Category: Work

MAKE THE HEART MOVE

“What does it mean to have a positive impact on a life? How intimate does that connection need to be? Understanding your scale — the scale that moves you — is critical to understanding with whom and how you should work, how you should live.”

Earlier in this piece, Craig Mod talks about working at Flipboard and hitting a million users, saying, “I didn’t feel my heart move.”

So then searching for the things that make your heart move, whether it’s one person a day or a 100 or a 1000. Helping add light to the world, add joy to the darkness, somehow, someway.

DELETING MORE APPS

Thought provoking piece from Joan Westenberg:

I deleted everything.

Every note in Obsidian. Every carefully crafted “second brain.”

Every Apple Note.

Every to do list.

Every article on my “read later” list.

Every productivity system I’d built over years. Gone in seconds.

And I felt zero panic. Just an overwhelming sense of relief.

Got talking about this on Alex’s ‘BAT WRITE’ co-writing hang out recently, and he made a good point of actually saving the thing, to have it as reference for later. I like doing that with this blog, and I also have a running note in my Bear app, too.

But again, here we are – I’ve added this to my blog. I can see this a week from now, or five years from now, and I love that.

ENERGY IS EVERYTHING

Energy is everything, man.

I just did a big running adventure with a friend. A “Twin Peaks” run, which is hitting two summits along the Appalacian Trail. Run up one side, come down, run up the other. Usually a river crossing. A good number of miles. This was 2500′ of climbing. First real hot and humid run for the year, and I got cooked! Took us 4.5 hours, but I was able to get it done because of the energy of my friend.

My Email Guidance offering. People send me an email with their backstory, some links, and their challenges, and I write them back with some ideas and possible solutions with a Stripe link to book for another five emails.

Not every email “converts,” but every email gets my wheels spinning, trying to think of ways to fix problems, present ideas, get some movement into the challenge. It’s all learning. It’s all research. It’s all… energy.

Good energy.

EVERYTHING IS A COPY OF A COPY OF A COPY

From The Slow Death—and Occasional Resurrection—of Original Reporting:

How We Fix It (a non-complete list)

  1. Fund the digging. Subscriptions aren’t charity; they’re R&D for democracy.
  2. Celebrate articles that wreck your priors. Surprise is the price of learning.
  3. Demand receipts. If a story leans entirely on “sources familiar”, ask for the paper trail, The Verge does this well.
  4. Back legal defence funds. Lawsuits stop more stories than lack of curiosity.
  5. Publish your changelog. Post the list: people spoken to, documents read, and known unknowns.

Excellent post.

ANSWER QUESTIONS

As always, Ash Ambirge bringing the gems:

If you’ve ever been like, ugh, HOW AM I EVEN SUPPOSED TO MARKET MYSELF, why not ask yourself a new question: how can I show up & just answer my customer’s questions?????

In the early days of my Social Media Escape Club I’d just answer people’s questions on Substack’s Office Hours threads. I’d even link them to Substack help docs. I did this so well someone from Substack noticed and reached out and asked if I had any interest in joining their help team (no, thank you).

Even for the bigger picture questions, like “how will I live without social media?” I don’t have the full answer for anyone, but I have bits and pieces that I’ve learned from my experience, and how other people have done it.

Sometimes you don’t need the full answer, you just need to the experience of reading and talking to a bunch of people on the same journey.

ACTIVATION VS PERSUASION

Your next big break is probably right under your nose. Your next sale, job, whatever.

“Marketers face a choice every day: hustle for new people or serve the ones who care. Activation is much more productive than persuasion.” Seth Godin

The most frequent question I get with my Email Guidance offering is “how do I get more subscribers,” and I never answer it. Instead, we dig deeper into their existing audience, asking “are you 100% that everyone on your current email list knows about your thing?”

And if so – is your website set up in a way that makes it easy for them to support your work?

BUILD DENSE THINGS

From ‘3 Ways to Amplify Your Creator Gravity,” by Alice Lemee:

LinkedIn posts and Substack notes and Skeets (that’s Bluesky for the uninitiated) are not dense. They extend your reach, sure, but they’re more like your planet’s atmosphere—thin, easily dispersed, and quickly forgotten.

Instead, you need density. When I say dense, I mean something that doesn’t have a 24-hour life cycle and can’t be plucked from the top of your head.