Apr 27, 2024

8:00 - coffee

Almost everyone is off work so everything is crowded. We usually just hang at the house if there is no surf. 

9:00 - email, 

10:00 - mowed the lawn, trimmed the edges

11:00 - did some laundry

12:00 - read

We are reading this book “This is not a T-Shirt”. Our team (staff at MNML) reads a book together every month. We read ¼ of the book each week and spend a little time talking about it at our team meeting every monday. It’s something we started in January of 2023 after I spent a year stressed out, not being able to count on anybody in our team to fulfill the basic obligations of their jobs. 

I take full responsibility. As their leader, I’m the one who creates the culture and defines the work ethic. I feel like 2022 was our year of growing out of our shoes. We had gone from selling 1700 bags in 2021 to 3000 in 2022. The little mistakes we were making in shipping, custom art, customer service, and even in our product were all exaggerated now that we were selling more bags. 

This was a bad thing. More orders meant more shipping mistakes. More shipping mistakes meant more customer service mistakes. And to make matters worse, we were doing a lot more custom art.

You might see that as a good thing. It should have been. But since our lead artist got hired by Disney as a sign-painter, we were fulfilling custom art orders like 90-120 days late. That was a bad look. Not to mention the communication with the customer was trash. 

By the end of 2022 I was stressed. Our team was falling apart. And our business was booming. 

In an effort to understand why our team didn’t have the same dedication to perfection as I did, I started self-reflecting. Actually AJ, our first employee, asked me the question, “why are you motivated?” And that sent me on a quest to figure out how to bring my motivation to the rest of the team.

Ultimately I felt that my motivation came from the hundreds of books I read about CEOs, professional athletes, and self-improvement. I figured, if everyone had the same information as me, they’d all be just as motivated to succeed. 

It was a guess. A hypothesis at best. 

So we started reading. We read Shoe Dog, Little Black Stretchy Pants, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, The Four Agreements, The Power of Habit, and a bunch more. 

By the end of 2023, we were a team. It worked. It’s still working. 

We finished our last book and Rob, GM of MNML GOLF CLUB, suggested “This is not a T-Shirt”. 

So we are at page 150 (two weeks in), and we’re loving the book. We’ve already put down a bunch of notes that we want to incorporate into our business and I’m 100% sure our team will be on board. It’s a lot easier to work together on an idea that we’ve all been a part of than one that the leader “says” is important. 

4:30 - Shopping for groceries

5:30 - Nicolle made dinner for us at Javier’s house at Royal Isabela. 

8:30 - Home and in bed