I can save you 28 hours a week!!!! Seriously

If you’re like me, there is never enough time in the day. Work, kids, errands, and on, and on, and on.  And what suffers the most, your sleep. You go to bed late, you have to be up early, and all night long you toss and turn because you can’t turn your mind off. 

What if I told you I had a solution for all of these problems? AND It was going to be very easy to fix. Super simple even. Are you ready…? wait for it…. put down your phone. Seriously…that’s it. Just put down your phone. 

I spent last week with some good friends in a beach house and it was interesting to see how we all live in 2019. There were no kids, no work, just adults allowed to be adults. And I quickly discovered I am not the only person with a smart phone addiction. 

Now let me be the first to say, there are a lot of positives to smart phones.  They are great for navigation, communication, problem solving, and I haven’t had to carry a CD case in decades. 

But they are also enablers. As humans we struggle to sit still and simply think, that is unless it’s 2:00AM and you have to be up at 6:00AM. As a result, we bore easy. And the greatest solution to boredom since firecrackers and Game Boys is the smart phone. There are so many things to see!!! You can gamble, look at porn, play a game, stalk your ex, watch cat videos, and don’t let me get started on the memes….ohhhh I love the memes. 

And that is the problem. The average person spends 4 hours a day on their device. Think about that, that is more than a full day each week. We will continue to complain we never have enough time in a day to do anything, but literally use a full day each week crushing candy and giving thumbs up to stuff that really doesn’t matter.  To really scare you, 4 hours a day is the equivalent to over 60 days a year. YEAH – you spend two months of the year looking at a small screen. If we saw a monkey do this, we would laugh our ass off and call them stupid. Guess what, it’s us! We’re the stupid monkey! 

So here is my challenge to all of you.  Let’s cut our smart phone usage in half. Let’s start with just two hours a day. Fortunately, the latest Apple update allows me to view my usage time each day and I will begin tracking it today and will report back next week and let you know how it went.  This one change will allow me to save 14 hours a week that I can use on all those errands I can’t seem to get to, the walk I’ve been meaning to take, and just maybe I can contemplate why Betty White doesn’t have a national holiday yet at a reasonable time and not at 2:00AM. 

Strengths & Weaknesses

To make sure a student graduates a university as a well-rounded student, and in debt FOREVER, educational institutions often require students to take “Electives”.  Electives are defined as classes outside the required curriculum. Elective courses can be on almost any subject, and when I say any subject, I mean ANY subject.  

To give you an idea of how odd these electives can be, Michigan State University offers an online course on “How to Survive A Zombie Apocalypse”. Ohio State University offers a course on “How to Stage Revolutions”. University of Pennsylvania, yes - the ivy league school, offered a class titled “Wasting Time on the Internet”.

At Ball State University, I was required to take electives as well.  And as you guessed it with my ADHD brain, the courses I selected were all over the board. I took classes on; Meteorology, Astronomy, Music Appreciation, Asian Cultures, and Mythology. 

But there may be something to this well-rounded student concept because it’s that mythology class that is helping me write this blog today.  Specifically, there is one story in mythology I am focusing on; The Story of Achilles. 

When Achilles was an infant, his mother (Thetis) learned that her son would die at a young age and to prevent this from happening, Thetis took Achilles to the River Styx.  It was said the river would give Achilles the great power of invulnerability. Thetis picked her son up by his left heel and dipped him into the water and for many years it worked.  Achilles was opening up cans of whoop ass on many battlefields.  But as the myth goes, towards the end of the Trojan War, Achilles was shot by a poisoned arrow in his only area of weakness, his left heel.  Regardless of his strength and invincibility, this one weakness ultimately led to his death.  

And that is the first lesson I have learned with this podcast that I share with you today. Before you want to start any business, podcast, adventure, etc. you must understand your strengths and weaknesses.

Your strengths will lead you to your success.  They are your “unfair advantage” against the competition but as with Achilles it only takes one weakness to cause it all to fail. Know your strengths but fully understand your weaknesses.  

Like all of us, I have my weaknesses as well (I have a large list of referrals if you need one), but you can still succeed. The key is to understand your weaknesses, work on them, overcome them, and in many cases simply surrounding yourself with talented individuals in your organization that have these same job skills as their strengths. 

So, go open your own cans of whoop ass but make sure to protect your Achilles Heel. Ohh...and we are always looking for talented individuals to join our team as well. Just send us a message.  

“Life is about kicking ass, not kissing it” - author unknown

Dutch Daulton 

Professional Hippie: How Did I Get Here?

I am 41-years old and I am pretty sure I am a few weeks into a mid-life crisis. I have no idea what the future holds for me and it’s scary.

How the hell did this happen? In my early 20’s, I already had the next 60 years of my life figured out. Everything was set, all I had to do now was turn on the auto-pilot, sit back and relax, and it was all going to be puppy dogs, cupcakes, and boat drinks.

I was married with my first child on the way and I was certain we would never get divorced. The divorce rate in the U.S. was growing faster than America’s waistline but that clearly wasn’t going to happen to us...we were in our early 20’s and knew all the answers.

I was working for an established company that I knew if I worked hard and did what I was asked that in 40 years I would get a gold watch, a cake, and an auditorium full of people telling me how much I meant to them and the company.

My young family had just moved into our first “home”. There would be Christmas mornings, children’s birthday parties, graduations, anniversaries, and retirement golf.

Then like most of us, life began kicking me in my man parts over and over and over.

I am now a member of the first wives (or in my case husbands) club. I have spent Christmas mornings in an empty house eating my Christmas Hot Pocket. And now I know what it feels like to spend 19 years working for one company only to be handed an envelope and an empty cardboard box as my parting gifts.

So I dub myself the professional hippie. I am dedicated to growing After 2 Beers into a profitable company but not at the expense of others. I have made mistakes along the way and I am certain more are to come but we have also had a lot of positive moments as well. Our number of listens are up, our number of followers grow each day, but our financial bottom line is not.

And that brings me to this blog. I am going to take you all along on my journey. How did we get After 2 Beers to this point? How do you start your own podcast? How do you grow your social media presence? And hopefully, how do you make your own small business profitable?

I ENCOURAGE open discussion. I am not a business or marketing major so I don’t pretend to have all the answers that you will find in a book or that was taught in a college course. What I do have is experience over the last two decades in sales & marketing and to this point starting a podcast.

The goal is that we all learn together. What worked for you and what didn’t work? How much do things cost? How long will it take? And much, much, more.

So I welcome you all to my blog.

Be Kind But Take No Shit

Dutch Daulton