Is this another rule I should break?
I’ve written a few times lately about my revelations re: seeing through the bullshit and kind of noticing that the emperor who is supposedly standing there wearing his expensive new clothes actually has his ass hanging out. It’s occurred to me lately that society tells us that we’re supposed to do a lot of things that kind of really don’t apply to all of us, all the time, and that sometimes (maybe often), it’s okay and it’s cool and it’s best to break those rules.
What I’d like y’all to know is that this isn’t me sitting on some philosopher’s cushion and declaring from on high that I’ve had some esoteric, metaphysical realizations that you might want to try.
This is me living my life and realizing — in a very, very visceral way — that a lot of things have been presented to me that aren’t necessarily true or right, and starting to defy them. To actually do, in my daily life, what I’m writing about here.
However, despite that Cool Guy intro, I’m running into one thing that has me stumped. One convention that is begging to be defied, but which I honestly don’t know if I should maybe just bow down to anyway.
Maybe you can help me decide what I should do.
As some of you may know, I’m an insulin-dependent diabetic. Since 13 days before my 13th birthday (I love that stat), I’ve been monitoring my blood sugar, injecting insulin, watching the things I eat. That is absolutely no big deal to me; it’s simply part of who I am at this point.
But since I moved out of my mother’s house… and here comes the rub… I’ve also been paying for health insurance to cover myself, as a diabetic.
Every year, the rates go up. Almost always significantly.
I got my new renewal rates in the mail a few weeks ago. And I found out that they’ll be going up almost 50%… again. And once that happens, I’ll be paying around $800 per month to insure myself.
And that’s JUST myself. My wife and kids have a separate policy. And by the way –that $800 policy? It’s the worst one I’m able to get. It has a $5000 deductible, meaning that I’m essentially paying for everything out of my pocket anyway.
Now, let’s go back to the rules thing, and to fear.
Society tells you (tells me) that you (I) must have insurance. Plenty of people don’t, but almost all of those people wish they did, and are only uninsured out of ignorance or lack of funds. But the vast majority of those people want insurance. They feel they need it. Because… what if something happens?
But “what if something happens” coverage for $800 per month for the shitty policy, and rising fast? Really?
And so here we come to my rule-breaking question: Can I decide not to have insurance?
I don’t like the idea — not one little bit. It bothers me that I could have an accident, or a sustained illness, and I wouldn’t be able to pay for it. And currently, while it feels like I’m being robbed at gunpoint if I pay $800 per month, I could do it. But what happens next year, when it’s $1100 or $1200? And what happens the year after that, when I turn 35 and move into a new risk bracket, and things really start to change?
What happens when I’m 65? Will the insurance company be asking me for $5000 per month by then?
I’m fucking 33 years old and am in stellar health. I’ve broken a bone one time and was hospitalized only when I was diagnosed with diabetes. I’ve done everything right; I’ve taken care of myself; I’ve done everything the doctor told me to do. But am I being rewarded in any way? Or am I, instead, being lumped in with the people who eat cake all day, don’t check their blood sugar ever, and have a foot amputated every spring?
Am I being treated like — and charged as part of — a demographic that I don’t really match? Am I being punished for the negligence of thousands of people I don’t know?
Do I maybe have a far better chance of costing less than they do as a medical patient — of costing less, even, than what I’m paying in for insurance?
Yes, I could get hit by a bus.
But am I being financially raped each month simply because my fear of a catastrophic event outweighs the likelihood that it will actually ever happen?
I’m really not trying to talk myself into this. I’m trying to raise questions, and see if it makes sense or not. So we’ll see.
But here’s something to think about:
Insurance companies know the odds. They pay actuaries large salaries to determine how much any one type of person is likely to cost for medical care. To them, you are a number. And on average, they know that if enough of your type of people pay in and and then cost what the actuaries tell them you will cost, they will make a lot of money.
In other words, the game is fixed. If you have health insurance, you’re essentially betting against the house. The average person in each demographic will always pay more in to insurance than they will get out of it.
That’s not conspiracy theory. It’s fact.
The question then, is, are you willing to pay in more — to bet against the house — on the chance that enough bad stuff will happen that you will “beat” the odds?
It feels to me like I’ve been lumped in with a shitty group. I don’t think I match the odds of most diabetics — not by a long shot. If their lifetime costs are X on average, I’m going to be a small fraction of X.
So if you’re betting against the house with your insurance, I’m apparently hoping to hit the Powerball.
I’ve gone 20 years without any of the traumatic “diabetic costs” like hospitalization, retinopathy treatment, fancy foot care, amputations, renal failure, etc. etc. etc. Yes, I do have ongoing needs for medications and supplies, but beyond that, I have the medical expenses of a nondiabetic.
Or, I’d wager, I probably cost less even than the average nondiabetic, since most Americans are less active than I am, eat more poorly, and so on.
I insure myself out of fear. We all do. The question will be whether or not the fear is justified. Whether it’s possible to honestly mitigate that risk well enough without insurance (or with some crazy insurance alternative), or whether doing so is a foolish gamble.
So let me pose the question: Should I break this rule? Should I consider dropping my insurance now, while the rates are only moderately fucking ridiculously insulting?
Alternatively, what else can I do?
- I’m self-employed and am not about to go get a 9-to-5 so that I can get on a health plan.
- I already have the worst plan offered. I cannot opt for a plan with a higher deductible because there is none.
- Isn’t there some coverage I can get cheap, even as a diabetic, that says, “If you have expenses over $20k or something, we’ll cover it, but otherwise, you’re on your own”?
- I do have substantial ongoing monthly costs. I pay around $150 per month for insulin, but that’s not even covered by my current plan, so I’m paying that anyway. I also have other stuff (testing supplies, supplies for an insulin pump and real-time blood glucose monitor) that is apparently pretty costly but that I now get for free as part of a diabetes management plan. Basically, by giving me this stuff free, they reason that I’ll use it and not have kidney failure later. If I ditch insurance, I have to start paying for all of it myself.
- I haven’t calculated that cost yet, but have a really hard time believing it’s EVEN REMOTELY CLOSE to $800 per month.
- My other costs are minimal. Doctor’s visits are infrequent and cheap. Lab work is infrequent and not hideously expensive. Knock on wood, I’ve only had one traumatic medical event, when I broke my arm at the gym while weightlifting.
- This one’s the kicker: If you don’t have insurance for a period of time and then want to get it again later, the company does not have to cover you at ANY price. So if I ever don’t have insurance, I can probably forget about ever having it again down the road, thanks to my rather expensive preexisting condition.
All ideas, thoughts, opinions, alternate means of covering my ass are welcome. I honestly don’t know what to do.
Ultimately, the question is: Is $800 per month (and likely to increase by at least 30% per year going forward) a fair price to pay for “just in case” coverage? Or should I maybe just put that same $800 per month into a bank account, and draw from it when needed?
Ugh, I don’t know. Fucking stupid insurance.
You’re worth more than you think
I’ve talked a bit here and there about pricing (more often there than here, as it turns out), but I was interviewed a few weeks ago by Lee Stranahan for his “How Much Should I Charge?” course and it got me thinking, so I wanted to write about it now.
(And also, Lee is worth checking out even if you don’t give a shit about pricing simply because he’s interviewed director Kevin Smith and his Facebook profile picture is of him with Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols. So, yeah.)
Anyway, on to the topic at hand: Pricing yourself.
And at this point, allow me to climb up onto my soapbox, because most of you out there — you designers, coaches and consultants, writers, illustrators, photographers, and whatever else — are going to screw up this whole pricing thing. You’re going to screw it up by undervaluing yourselves, because you think that what you do is a commodity, like a pack of razor blades or a toilet seat cover.
This may seem obvious, but it’s worth really thinking about, so think about it: Creative services are NOT A COMMODITY.
Read that again. Write it on your office wall. Crochet it onto your pillow. Tattoo it on your spouse.
What you do is not a commodity, so stop acting like it’s something you can pull off a shelf at Wal-Mart. Stop ranking yourself against those in your niche in the way a bargain store would. Stop competing on price. Stop thinking that if you do X and Joe Blow down the street does X, that Joe’s going to run you out of business if he charges less than you do.
Photographers aren’t interchangeable. Designers aren’t interchangeable. The price of a photographer or a designer matters to clients, but it’s only one of the deciding factors, and usually one down near the bottom. Will your price weigh in your customers minds? Yes, but only relative to the rest of what you have to offer.
Customers and clients aren’t weighing whether the price is “high” or “low.” They’re wondering if what they think they’ll receive is worth the price they’re being asked to pay.
See, there is no inherent dollar value to a photograph or an illustration. What it’s “worth” to one client is different from what it’s worth to another. For instance, I hired N.C. Winters to create the banner graphic at the top of this website. He quoted me a price and I got to decide if I wanted to pay that price to have a custom piece of his art.
I was not thinking, “If I have this banner, will it bring in X more dollars per month?”
And even if I could draw a direct line between N.C.’s art and my profit, it wouldn’t tell the whole story. Has having that banner it improved my branding? Has it made me look more reputable or professional? Has it increased my image of “cool”? Has anyone seen the art, thought it was neat, and then quite coincidentally remembered it when pointing a friend to a post I made — a friend who then referred someone who referred someone who introduced me to a good networking connection?
What is the value, in dollars, of my header graphic? And what is it that makes N.C.’s work worth more to me than other people I could have hired — people who might have charged me less?
The answer to the second question is, “It’s worth more because I liked it more.” And the answer to the first question is, “Who knows?” Because I sure don’t.
The market may give you an idea of the price range you can work within, or the price range you might try to strive to rise above, but the market does not DETERMINE your price.
The most commonly overlooked fact about subjective pricing is this: The main reason that the cheapest providers in the market are cheap is because they decided they weren’t worth much. And the main reason the most expensive providers in the market are expensive is because they decided they were worth more.
Yes, people have to agree with the expensive guy if he’s to make any money, but he never would have made that money if he hadn’t decided it first.
There are good and bad photographers. There are good and bad coaches. Which are you? If you’re good, believe it — and then hike up your pants and price yourself accordingly.
Cutting prices works for commodities, but will not win you good clients. If you’re cheap, people won’t think it’s because you’re awesome and they’re getting a good deal. Instead, they will look at your bargain basement price and will assume that you suck.
Because everyone has heard that expression — the one about how you get what you pay for.
Lee and I talked about this stuff in some serious depth (enough depth that he had to cut me off or I’d go forever), and he also got some crazy good stuff from my buddies Charlie Gilkey and Caffeinated Elf. (I know it’s good because I’ve heard it.) So let me go ahead and make a totally biased suggestion — biased because I’m in it, and biased because I’m an affiliate:
If you’re a person providing a product or service that is in ANY way subjective and if you are AT ALL uncertain about pricing, go buy Lee’s “How Much Should I Charge?” course while it’s still cheap. Because I’ll bet that most of you could be charging $20 more per hour, and recouping what you paid right away. Like my wife… she charges this one client like $25 an hour or so, which is ludicrous. She could and should very easily be charging $45. I keep telling her.
If you’re serious about your business, then for real: head over and buy this course. Then listen to what we have to say and act accordingly. The entrepreneurial world isn’t a corporation with regular raises handed down from above. Nobody’s going to hand you the increased rates that you deserve, so you need to learn to ask for what you’re truly worth. And if you’re good at what you do, you can almost certainly get it.
Go get ‘em, Sparky.
How to fail at your goals
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You may remember that in early November, I set a goal. I was going to score 28 points on Crossfit’s “How Fit Are You?” challenge. To refresh your memory (which is surely unnecessary, as I’m sure you have detailed notes everywhere about every aspect of my life and work), here are the descriptions of the tests that make up the challenge, and what I wanted to do on each:
Test #1: Maximum bench press immediately followed by maximal pullups
GOAL: 8 points, which would be max bench press x max pullup reps equal to more than 8000.
Test #2: 15 clean and jerks at a fixed weight without putting the bar down or resting it on the floor
GOAL: 12 points, which would be using 160 pounds for the 15 non-stop reps.
Test #3: Maximal Tabata squats followed by max muscle-ups in 4 minutes
GOAL: 0 points, but one muscle-up. (There’s no way I was going to reach even the lowest scoring level.)
Test #4: Max deadlift followed immediately by maximal handstand pushups
GOAL: 4 points, which would be deadlift max x HSPU max reps equal to more than 3500.
Test #5: Run 800 meters (1/2 mile), then do 21 thrusters (a front squat combined with a push press), then do 21 L-pullups (pullups with your legs in front of you)
GOAL: 4 points, which would be finishing the above inside of six minutes.
So I trained for this. I worked on aspects of each test and the tests themselves for two and a half months, knowing that I had promised to do the thing around January 15th. For a while I was goaded along by competition in the challenge by Craig from Bloomverse, but then he wussed out because he decided that caring for a new child was in some way more important than an internet fitness challenge with someone he didn’t actually know.
Time passed, and my deadline loomed. Then, this week, I did the tests — five tests in five days in a row, in the order above, as prescribed.
And I scored 8 points.
How to fail, Truant style
Get this: I don’t care that I scored 8 points. And do you know why? Because I scored 8 points. And do you know how many points I would have scored if I hadn’t set the a goal to score 28, and then hadn’t trained for or taken the challenge at all? I’m thinking zero.
I don’t care because the goal made me train, and stretch, and improve. I grew further than I would have if I hadn’t been striving for something, if I hadn’t felt a positive “push” moving me forward.
You see, there’s more to the story.
The challenge is scored differently for each of the five tests. But in each, if you reach a certain threshold, you get four points. If you reach the next threshold, you get eight. The next is 12, then 16, then 20. If you’ve never tried Crossfit, it also wouldn’t be obvious to you that a 20 on any given test is almost unattainable, and a 20 on more than one test would only be possible by Superman if he found a good supply of crystal meth.
So while 8 sounds not so fantastic, it’s also not terrible. Specifically, here’s what I did.
Test #1: For how long I’ve been training, I’m a hideous bench-presser. I got a max of 240 pounds. I then did 22 pullups. Multiply them together and that’s 5280. You need 6000 to get four points. So I got a zero.
Test #2: This was the only one I scored on. I did a 160-lb clean and jerk 11 times without setting the bar down. I would need 15 reps at 160 to get 12 points. But because 15 reps at 135 is the low end of the 8-point bracket and because I’d done 150 lbs. a few weeks prior, I gave myself 8 points.
Test #3: I still can’t do even one muscle-up. I scored 16 on the Tabata squats. Those two multiplied together have to be 180 points to score a 4, and I got 0 x 16 = 0. Obviously room for improvement here.
Test #4: I just missed a 475 pound deadlift, so I settled for the rep at 445 that I had done earlier. I then did 6 handstand pushups, which, multiplied with the 445 deadlift, totals 2970. I needed 3500 to get 4 points.
Test #5: I could do the components of this test, with rest between, in under 6 minutes total. However, it fell apart when I put it all together. I needed under 6 minutes to get 4 points, and it took me 7:13.
If you don’t give a shit about weightlifting or fitness and are just looking for the bullet points of why I’m still happy with my monumental failure on this goal, here they are:
1. My score of 8 is, despite appearances, actually a respectable score.
2. My scores on tests #1, #4, and maaaaybe #5 represent “high zeroes,” and my score on test #2 represents a “high eight.”
And most importantly,
3. Even though the “points” score doesn’t reflect it, I improved on each and every one of those. Each and every one. (Except for 3, but 3 sucks anyway.)
See, the purpose of a goal isn’t to get the goal. The purpose of a goal is to make us stretch, to force us out of our comfort zone, to cause us to get better at something.
Several times now, I’ve made the goal to have a million dollars in the bank by such-and-such an age. I haven’t accomplished that goal even one of those several times, but I keep making more and more money, and doing better and better in my business. (Just don’t check my bank balance to verify this. Despite my million-dollar goal, I currently have in the neighborhood of zero dollars saved thanks to my terrible real estate investments. Although, I did find a quarter in the couch the other day.)
But where would I be without the goal to make the million dollars? And where would I be without the goal to score 28 points on the HFAY test? Well, I don’t know exactly, but I can give you a simple answer that I’ll guarantee is qualitatively true:
I’d be poorer. I’d be fatter.
We get hung up on goals. We think that if we don’t get the object of the goal, that the goal wasn’t worth making — but that’s not true. The goal made you stretch. And, by the way, the failure to achieve the goal forced you to accept that things don’t always work out perfectly, but that if you’ll just keep working and keep trying, they’ll eventually work out better than they would have if you’d have given up.
So here’s the thing. Here’s my new goal.
If I had cranked out just three more pullups on test #1, four more reps on test #2, two more HSPUs on test #4, and had trimmed 1:13 off of test #5, I would have scored 24 points instead of 8. That’s how close I was.
So by June 1, I’m going to do that, and a bit more. I’ll go one level higher on the bench press/pullups test and the deadlift/HSPU test, for a grand total of 32 points.
Do you hear that Craig from Bloomverse? There’s a new goal afoot, and I doubt you can pump out another excuse child quickly enough to avoid running for this one.
Neither I nor Tim Brownson are islands
This is a guest post by my fish-and-chips-eating life coach, Tim Brownson. In it, he explores many untruths about me and mocks me openly. Enjoy.
And because I know that some fools will take what Tim says literally, um… yeah, don’t take this too literally.
Oh, and one last thing: good fucking luck figuring out what the hell he is saying through all of the Britishisms. The use of 3-D glasses is suggested.
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No man is an island. I’m sure you’ve heard that expression many times and I’m here to tell you it’s a load of old bollocks. For instance, my mate Bob Island that works at NASA can say categorically and without any risk of contradiction, he is indeed an Island.
Still, John Donne (the dude that first wrote that quote) maybe could have said:
“You know what? We all rely on other people to a greater or lesser extent. Sure, some people work alone and shit like that, but they still need electricity, transportation and cheese. So therefore, they rely on others and thus, are connected.”
Admittedly it’s not as snappy as the original, and he’d probably have been burned at the stake for heresy, talking about electricity centuries before Al Gore invented it — but technically speaking it would have been more accurate.
I don’t think I’m breaking client confidentiality when I tell you that Truant was a mess when I first met him. A blubbering, incoherent shell of a man that fantasized about Zombies and had nightmares about naked women.
His fruit fly fetish that you will know about if you have been reading for any length of time was quite frankly out of control, and his finances had people from Enron wincing in pain and offering help.
Even though he was on his knees and only a haddocks dick away from living under a cardboard box and smelling of urine for the rest of his unfortunate life, he still had the wherewithal to call and beg me to coach him.
Of course I mocked him to begin with, but 5 hours of sobbing down the phone is enough to break down even the steeliest of resolves. So eventually I crumbled and agreed to take him on as a client under the strict condition that he never told a living soul. At that point he asked if he could tell his Zombie buddies and I told him to grow up.
Zombies have lips too you know.
Why we work together
You may be wondering what possessed me to take on a lunatic like Truant. That’s a fair question, and one my wife asked me several times when I was wandering around in a daze, muttering to myself and wearing a thousand-yard stare after our early sessions.
Bizarrely, I stuck with it due to a gut feeling — a gut feeling that this wreck of a human being actually had potential. Not lots of potential you understand — I mean he wasn’t going to become an ‘A’ list blogger or anything like that — but he had enough to make me think he wasn’t such a tool after all.
The fact is, Truant was hitting the phones begging half of the Internet to help him. It was months later that I found out I had listened to the same five hour tape of him weeping down the phone that everybody else had.
I also knew that if I could pull several rabbits out of one hat and help JT get where he wanted I would cement my place in the Life Coach Hall of Fame. Of course I’m a modest guy, (talk of me commissioning that 40 foot statue of myself was grossly exaggerated. It was actually only 25 feet and made of bronze, not gold) and helping Hobo Johnny was way more important than me getting myself on Oprah.
At this stage I have to point out that I cannot divulge the exact magical tricks and life coaching wizardry that I performed on the Truantmeister to drag him out of the gutter and turn him into the fine(ish) upstanding human being you see before you today. After all, if you knew what I knew you’d be me and then where would I go? Needless to say though, they worked.
I don’t want to make this post all about me (actually that’s not completely true. I would love to make it all about me, but I doubt it would get published and that would be a waste), so let you tell me about the man that is normally writing for you.
It would be easy to say, ‘That lucky fucker Truant — he has all sorts of people helping him. I hate his guts and would gladly punch him in the face” I know I have, many times.
I know why he’s such a lucky fucker though, and amazingly enough it’s not because he has a rabbits foot hanging round his neck. The reality is his luck emanates from working his tits off and being prepared to ask for help when he needs it without worrying that he’ll look like a total wuss.
It’s not rocket science as I said to Bob Island the other day. It is common sense, though. Although I’m sure you know what they say about common sense: it’s not that common.
My New York Times best selling book (in my mind) How To Be Rich and Happy tells people to ask for help, because that is what smart people do. Of course 90% of people will laugh in your face, but so what? You just move on to the next person and sooner or later somebody will say yes.
In fact, I’m in the process of trying to raise $1,000,000 to print up copies of How To Be Rich and Happy to give away to people that can’t afford it. Trust me — I need help, and I know most people will say “No.” Actually, that’s not true… they’ll say “Sounds like a great idea Tim, I’ll get back to you” and then vanish off the face of the earth, but it’s effectively the same thing.
Johnny can afford to pay me now, which is ironic seeing as we hardly work together anymore. He has done a truly stunning job of dragging himself up by the boot laces. You can too if you aren’t where you want to be, because you really are good enough.
Don’t fucking argue, you are, and that’s the end of it.
I probably don’t know you, but what I do know is that unless Bob from NASA is reading this, you’re not an island. It’s not rocket science and it’s not only ok to ask for help, it’s uber COOL to ask for help. Because guess what? That’s what the most successful people do. Asking for help is the new black, so just do it. But not from me, I’m full.
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Tim Brownson is absolutely the kind of life coach you want if you’re a cool person and enjoy British accents. If you do nothing else after reading this post, head over and read his goal post and get off your ass and help if you can. This is a man on a mission.
