle is just going to look back and go like I did a whole lot of mediocre things or I did a whole lot of partial things or I did a whole lot of nothing. 

Tom Also, do you think there there is strength in approaching a day optimistically, the thing that we often get confused is that optimism doesn't mean positive in the sense of everything has to be yes. Saying no to something doesn't mean that you're actually not being helpful. Because I think what we have to look at, though, is what does nine a.m., Kyle, need to accomplish that only Kyle, regardless of the hour of the day, only you can accomplish? And that's going to have the impact that helps the most people, that helps the most in the outcomes that you're looking for. Outcomes and decisions are different things. 

Kyle And with that, part of it is we don't always know what game we're in, what results really matter, or maybe we do, but we're afraid to look at it. It's almost just like terrifying. If I can just kind of stay around in the tasks and not focus on the results, then it's safer if I actually commit to these over like getting the stuff on my task was done then. Then I have this possibility of failing or I have this possibility of not achieving those results. And that's like that's that's scary. 

Tom Absolutely. You're kind of looking into this void. I have a story for you now. 

Kyle Oh, tell me your story. 

Tom My my opa my my grandfather, he was a brilliant artist, but I remember most being in his basement often and he really had a passion for soapstone sculptures. But I do particularly remember a time one summer where I'd go down and he was working on this really elaborate family of of elephants and it just never seemed to be done and like. This is a really malleable object or material, and yet, you know, with with time and focus and work, you can carve it, you can craft it into a shape at your will. But so with these elephants, I'd sort of say, like, why have you been working on this for so long? He said, I don't know and used this word, which is why I think the story kind of just popped into my head. He said, I just I just feel like fussing around is going to help make it better. They said, well, what don't you think is done, like, it looks really good to me and he said, I don't know. I don't know what done looks like. And then and then I think the more profound part is, he said, the bigger reason is if I finish this one, I don't know what I'm going to work on next. So that's the void, I think. Right. That's that's staring at this thing you've been working on. First of all, not knowing what the result, the end result, what done looks like. And then especially if you don't know what your next step is, that can be a scary thing to look at. 

Kyle That's really good in that I think kind of like another factor of kind of what causes us to fuss sometimes is that we've always fussed we've always done that. It's like a habit almost that we get into your right. It's like you become habitually as you're creating to like always just keep perfecting, always keep polishing and never, never ship it, never deliver it to the world. 

Tom Leaning a little more into the self-indulgence of this episode, we thought we would play a little game to help you all get to know us. Tom and Kyle, your hosts, a little better with facts about our lives that are in no way useful. 

Kyle We're going to play a game called What Is Your Story in the style of Jeopardy. And here to help us get to know us is our producer. You've met her before. The one the only Julia! 

Julia Really excited to be back. Guys can't wait to help you get to know yourselves a little better. Truly the best use of my time today. Thanks. Great. 

Kyle Such a pleasure. 

Julia OK, here we go. First answer, Claire Danes at 12 years old. 

Kyle Who is Tom's mom? 

Julia Incorrect. The answer we were looking for or the question we were looking for was what was my first celebrity crush and how old was I? Next answer, Clifford. 

Tom What Kyle wishes everybody would call him. 

Julia Close. What is the nickname Kyle's childhood best friend's brother gave to him? 

Tom Wow. That's so, so random. 

Julia Half point. Half point. 

Kyle Half point. Half point. 

Julia OK, third answer. Marvel, Musical Theater and Special Forces. 

Kyle What are Tom's three favorite words that start with M except the last one. 

Julia Want another, another go? Or is that your final answer. 

Kyle Final answer. 

Tom The correct answer. No half point here. What three dream careers did Tom walk away from in order to do what he's doing now? 

Kyle Tom you know being a superhero is not a real job though right. 

Tom Agree to disagree. 

Julia OK, next one, Swedish meatballs. 

Tom Yes. What is the name of Kyle's band? 

Julia What is the food that still makes Kyle near vomit to this day? I think that's zero points on that one. 

Kyle That is a fantastic band. 

Tom It really is. 

Julia OK, next one, hot and sweet with a bit of cream,. 

Kyle What is my nickname for Tom? 

Tom Nice. 

Julia Incorrect. But I want to give you a bonus point here, because that made me laugh out loud. So the real question, though, was how does Tom like his coffee? 

Kyle Oh. 

Julia And the final answer is very vague. 2003. 

Tom The the year that Kyle fell in love with me. 

Julia That could be correct. But the provided question was, what is the year Kyle got his first master business license? Because it's so fancy. 

Kyle But basically, same year. 

Tom So tie game and everybody got to learn a little bit about nothing, and I know more about you as well. 

Julia And can I go now? 

Tom Yes, sorry, you may go. 

Kyle OK, we've discussed what exactly fussing is and why understanding it is important now, how do we move away from it? And Tom, there are three simple tools and I think there's three areas we want to touch on that can help move away from breaking, away from fussing and getting to the work that really needs to happen. The first is about shifting your mindset. And I think the remedy to fussing sometimes is about focus. When you bring things into focus, you're actually like taking certain things out of focus. And I think we like throw around focus sometimes. It's just like, like my focus, focus, focus. So there's an interesting kind of like history lesson in this. And so thinking of focus, we talk about priorities versus priorities a lot. And I think this is like an interesting etymology of the word. 

Tom Yeah. 

Kyle Did you what did you want to kind of like break it down for us? 

Tom Yeah. So this really interesting trend happened. We talk about priorities all the time, the plural. The interesting thing is that the plural of priority was almost nonexistent before the nineteen forties. And if you really look at the etymology of it coming from the Latin priorities, it is meant to define the prime or the first thing to be done above all others. And I know it's really lame to talk about like Webster's Dictionary defines priority as it's like every bad high school speech. But let's roll with it, because I think the truth of the matter is what is important is singular in nature. There really can only be there can only be one priority. There's one. Even over others. This is the thing that will get my attention and my focus. 

Kyle Even over is a really cool tool that a lot of a lot of folks in leadership will use is it's not that the other things that we've got to get done aren't important, but what will you get done or what will you focus on even over these other things? 

Tom Absolutely. This was sort of touched on, actually, by Yannis in Episode two, where you talked about leaders being very afraid or unwilling or averse to focusing on the biggest opportunities instead of the biggest problems or risks. And I think that really comes into play here. Setting priority singular means saying no to everything else until that's been accomplished, until that has been done. So looking at step one here, starting with with shifting your mindset, we need to get better at saying no so that we can look at our biggest opportunities versus our biggest risk. So number two, I think comes down to to the self. Take control of your habits, take control of your team, of your brand. If you're in those positions of leadership and guidance. 

Kyle A simple way that I've understood is all about friction. And you can take control of your habits by either adding friction or reducing friction. And if you kind of look at, like almost everything we do as as habits, whether it's what we do when we get up in the morning and what's the first tab that you open in your browser all the way to after dinner? And if you can take all those things are to see them as these habits. These are the things that we just kind of typically do. If you add friction, it can kind of pull you away from the habit, whereas if you also reduce friction, it can kind of pull you into the habit. So like a simple a really simple example would be, I want to read physical books because I want some time away from my screen. And I like the kind of like headspace it comes from it. So a simple way that I reduce friction was I've been starting to leave the book out that I'm reading like right on this one ledge in our living room so that when I get up in the morning, it's there for me. And I know it seems like super simple, but I've reduced a small friction point of having to go to the bookshelf, which is a totally different room, and get the book out. And it's just there for me. 

Tom Although we're talking about three ways to break those habits to to really be able to lend focus and stop fussing around. It is simple, just like the story you told at the beginning, the thing that ended up getting the job done was what that commander knew he needed to do from the beginning. It's really just comes down to the courage to recognize it and to make that change. So, yeah, simplicity is fine. It doesn't mean it's not hard. In fact, the simple things often are the most difficult. So take control of your habits, take control of the habits within your team, within yourself and within your brand, and start with mindset shifting. And I think really then it comes down to to this third piece, at least from our perspective, is using practical and clear frameworks to stay disciplined week over week, time after time and encourage that reflection in that growth that's needed to see those times where maybe it didn't go exactly the way it could have. But if you look at incremental improvement over time, and this came from an old sales mentor of ours, used to say this all the time and I didn't really get it until after the fact of yeah, you keep saying incremental improvement over time, like I want change now. I want to see results now. But I think the real wisdom and practicality in that statement is that. You will see growth, you will see movement, and you will see the outcomes that you want to see more and more when you are focused on change over time when you can reflect and understand. When you did it right, when you goofed up, when you're fussing around, and more importantly, why? And look, to change those and not to think are super practical, to stay committed, disciplined week over, week over week. 

Kyle Yeah, and I think we you know, we so often associate discipline with, like martial arts and like so slobbering. 

Tom That's brutal. And a thousand pushups every morning. 

Kyle It's like it is that's a really good example of, like self discipline and commitment to discipline. But discipline is not discipline to like everybody shows up and does pushups in the morning, although that's maybe not a bad idea given our general health and wellness in the world, but discipline to what matters and what is the real focus that we're at. And so some of the practical tools that we've seen really helpful is getting frameworks like like OKRs or job one. And so it's like, what game are we in? Why are we doing this? And only have a few of them, like don't have like 10 of them have like two or three of them or maybe four of them across the company. What, what are we trying to achieve. 

Tom And then three or four key results for each of those of how you'll know you've got there. And then the discipline aspect is not so much martial arts as it is about when we have moments that don't go the way that we want or when we get sidetracked and we start fussing to come back to those things and regroup and stay disciplined to what matters, the counterpoint I'd bring to it is these frameworks are are meant to be just that they're frameworks, something to hold meaning and focus. And I think what we can also have the tendency to do is to fuss around the framework. Yeah, I use OKRs and CPI's and whatever other acronym you want there. But like the big point is, is set the objective set those those clear and understandable results that hey, when we see this and this, we'll know we achieved this. Plan well, but focus on the action to the movement, to the steps, to the practice, to the good habit building, see how it goes and refine it. Don't focus on the framework because you're still not going to move something forward without the the actions to go along with it. 

Kyle As you're setting these priorities or the priority and whether it's for a project or for a quarter that you don't lose that true north star of purpose. 

Tom Yes. 

Kyle We always look at it and our team is the purpose, purpose, priorities posture's sandwich, which is like. 

Tom Peas in a pod cast. 

Kyle Three three peas in a pod cast. Our purpose is our why as a company, why we're here and always frames what we do and then our postures or our company values how we approach every situation. There's this kind of default positions of how we come to a situation. And then the priorities in the middle are what sort of change around every quarter as we as we refocus the company and refocus the team in different directions to focus on different things that matter at that time, but never forgetting that just because priorities might change, just because maybe we're focusing on a heavy time of growth or maybe we're focusing on perfecting a certain project experience, it doesn't change that. Why we're all here as a team, why we're here as a brand is that purpose. And I think super important for brands to remember, too, that even if they're pursuing X or Y, that they're never doing it outside of purpose. It's always like within the fabric of that purpose. 

Tom So we're going to start with mindset shifting. We're going to start with saying yes to saying no, understanding that reflection and the courage to be, I guess, to say no to something, the courage to say no is what's needed and kind of waking up every day to set that priority singular, even over everything else that's important. Get this one thing done and that's where you're going to have the most impact in your role. Number two, we talked about taking control of your habits. That could be personal team or brand, adding friction or removing friction from certain examples that you shared. But but finding those places, you know, in your day where doing one of those two simple things can really add a lot to the effect that takes takes place. And then thirdly, practical and clear frameworks that can help us stay disciplined week over. We can help us make sure that those habits and that focus stay in track and that we can kind of measure and reflect on how we're doing, how are we doing with these things? And these frameworks will help us do it. I think, personally speaking, I think those three things are like that's a lot to work on right there. 

Kyle If people could get one thing out of it for me today is. And I think this is a is a Seth Godin quote, but nobody gets points for busy, no one gets points for fussing around and nobody wants points or fussing around like nobody wants to start their eulogy with like they really fussed around. They did great at Busy. 

Tom George was a really busy guy. 

Kyle Yeah. Kyle was super busy in his life. Yeah. That's my dream. Right. It's so we don't want that. So if you could just get one thing out of it, it's get clear about what you do want, what does matter, and then get busy doing it. 

Tom Mm. Back that up with the courage. That's needed to say no to everything else. 

Kyle There you have it. That's episode three of Commerce Chefs. Thank you so much for listening. 

Tom We hope you learned the secrets, the setting and achieving great priorities and how to stop fussing around. 

Kyle But if you're looking for more, make sure to join the Commerce Chefs community by following us on social at Commerce Chefs. Ask us questions, send in requests. We want to hear from you. 

Tom We're currently cooking up the next episode of Commercial Chefs, so tune in on February 18th for a special steamy edition of the show. Oh la la. 

Kyle Lastly, if you like this episode and want to support us, make sure to hit, subscribe and leave a five star review and a rating until next time. This has been a pinch of Kyle. 

Tom And a dash of Tom. We'll be cooking with you in two weeks. 

Britt Cool. Let's do another take. Funny thing, Tom, when you read your first line, you kind of sounding like a grandpa on his deathbed. 

Tom I hope you learn the secrets to setting and achieving great progress. 

Kyle That was intentional. 

Julia That was the best feedback I've ever heard in my life. 

Tom You sounded like a grandpa on his deathbed. 

Julia Sounds like a grandpa on his deathbed. 

Tom That is hurtfully specific. 

Julia Cutting deep Britt. Anyway, sorry. That's hilarious.