Enjoy Alex’s recent Insider Fix newsletter featuring the latest entrepreneurial, legal, and one random fix to help you. Alex hopes that these three hacks to be so useful that they will multiply and provide you a 10-fold return.
The Best Kept Secret of the World’s Uber-Successful
I’ve interviewed and studied thousands of entrepreneurs for my podcast over the years – both new guests and clients. I never miss an opportunity to ask them about their habits and routines. You typically hear “exercise” and “meditation” more than anything else, but I think the biggest hidden secret among the uber-successful is a good journaling habit.
It doesn’t have to be lengthy, but it can be. It should be daily, though. I’ve been journaling for almost twenty years. It helps me get out of my head; it helps me avoid obsessing about a problem (there’s something about conveying a worry onto paper that de-escalates or de-prioritizes it and takes the sting out of it). When you go back and read your journal entries from a year ago, or two or five years ago, you’ll be amazed by how few moments you remember, much less how few of those worries ended up being unimportant.
My challenge and promise to you are this: give it a shot for the next three weeks for a minimum of five minutes a day. There’s going to be a high probability of this new habit being completely life-changing for you. Here are some ideas to get you started.
COVID Vulnerabilities
One of the most common questions we get from our clients is, “How do I reduce my risk of lawsuits for exposing my employees and customers to COVID just by being open?” From a damages-in-court perspective, the proof is going to be difficult. Plaintiffs will need to demonstrate not only that the business owner failed to meet a reasonable standard of care, but that such failure proximately caused them to contract COVID, and that contracting it caused actual, measurable damages. That’s a tall order.
The reality is that it’s going to be highly unlikely that anyone will be able to collect damages in a judgment from you in court for their contracting COVID-19 at your business, whether as an employee or as a client. They may be able to tie you up in needless litigation, but that’s true for many things and always has been.
That doesn’t mean they won’t try, or that they won’t tie you up in needless litigation when they do so. You may also get a visit from the local authorities.
Here’s our general advice to our clients: First, focus your control measures on the government’s reopening guidelines to avoid a cease and desist letter or enforcement action or bad publicity. Your state will likely have a (hopefully) easy-to-follow set of guidelines for businesses generally, and your industry specifically. Here are Ohio’s for general businesses and specific business sectors. And check the CDC’s guidelines as well. The low-hanging-fruit is: require masks; require social-distancing; urge work-from-home; over-sanitize. And remember, you can always go stricter. Second, in some cases, get a release and waiver from your customers and employees. Get a similar document in place with suppliers, and have them indemnify you if you are sued for their misconduct. My absolute Recommendation for these documents is to have an attorney draft them for you – it is not a one-size-fits-all solution and it may be unenforceable in some contexts. For the documents, do not try this at home (i.e., by yourself). If done correctly, it may help eliminate or shorten any lawsuits that come down the pike.
Targeted Distractions
Next time you need to unplug and get a little perspective, here are some diversions that will do the trick.
- This website lets you look out of random views from other people’s windows around the world in real-time.
- Here’s a gallery of beautiful photos of random people around the world.
- And next time you think 2020 is the weirdest year you could have lived in, think again. Many historians and social scientists agree that 536 AD was actually “The Worst Year In World History.”
