Tag: do the work

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Change Can Be the Right Thing.

This is a photo of me, ready for takeoff back to New York

When I first started Inbox Collective, I thought most of my job would involve projects and travel.

I’d do an audit for a newsroom, then travel to their office to lead a workshop. I’d take the lead on a big project, where I’d get into a client’s email platform to build something for them. I’d do talks in person. I’d speak at conferences in front of big rooms.

And the job changed when the pandemic hit. I wasn’t traveling for work anymore, which meant more calls and presentations on Zoom. A lot of friends told me they hated Zoom — I found that I loved it. I could actually work with more teams and help a lot more people since I wasn’t spending all my time on planes. I could work with newsrooms and writers in far-off parts of the world, and do so on my schedule.

And at the same time, I started to realize that I didn’t love project work. It took up a lot of time and was full of frustration — exactly the stuff that made me want to go solo in the first place.

So the job changed. I shifted towards the work I liked most: Coaching, writing, and IRL work that involves lots of 1-to-1 time. I took on some audits, but only occasionally. I farmed out work that I wasn’t enthusiastic about to other consultants or agencies.

This week, I traveled to LA for work for an on-site with a client and a Dine & Deliver dinner. I was in LA for 36 hours. I landed just before 2 a.m. in California. I got home the next day after midnight.

And I loved the work I did on site, but it was a reminder of how happy I am with the job I’ve created for myself. It’s definitely not the job I thought I’d have four years ago.

It’s better.

———

That’s me on the flight back from LA. I might not have been smiling if I’d realized that I’d get home at 12:30 a.m.

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Learn From Others — But Find Your Own Way, Too.

That's a photo of someone writing down ideas on Post-It notes (and crumpling up the bad ideas)

We live in an age of copycats. When someone has success in a particular way, there’s a rush for others to copy that model.

There’s nothing wrong with learning from others. There’s no reason to make the same mistakes that others have already made. Ask good questions, listen, and learn from others. Use existing examples to make the work you do better.

But you have to find your own way, too. You have to find ways to take what you’re doing and put your own spin on it.

Only you can do what you can do. So don’t be content to copy and paste — learn from others, and find a way to make things your own.

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That image comes via Kelly Sikkema and Unsplash.

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Stop Stomping Around. Go Do The Work.

That's an alarm clock and a calendar, overlaid on a pink background.

There’s this story Mel Brooks tells about writing the title song for his movie, “The Twelve Chairs”:

“I was gonna get somebody to do the title of ‘The Twelve Chairs,’ and Anne [Bancroft, Brooks’s wife] said, ‘No, you’re a songwriter. Go up to the attic and don’t come down until you have a version of the title song for ‘The Twelve Chairs.’ ’ So I went up to the attic, walked around for a while until I’m sure she could hear me. And then I got an idea, and I sat down, and three or four hours later, I came down with ‘Hope For The Best, Expect The Worst‘ [which became the title track].”

I had one of those moments this week. I’d been procrastinating on a big project. It was one of those days where I was crossing stuff off on my to-do list, which made it feel like I was getting stuff done, but really, I was doing other work to avoid the big thing I knew I had to do.

And then Sally, who’s wonderful at holding me accountable, told me directly and sternly: “Go to your office and do your work.”

It was just what I needed. Everyone needs someone to hold them accountable from time to time.

So I went to my office, and a few hours later, came out with a finished project.

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That photo of a clock is what comes up when you search for “deadline” on Unsplash. It was taken by Towfiqu barbhuiya.

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What Are You In Such a Rush For?

That’s a photo of a jam-packed First Avenue here in New York City

When I talk with a prospective new client, they almost always tell me: We want to grow as much as possible, as quickly as possible.

And that’s natural — but my follow-up question is usually: Why?

If you’ve got the team in place, and the strategy in place, I understand the need to grow, and grow quickly — you’re trying to reach a level of scale where your business can flourish.

But so many of the teams I talk to aren’t there yet. They don’t have the team yet. They don’t have the strategy yet.

And in those cases, growth shouldn’t be the top priority. Their priority should be growing their audience to the point where they can prove out their editorial concept and business model. Only once they’ve done that should they shift into growth mode.

Yes, growth always sounds great. But maybe it’s worth asking yourself: What are we in such a rush for?

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That’s a photo of a jam-packed First Avenue here in New York City. It was taken by Lerone Pieters for Unsplash.

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Make It Work For You.

That's a photo of a Brother typewriter, in teal and black.

I’ve been working with a few newsletter writers who are in a period of transition. For nearly two years, they’d been writing multiple newsletters per week. Now, they’re all trying to figure out what to do next. Should they write more, or less? Should they change the way they monetize?

And my advice, over and over, has been simple: Whatever you do choose to do next, make it work for you.

There isn’t a single way forward here. There is no one-size-fits-all answer.

Which means that the right answer, for now, is the one that works for each of these writers. It’s up to them to figure out what they want to build and how they want to build it. There’s no need to build around someone else’s constraints or rules — they’re free to do what’s best for them.

Maybe that means, as I told one writer, telling their readers that they’d be taking a month off in December so they can get ahead for 2023 and pre-write the first few months of newsletters. “I’m allowed to do that?” they asked me.

You are, I told them, because this is all about making it work for you.

Maybe it means changing up the way they monetize. One writer’s been trying to push forward with a paid subscription, but it isn’t working as well as they hoped. But they do have a fairly large, engaged audience. Advertising might be a better way forward for them.

“Can I just cancel the paid offering and switch businesses models?” they asked me.

You can, I said, because if you’re going to make this work, it first needs to work for you.

What’s the best route forward? Figure out what’s best for you , and work from there.

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That’s a photo of a Brother typewriter, in teal and black. It comes via photographer Laura Rivera and Unsplash.

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Be Proud of the Work You’ve Done.

A client had a question recently about something I’d worked on at BuzzFeed, so I went back into my email archives to try to find an answer. And what I found, unexpectedly, was this email:

That's an email I sent after the first year of work at BuzzFeed. That year, we launched 9 new newsletters, added more than 100,000 subscribers, and drove 600,000 more clicks than the year before

It’s from the end of year 1 of my work at BuzzFeed. It said:

Monday marks 1 year since we really launched the newsletter program here at BuzzFeed. Quick numbers for you:

January 2013
5 newsletters — all automated, with about 20,000 total subscribers
Newsletters drove 46,000 clicks to BuzzFeed
Newsletters were the 28th biggest referrer of traffic to the site

January 2014
14 newsletters — all hand-curated, with more than 125,000 total subscribers
Newsletters drove over 650,000 clicks to BuzzFeed
Newsletters are the 8th biggest referrer of traffic to the site

I’ll be honest: I knew I did a lot of work that year — I just didn’t remember how much work!

Looking back, I know I was motivated to prove that newsletters could be a great tool for BuzzFeed, and I remember working long hours to keep the newsletter strategy moving forward. I was making stuff up as I went along, and I didn’t really have many resources at my disposal. I was lucky to have a few wonderful supporters in my corner who helped me stay on track. But even now, looking back at this email — which I wrote — I’m stunned at those results from year 1.

Did I really do that?

I know I can be dismissive of some of the work I’ve done in the past. I know I’m better at this now than I was a decade ago. I don’t always want to talk about the mistakes or lessons I learned along the way.

But I don’t get the chance to build Inbox Collective without that work I put in ten years ago at BuzzFeed. I’m grateful for that work, and I’m proud of it.

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Are You Ready For the Work?

Bob Uecker’s a former baseball player, and longtime radio broadcaster for the Milwaukee Brewers. (You might also remember him as the announcer from the movie “Major League.”) Last week, on the final day of the season, with the Brewers eliminated from postseason contention, Uecker spent the final broadcast of the season telling baseball stories.

Here’s my favorite of his, as explained by Frank Schwab of Yahoo Sports:

Bob Uecker today talking about how he started with the Brewers scouting the Northern League. He didn’t know to have a stopwatch. “I’d cup my hands like I had a stopwatch, then ask the guy next to me, ‘What did you have him at?’ They’d say ‘3.4 seconds.’ I’d say ‘Yeah, me too.'”

It reminded me of something Adrienne Miller described in her book, “In the Land of Men,” about her first day at GQ:

“As [GQ editor David] Granger and I spoke, it became apparent that I did have one thing going for me: I was able to talk about past issues of GQ. Later, he said that I got the job because I was the one person he’d interviewed who’d actually even bothered to open the magazine.”

“ ‘Never underestimate how unprepared most people are,’ he would later observe, correctly.”

Don’t forget your stopwatch. Read the magazine in advance. And if you’re not sure what you need for the first day, ask. Otherwise, you might not be prepared to do the work.

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Three Years Ago, He Replied to My Welcome Email. Here’s What Happened Next.

So here’s how a response to a welcome email led to one of the best things I’ve done in my three years of running Inbox Collective.

In October 2019, I get an email from Jan Birkemose, who runs the Danish media website Medietrends. He got my welcome email and wrote back, telling me a little about his business. We start trading notes back and forth. He tells me about these courses he’s running, including a two-day class all about email.

A few months later, Jan invites me to speak as part of that course. It goes well. He invites me back for another session later that year. 

And then two more in 2021.

In December 2021, I happen to find myself in Denmark after Mette Will invites me to speak at Email Summit DK. (Thanks again, Mette!) On my last night in town, Jan and I meet in person for the first time. He asks if I’d be interested in hosting an email workshop of my own in Denmark in 2022.

Yes, I most certainly would.

I’d been wanting to do one of these for a while. I’d built up a series of workshop session that I do with individual newsrooms, but I’d never done them with several different orgs in a single room. Only thing had stopped me: Planning the event itself. Booking a space, coordinating with all the different teams, scheduling lunches for a big group — that part seemed intimidating to me.

But Jan had done these sorts of workshops dozens of times already. If I was going to take the leap on something like this, I needed a partner like him.

Fast forward to mid-September. It’s the end of a beautiful fall week in Copenhagen, and we’ve got 20 participants from 16 organizations (who came from four different countries) in the room together. They’ve learned a lot of the past three days (and, thanks to Jan’s planning, been fed every day!), and are telling me about what they’re going to do next.

They’ve got ideas: For surveys to run, and growth tactics they want to implement, and newsletters they want to launch. There’s a lot of excitement in the room, and a lot more work to do, but this group is ready to take it on.

Now that it’s all over, I’m feeling grateful for the opportunity to share what I’ve learned, and grateful for partners like Jan, who believed in this workshop idea and gave me the chance to lead it.

(And thanks for writing back to that welcome email, Jan! It’s amazing to think about the doors that a single email reply can open.)

———

That’s me with the group at the end of the workshop. What a week!

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There’s Always More Work to Do.

the practice courts at the US Open are on right, with more courts on the left. You can see the Grandstand, one of the biggest courts at the facility, on the far left.

So we’re at the US Open last week. We’ve seen some great tennis already, but there’s one star we really want to see: Serena Williams. She’s playing in the night match at Arthur Ashe Stadium, the venue’s biggest court, but we don’t have tickets for the night session. So we do the next best thing: We find out when she’s practicing, and wait on the practice courts for her to arrive.

While we’re waiting, we’re hearing the roars from Ashe, where Coco Gauff, the 12 seed, is playing her second round match. She wins the first set, but trails 5-3 in the second set. The match seems destined for a third set. But then Gauff turns things around. She wins her serve, then breaks her opponent. The match goes to a tiebreak. We hear the roars as Gauff wins the tiebreak, the set, and the match.

And a few minutes later, we hear another round of applause from one end of the practice courts. We look up. It’s not Serena — it’s Gauff, walking out from Ashe directly onto the courts. “Her serve was off today,“ whispers someone behind us. I check the stats: Gauff finished the match with more double faults than aces. Not great.

So there she is, on Practice Court #5, mere minutes after winning a big match on center court, and she’s back out with her coach, working on her serve. For a lot of players, making the third round of a major would be a career highlight. But for Gauff, who made the finals of the US Open last year, there are clearly bigger goals in mind.

It reminded me that even the best in their field have an off day. And what do the greats do after an off day? They get right back to work.

Even when you’re at the top of your game, there’s always more work to do.

———

That’s a photo I took of the practice courts, there on the right, at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens.

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The Things You Have to Do to Get There.

There are a few different ways to become a PGA Tour member, but the most direct is by being one of the top players on the Korn Ferry Tour, which is the top minor league circuit for men’s professional golfers. Just making it to the Korn Ferry Tour itself is hard enough — it requires first going through a series of qualifying tournaments, and then life on the Korn Ferry is a grind. While the PGA Tour offers massive checks, the Korn Ferry’s prize money is relatively paltry. (The player who finished in third place in yesterday’s PGA Tour event won $885,000; the prize money for the entire field at last weekend’s Korn Ferry event was $850,000.) But to get to the PGA Tour, you have to go through the Korn Ferry Tour, so those with dreams of playing on the big tour have to go through the minors first.

And yesterday, the PGA Tour announced the 25 golfers who played well enough during this Korn Ferry Tour to qualify for PGA Tour’s upcoming season. I was reading through their bios and found myself amazed by some of their stories.

Among the qualifiers are Paul Haley II, who qualified for the PGA Tour back in 2012 but played poorly in his one season on Tour. He spent a decade bouncing around the minor leagues of golf, but will be back after a strong season on the Korn Ferry. “Maybe if you were younger, you stress out about really small things and when you play bad, it seems like the world is coming to an end,” he told a PGA Tour reporter. “You’re not going to have your best stuff every week. You’re going to miss the cut. You’re going to shoot over par. But just taking that step back and realizing everything is still pretty good.” This time, he’ll aim to stick around on the top circuit in golf.

There’s Ben Griffin, who quit golf and was working as a mortgage loan officer — until his grandfather died, and Griffin decided to give golf one last shot. (A line in his grandpa’s obit: “His motto was ‘Hit them long and straight,’ having loved golf.”) A year later, Ben qualified for the PGA Tour.

There’s Erik Barnes, who had to take a job stocking shelves at a grocery store during the pandemic (base pay: $17/hour) to make ends meet when the Korn Ferry Tour went on hiatus during the early part of the pandemic. He’s 34 years old, but after more than a decade as a pro golfer, he’ll finally make it to the PGA Tour.

And there’s Kevin Roy, who once missed the cut in five straight events, which meant that he went more than a month without collecting a paycheck. Scrolling through Instagram one day, he saw a hat with the words “Have More Fun” and bought it. While other golfers wore hats with sponsor logos on it, he wore his “Have More Fun” hat as he turned his season around and qualified for the Tour. He’s 32 and will be a PGA Tour rookie.

It’s remarkable the things that people will do to achieve their dreams — the sacrifices they’ll make, the work they’ll put in, the challenges they’ll overcome. Even people at the top of their field struggle. But sometimes, reading stories like these reminds me that it’s possible to reach the top of your field — even if it takes a little bit longer than you expected.

———

At the top, that’s a video of the 25 Korn Ferry Tour members who officially qualified for next year’s PGA Tour.

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