Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 126 - Pay attention, TAs: Perfect is the enemy of done
Transcript
- Rachel K: Welcome to the Travel Agency New Year podcast. I am your host, Rachel K. Today is day 126, not even halfway through the year, folks. Thank you for joining me today. And every day, ⁓ if you are brand new, hit the subscribe button and you will receive daily notifications of our episodes. They are usually airing 6 a.m. Central Standard Time every single day. If you don't know who I am, head over to elevatewithrachelk.com to see how I can help you with your travel business because we have lots of different courses. There's one-on-one coaching calls, mentoring, all that kind of fun stuff. Also, it's Travel Advisor Appreciation Month. Don't forget, if you're like, dang, I really do like this course, 20 % off. Everything except the success circle because it's a subscription and I've tried to do coupons before and it's a nightmare. Sorry, but it's $35 a month. Come on people. 20 % off. Use the promo code, yaytas. Y-A-Y-T-A-S. Thanks for doing what you do. I'm also a travel advisor and I appreciate you just even being in the industry because when I first started in this it was like nobody's a travel advisor. Everyone just books on Priceline. How are you even going to make any money? That's what I heard from people. So I even appreciate you as a fellow travel advisor. Like thanks for doing this with me. There's a lot of us. And there's not a whole lot of us at the same time. Perfect is the enemy of done. Let's talk about the get enough philosophy. Business owners should possibly adapt. Don't go, it's a nice balance. It's a balance, okay? Don't be like full on laissez faire, lazy bones. But if you are doing the good enough philosophy, what are the benefits? What is the good enough philosophy? It's good enough. You don't need to tweak it. It's good enough. Okay? Calm down. When you adopt the good enough philosophy as a business owner, you're prioritizing actually get something done, getting something done. You prioritize that over perfection to help you foster innovation. that make sense? No, it doesn't. What do mean, how am going to foster innovation? Instead of sitting there and being like, well, should I have hex code DFFQ whatever or hex code DFFQ seven? Hmm, that's a slight change in peach. Who cares? Just pick one. Change it later when you have time. Get it done. This has been something I've seen not with all travel advisors. I do see this with a lot of travel advisors where they're like, ⁓ I need to tweak my landing page. Why? Well, I saw another person's landing page and they use different fonts. Doesn't matter. Well, I'm not getting conversion. Are you sharing this landing page anywhere? Well, no. Okay, well stop. It's done. Like put it out there first and see how people react before you're obsessing over how perfect it is. Okay. You want something done, give a difficult job, this is the whole fostering innovation thing, give a difficult job to a lazy person because a lazy person will find the easiest way to do it. That is per Walter Chrysler, by the way. Give a difficult job to a lazy person because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it. The good enough philosophy, they're gonna get it done. And if you prioritize actually getting something done, you become that lazy person because you don't obsess over perfection as a lazy person, you just wanna get it done. And you may come up with an innovative way to do whatever the heck that task is. You may not. But you might. Pretty is not as important as finding the shortest path to a solution. Nobody cares about pretty anymore. With the advent of AI taking over a lot of content creation, which if you haven't been on any short form or regular video like YouTube, there's a lot more AI bots out there I'm seeing than ever before posing as creators. And everything is perfect. So perfect that you're like, that's not human. Please do not worry about being pretty and perfect. Please just get it done and be okay with being you. I promise you people will be like, ⁓ my gosh, that's a real human being. I'm gonna work with them. Don't put AI generated images of you in freaking newsletters. Don't do it. Like you can do the filters if you want. Like filters are fun. Or maybe you're tired, whatever. You can wear makeup. I don't care what you do with that. Don't worry about being perfectly pretty anymore because curated, perfect algorithms, here's my conspiracy theory if you really want to get into it, has been used to train AI to be your biggest competitor in the social media sphere. So stop it. Pick your nose, I don't care. Excuse me. All right. Good enough philosophy aids in faster decision making versus over analyzing and analysis paralysis that I was talking about with the optimization trap. Is your business good enough as it is? Okay. Why are you spending money on other stuff? I'm yelling right now. I need to not yell. You don't need to buy that stuff. You don't need to do this training. You don't need to do that. Like maybe you do, but maybe you don't. So if it's good enough, you're okay. I'll get into that in a second. Good Enough Philosophy also prioritizes finding value over aesthetics. I'm a big believer that the whole Instagram feed, whatever it's called, I've never really been on Instagram, and like extreme looks maxing has killed the concept of aesthetics because it's all fake. and like I just mentioned, AI. It's all fake. Filtering out. ⁓ what is it? There's like content creators that would be like, ⁓ I in Santa Rita like three years ago, whatever. And they'd have these beautiful photos where they photoshopped out the hundreds of other tourists around them to make it look like, ⁓ it's so peaceful and calm. No, it's jam-packed. But they're getting paid by a hotel to post this. Any hootle. So, what was I gonna say? ⁓ Over-analyzation, value over aesthetics. Faster, I had something I was gonna expand upon and now I'm blanking, because it's not in my notes. Stay insane when battling the concept of good enough. ⁓ that's it, that's it. So, there is a balance, right? I'm a big fan of the growth mindset and look to always. Like, be open to improvement. Not constantly. beating yourself up because you're not good enough and constantly seeking perfection and what's wrong with me here, what's wrong with me here, I need to improve, improve, improve. That's not healthy. That is the toxic side of the growth mindset and the toxic side of self help. What is it called? Toxic positivity. I remember hearing that a few years ago where you're just like... Well, if I do this and if I do this and if I do this, then I'll be good. Like you are good enough now. Okay. So that's one side. Like I love the idea of a growth mindset, practicing having a growth mindset. You do not want to take it so far that you are always striving for perfection because guess what? We are never going to be perfect. It doesn't matter. ⁓ Being open to taking a look at yourself and taking accountability of maybe the shittier parts of yourself. that are really holding you back, that's a good thing. That's going to help you with every aspect of your life, Okay, conversely, not doing shit and calling it good enough is also bad. You need to actually work, but you need to not psychotically wait for everything to be perfectly perfect. Alright, stay insane while you're battling the concept of being good enough. Number one, keep calm and carry on. Who remembers that everywhere? Back in the 2010s, I was working at a brewery part time and I had, they had like beer shirts, whatever that you wore, and my favorite one was like a Heather Blue and it said keep calm and like, I don't know, something about whatever brew that somehow matched England in my, I don't know. But it had the little crown and everything. Keep calm and carry on. It was a beer pun. But anyway, that's the thing. Keep calm and carry on. When anxiety creeps in or insecurity starts coming up to you because you're like, this isn't good enough. This sucks. This is stupid. It's never going to be good enough. You might as well not even put it out there. Ugh, you're going to get like two views. Keep calm and carry on. Say a mantra. Like, keep calm and carry on. Or, this too shall pass. When you have an angry client and you're like, I've done everything I can, it's good enough. And they're like, but it's not perfect in my brain. Those people are always fun. I had an imaginary thought of perfection in my brain when I signed your clearly defined, here's what I'm gonna do for you, here's what I'm not gonna do for you. And what I had in my brain, you wouldn't bend in your boundaries for me, so now I'm upset. Keep calm and carry on. This too shall pass. All those really, and we all get them, those clients that want to overstep boundaries or want to tell you how you run your business. This too shall pass. And in six months, three months, you'll be laughing about it and be like, how is that person a functioning adult? Focus on enjoying the present process, not the outcome. Keep calm and carry on. Enjoy the process of educating people who are fighting back. Enjoy the process. of creating content to reach people who are like-minded, even if you only get two views. Enjoy the mundane tasks of the booking and just be like, is going to keep me on the path that I need to be on so that I can hire someone to do this later. Number two, stick with honesty, integrity, and your values. This will always prevent you from taking shortcuts. If you remind yourself, I got to be honest, I got to have integrity, what are the values of my business? Am I sticking to these three things? that will stop you from taking shortcuts. Yes, you might have to work an extra 15 minutes on a trip. Or you might have to sit on hold for a few hours for one reason or another with a trip. But if you shift to taking shortcuts so you can make more money and not care, that can result in costly mistakes. Also, the importance of the OOPSIE Fund. I don't know if I've ever mentioned this here or anywhere else. I do tell all my agents on my team, set up an OOPSE fund, win your brand newbie, 10 % of your commission, put it in like a savings account or something, and have a goal of having like five grand in an OOPSE fund. That way you don't have to file an E &O claim for like a thousand bucks. What are you kidding me? Just pay it go on. It'll reduce your, like every time you have to, you guys should know, it's insurance. Every time you have to file a claim on any kind of insurance, your premium increases. And it's just like you aren't able to pay the deductible, so. Like just pay the deductible out of pocket expenses and don't claim it on your insurance. You know what I mean? you should have an OOPSEE fund. Number three, stay positive. Stay positive. Can you stay positive? Do you spiral? Do you shift blame? Do you worry that it's not good enough when you put that content out there, when you post that blog, when you've built your website, when you've built your funnel? Do you worry about it? No, stay positive. who, like somebody's gonna tell you, like, hey, this is messed up, go fix it later. Thanks for your feedback. I'm gonna take care of that. Stay positive. How courageous is it for you to send an email with a typo out? Because you got it done. Better than not, and just falling away to the wayside because you couldn't send your newsletter, because you couldn't decide if you should use the word they or them in a sentence. Or you had to proofread it 17 times and then you just missed it. And then you were like, well, I might as well not send it out. Who cares if there's a typo? That just means a human wrote it. Not AI. Okay, I love AI, don't get me wrong. And I also have a little bit of the beef with it for a number of reasons. Data centers destroying our environment. Also, the human touch is being taken away. AI is writing everything. All right, thanks for tuning in. Fight me on AI. Find me. I'm not really on social media. Comment on this and be like, you're dumb. AI's the greatest thing ever. Okay, talk to everyone that lives in the state of Wisconsin about that. ⁓ Anyway, have a great day and we'll chat tomorrow.