Whether it’s in your business or your personal life, for each thing you do, do you know why?

When you know why, you can be more flexible.

One client I had, a retailer, realised her main motivator was providing employment.

She didn’t have to keep selling the same thing in the same way, which freed up her thinking to find a more sustainable way forward for her business.

Once she’d nailed that, she was able to re-imagine her business in a way that could make it more profitable whilst staying true to that why.

Another client of mine, a coach, is most driven by helping her clients grow out of limiting mindsets.

Once she was clear on that, she was able to focus on creating her courses, group programmes, and other one-to-many offers that would help more people live their best lives.

✉ Or, as a personal example, I love sending snail mail: cards and letters.

I do it because I love bringing a spot of joy to the recipient – here’s a piece of mail that’s not a bill or junk, woohoo!

I also like doing it because it fits into my life. If I think of someone and want to send them a message at 11pm, a letter definitely won’t ping their phone and potentially wake them.

I don’t do it because I expect a reply. If I get one, it’s a lovely bonus.

By knowing my why, I don’t get downhearted if I don’t get replies; I’m simply delighted when my cards and letters make it to their recipients.

I’ve recently re-read Atomic Habits by James Clear. I honestly can’t remember the last time I re-read a book, but this one is worth it. He talks about how every habit we have serves some purpose, and if you know the purpose being served, then you can figure out how to replace the habit you want to rid yourself of.

Big or small, every action we take has a why. If you know yours, you free yourself.

Links & Inspiration

They say: “Be more like Amazon!” “Be more like Apple!” “Be more like Coca-Cola!”

But why?

We don’t know what mix of skill and luck has gotten them there.

We don’t know what really goes on inside those companies (we lack that data).

We can’t recreate the circumstances they had – those times are gone now.

“We tend to fixate on whoever is #1, in business as with sports, tacitly assuming that the contest is mostly skill and therefore the tournament has selected the rightful leader. But I’m not so sure we know the skill/luck proportion. I’m not sure we can assume the contest (marketing, sales, product) and tournament (the marketplace) picks #1 based on a repeatable, codify-able law.”

Jason Cohen illuminates the flaw in focusing on #1 – and what to do instead – at his blog, A Smart Bear.

Revenue per employee ( ) is a straightforward metric – exactly what it says on the tin. Take your total revenue and divide it by your total number of employees (revenue generators).

It’s a popular metric in SaaS companies, and is most suited to service-based businesses.

CJ Gustafson explores why you should use this metric and an example contrasting venture capital firms with SaaS firms in his recent Substack post.

As expected, Trump has made horrific waves all over the place, including in the world of data, by ordering the takedown of many US government websites and datasets. More than 8,000 pages have disappeared so far.

This may be worrisome, especially if you’ve been using those datasets, research reports, and references for market research for your business.

Do not fear immediately.

Those websites and datasets were already archived as part of the End of Term Web Archive, a routine webcrawl that has run every 4 years since 2004. (The Internet Archive Blog)

There are other places to find copies of those deleted resources, too, and Lifehacker has a good round up of them. Some of them are downloadable.

Datasets have a limited lifetime, so these unmaintained, un-updated ones will only be useful for a while. But for now, they are there, and you can keep making use of them.

I don’t pretend to understand the stock market, but nonetheless, that didn’t make sense to me.

Timothy B. Lee’s explanation on his Substack blog Understanding AI worked much better for me. He also talks through the technical and economic background around DeepSeek, to give a better understanding of the big picture.

There is also a lively discussion in the comments – so if you’re not convinced of his hypothesis, you’ll find your people there.

In case you missed it, the Copyright & AI consultation is open until 25 Feb. I shared some of my thoughts on it here.

This is really important, so I’m sharing it in each of these curated link newsletters until 25 Feb. Please do have your say.

There are no affiliate links in this or any of my emails or blog posts. I simply enjoy sharing resources that could help move your business forward.

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