Saturday Musings - Serious Thinking

Is it time for some serious thinking?

For just over a week I’ve been laid up sick and had just enough energy to press the buttons on the TV remote control. Last weekend I found sleep virtually non-existent as the pain my throat from coughing kept me awake….but there was a silver lining to my incapacitation.

Being ill gave me a lot of time to do some serious thinking. This can be quite a dangerous activity when you’re wondering whether your lungs are about to shoot out of your mouth in yet another coughing fit but being a brave sort, I persisted with my mental dalliance.

Unlike Douglas Adams who wrote The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy I didn’t come to an epiphany that the answer to the ultimate question was 42 but I did realise a few things.

The first is that I’ve allowed myself to become a bit slack. This has nothing to do with work ethic (I work really hard) but more about being slack about how I've been thinking. It’s the old adage of working smarter rather than harder.

There’s a story of a man wandering through a forest and he comes across another man sawing a log. As he watched the logger, he noticed that the saw didn’t appear to be cutting into the log and so he said,

“Why don’t you sharpen your saw?”

The logger instantly replied, “I don’t have the time.”

In my malaise I’d discovered that I’d been working really hard on stuff, but I hadn’t taken the time out to really do some thinking about why I was doing what I was doing. I was the logger that was too busy to stop doing busy work.

Now that I’m feeling my regular self again, I’ve determined that I’m going to set aside time to think and ask some fundamental questions. Some may even include things such as;

• What is the next evolution of traffic monetisation?
• How can we add growing value to domain investors rather than pray for clicks on advertising links?
• What is a better way to price domains?
• Where is the true value in domain names versus perceived value?

All these are interesting questions but even more fundamental are the ones about life. Some of these very personal questions that focus on the bedrock of what it means to be me.

I hope you take this opportunity to spend some time of your own to think about the problems you’re wrestling with in your life. They could be about family, relationships, colleagues or business but I'm sure that each of them would really benefit from you doing some serious thinking.

Have a great weekend!
Michael