Doomscroll Some Problems

TL;DR- I launched a TikTok channel.

I consider myself good at time and project management but I also know that I'm a meatbag in a capitalist society. Companies with more money than God have designed supercomputers and apps pointed directly at my brain, but I've taken steps to protect myself from their siren calls.

One of those steps was installing an app blocker on my phone which limits my access and doomscrolling time (currently at 650 days🔥). It's made me be more conscious of whether I REALLY want to pop into Instagram and doomscroll...and then after 7 minutes, it prompts me to make that choice again.

The other step I took to protect my focus and time was NOT installing TikTok.

Until last week.

There's quite a few pragmatic business reasons why I decided to slip into the feed- write back to this email if you're interested in the full backstory- but it seemed like a natural extension of what I was already doing with the Problem-Finder 3000: making it easier to identify when a people problem is masquerading as a business problem.

"People Problems" are hard to identify, especially if you're a first-time agency founder. They show up as missed targets, projects behind schedule, sleepless nights stressing about revenue, and an inbox that's always smoldering with little fires. They look and sound like business problems...

...but as you trace the line from the symptom to the cause, it often ends up at a person:

• You are short on qualified leads because your marketing person doesn't speak the language of your ideal customer
• Your sales are behind because your sales person isn't converting enough high-quality leads
• Your clients feel ignored because your account manager is overworked and disorganized
• Your time seems to disappear because you are doomscrolling on TikTok to cope with the stress of your people problems

As someone "good" at time and project management (and identifying people problems), I knew that my biggest threat to my projects was me.

Aware that I'm meatbag in a capitalist society, I knew that if I allowed myself to get distracted with all these God-like attention-grabbing apps, I would not have the time and focus to be as effective as I wanted to be.

The solution to my people problem was an app-blocker.

The impact: 650 days of enhanced productivity, my friends.

I invite you to visit my brand new TikTok channel where I am helping identify how-

• ​being the Chief Problem Solver​
• ​protecting team members from "small fires"​
• ​brutally honest Glassdoor reviews​
• ​silent meetings​
• ​failing to test for tenacity in interviews​
• ​not turning down profitable projects​
• ​the meeting after the meeting​

-are really people problems in disguise.

A TL;DR from the CRO

This is your brain on doomscrolling.

-Roman Noodles, Chief Ruff Officer

Black Friday Deal- See Ya Next Year

Longtime Learn to Scale fans are probably expecting one of our Black Friday promotions for our Post-Thanksgiving TL;DR, but this is me going on the record that there's no special discounts or deals coming out through the rest of the year.

However, if you are looking at your end-of-year budget and have realized that 2026 is coming whether you like it or not, now's an excellent time book an Agency Talent & Culture Audit. This two-call deep dive is designed to give you clarity, focus, and leverage so you can start 2026 far more effectively than 2025.

In the Audit, we focus exclusively on the human systems that power your agency: how you hire and onboard (solving the 'I hate training' problem), how you develop your managers (so you can stop being a bottleneck), how your team communicates (so you can prioritize effectively), and how you prevent burnout (because…duh).

ROCK TUMBLING UPDATE

Pictured here, in my new display case, are the two newest rocks that came out of Rock Hudson and Rock Lobster. Big thanks to Dana for replying a few TL;DRs back encouraging me to do the Before-After comparison!

The orange-ish rocks are Iron Quartz, while the white/pink-ish is Rose Quartz. This was about 7 weeks, from start to finish.

For you science-heads, quartz is one of the most common minerals on earth, made of silicon and oxygen. The various colors can be caused by impurities (like iron) and other mineral fibers (like dumortierite). Perfectly clear quartz means the crystalline matrix had no interlopers...but come on, these colors are pretty cool; imperfection really does make life vibrant.

For you woo-woo-heads, since quartz can be found literally everywhere it accrued various kinds of symbolic meaning. Some cultures used it for emotional healing, alleviating stress and anxiety. Other cultures say it helps expand consciousness (and when light refracts through the clearest quartz, you can imagine why they thought that).

For you business-heads, here's what it taught me about B2B enterprise sales...

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Thanks to my impurities, colorfully yours,

Dan from Learn to Scale​

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​PS. What if it rains bananas for a single day? MAYHEM​