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Start Writing. Keep Writing.

I launched my consulting business in 2019, and in the years since, I’ve never sent out a cold email request to a potential client. My website mentions my consulting practice, but honestly, it’s a little bit hidden. Yes, I’ve got a newsletter and a welcome series, but I barely promote my consulting work at all. (I’ve had clients tell me they were on my list for months before realizing that they could hire me.)

And yet, I’m fully booked for the next six months.

So what’s the secret?

I just keep writing.

For the first few years, I shared what I was learning in Not a Newsletter, a public Google Doc I published. Later, I moved everything over to WordPress and started publishing every week.

But just through the act of publishing — at this point, hundreds of thousands of words about newsletters — I keep proving to my audience that I know what I’m talking about. (At least a little bit. I’m still learning new stuff about this space every month!)

If you’re in the services business and you’re not sharing what you learn — on your blog, in your newsletter, regularly via channels like LinkedIn — forget about those cold email strategies that promise to bring in new clients.

Just start writing.

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Speaking of longtime writing projects: I’ve been writing here on danoshinsky.com since 2008. That’s a screenshot of my website back in summer 2010 — I think dropping the tagline about my mom was probably a good move!

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Anything Can Happen.

This first week of March Madness is always one of my favorite weeks of the year. I haven’t watched a minute of most of the teams in tournament — truthfully, I had to Google where High Point University was before picking them to upset Purdue in the first round — but I’m excited to watch the games anyway.

Why? Because this is a week when anything can happen.

I’ve seen tiny schools beat brand name universities. I’ve seen buzzer beaters, improbable comebacks, and heartbreaking collapses. I’ve seen ordinary kids suddenly become legends. (Finding out that Ali Farokhmanesh was an assistant coach on 12-seed Colorado State immediately sent me to YouTube to watch a shot he hit 15 years ago.)

I have no idea what will happen this week, but I know that anything can happen, and there aren’t many days on the calendar when it feels like that’s true.

I’ll be tuned in, ready for whatever, and I can’t wait.

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That photo of two basketballs on a rack comes via Unsplash and Todd Greene.

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You Ain’t Hamlet.

This interview with Jason Alexander, of “Seinfeld” fame, popped up in my feed the other day, and I think it’s worth watching in full. In it, he says:

I went to Boston University as a theater major, and because William Shatner was my muse, I wanted a dramatic career. I really thought I was going to play some of the great classical roles and be a dramatic actor. Sure, I hadn’t done much comedy. I’d done some musicals, so there was that, but I hadn’t done much comedy. And the summer second semester of my sophomore year, I had a professor named James Spruill at Boston. He was the only black member of the faculty. He was a guy who had come up in the ‘60s with street theater — theater is to change the minds of the masses, affect change. He brought me into his office for my my semester consultation, and he had this great basso kind of James Earl Jones voice, and he sat back, and he just kind of nodded his head and looked at me for a minute. He went, “I know that your heart and soul is Hamlet, and you would be a profound Hamlet. You will never play Hamlet, so you best get good at Falstaff.”

And he basically said, look, look in the mirror. You are 5’6’’. You are 20 to 25 pounds overweight, and you are losing your hair. You have a large performing persona. If you want a a commercially successful career, you’re going to be a comedian, and you’re not embracing it, you’re not looking at it, you’re not doing it.

Had he not said to me, “You ain’t Hamlet, man,” I would have finished that school and gone into the professional world thinking, ”Here’s Jason Alexander and the Iceman cometh. It’s what everybody is waiting for.”

And I would have been wrong.

It’s such a wonderful reminder: We all need someone in our lives who’ll be truly honest with us. Sometimes, we need that person to lift us up. Sometimes, we need them to keep on the right path. But all we need those voices we can trust, and if you find someone who can do that, you owe it to yourself to listen to them. They’ve got something worth hearing, even if it’s not what you want to hear at that moment.

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It’s OK to Do Nothing.

2025’s been a lot. There’s been travel (Denmark, New York, Florida), multiple visitors staying with us, and a lot of new projects. I’ve been saying no to just about every new opportunity that comes across my desk — but that’s because I’m already fully booked.

And this past weekend, I hit the point where I just couldn’t tackle another thing. I usually do a little work on weekends: Reply to emails, maybe do some writing, definitely some prep for the week.

I didn’t do any of that.

Instead, I barely opened my laptop.

We went skiing on Saturday. We had friends over on Saturday night and Sunday. I cooked a few meals. We spent a lot of time on the playground with our son. I even went for a bike ride — it was warm enough to actually bike outside in shorts here! (It snowed 24 hours later.)

Look, 48 hours of nothing isn’t some magic cure. I’ve still got plenty to do this week, and I need to continue to work on saying yes to the stuff I’m most excited about.

But everyone needs breaks. Everyone needs to step away for a few days.

It can be weirdly hard to take time off. I need to get better at it — in the long run, I can only do my best work if I’m making space for the stuff outside it.

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Sally and I went skiing at Park City on Saturday. We stopped for a while to eat lunch outside, and that’s when I took that photo. It was a gorgeous day that felt like spring skiing — blue skies and temperatures in the 50s!

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Be Excellent, Not Perfect.

My Missouri Tigers had a huge win this past week in men’s basketball, and I went back to watch the highlight package that the basketball team put together. Mizzou’s coach, Dennis Gates, has a bunch of different sayings he uses. (For instance, his eight core values for success: “Friendship, love, accountability, trust, discipline, unselfishness, enthusiasm, and toughness.”)

But watching the movie, I heard one line I’d never heard before.

Gates: Communication has to be excellent, OK? It has to be excellent. It don’t have to be perfect, it has to be what?

Team: Excellent!

I’ve written a lot — like, so many different things — about perfection. But I love the idea of reframing the concept. For most of us, the goal shouldn’t be around perfection. The goal should be to put in the work, to enjoy doing the work, and to try to do something great.

Aim for perfection and you’ll usually fall short. Aim for excellence and you have a chance to do excellent work along the way.

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It Might Not Happen Today.

A funny thing about being a parent, especially a parent of a young child in daycare, is that your entire schedule can change in a moment.

One phone call from daycare — “Hey, your son has a runny nose and a weird cough, so I think you need to pick him up” — and suddenly, there goes your week. Calls get canceled, work gets postponed. That big project you wanted to do today? It’s definitely not happening today anymore! (And maybe not next week, either.)

All of this has made me weirdly grateful for the days when things go right. There are days when things actually work out, where the work gets done and your child comes home completely healthy. Those are great days, even if this winter, it feels like there are far fewer of them than before.

Still: The mindset shift is important. I used to get mad when the work didn’t get done. Now I know it’s part of being a parent — and it’s my job to adjust how I work, adjust what I work on, and adjust my mindset. I’m a dad and a business owner. This is just how things work now, and that’s part of what I signed up for.

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That’s a photo of my son carrying a reusable bag upstairs. Why? Who knows, but parenting means a lot of unexpected moments — like my son deciding that a bag is far more fun to play with than the toys we got him.

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Find Your Rubber Duck.

A few days ago, I saw Sandie Taulo Essemann do one of the smartest things I’ve ever seen a speaker do on stage.

So we’re in Odense, Denmark, for Email Summit. When I give talks in America, there’s usually a line of people coming up to ask follow-up questions or say hi. But in Denmark, the cultural tendency is to leave the speakers alone — they don’t want to bother the speaker, so they quietly shuffle out of the room.

I was talking to Sandie about this the night before the conference, and she said she’d figured out a way to get people to come up and chat with her afterwards.

“How?” I asked.

“I brought rubber ducks,” she told me.

In her suitcase, she explained, she’d brought more than 100 rubber ducks. She told me she planned to close the talk by reminding people that when they went back to work, she didn’t want them to lose the feeling of excitement that they had at the conference. She wanted them to take a rubber duck, put it on their desk, and use it as a reminder of the sense of possibility they’d felt at Email Summit. Anytime they felt like they weren’t making progress, the rubber duck would be there to remind them that they could always make things a little bit better.

So the day of the conference, I stood in the back as Sandie closed her talk with the story about the rubber duck. (Fun fact: There’s no word in Danish for rubber duck. They just use the English words.)

I’ve spoken in Denmark three times, and at this point, I’ve seen lots of speakers give talks, both in Danish and English, but I’ve never seen more than two our three people ever go up to the speaker afterwards.

And then I watched, with amazement, as Sandie finished the talk, and more than 100 Danes stood in line to say hi to her, ask her questions, and take home their very own rubber duck. (And I saw a ton of people scanning a QR code to sign up for her newsletter. These are people who didn’t just get a free rubber duck — they’re also going to become Sandie’s fans, and maybe even clients one day.)

It was an absolutely brilliant icebreaker, and an example of a speaker going the extra mile to really connect with her audience.

(Now the only question is, because I’m 100% stealing this idea for myself: What should my version of a rubber duck be for my next talk?)

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That’s Sandie introducing the rubber duck concept on stage! (I got one of the last ones. Since I got home, my son has refused to end bath time until he plays with it.)

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It’s The Little Things.

I ate at NOMA last week — a restaurant that’s widely considered to be one of the best, if not the best, in the world — and what I can’t stop thinking about is the napkins.

Yes, everything we ate was extraordinary, and the service was exceptional. But what sets NOMA apart are the little things. It’s the way you arrive at the table and the food you’re about to eat — the crab and fish and veggies — is sitting there on the table for you to observe before it goes into the kitchen to be prepared. It’s the details about the dish that the staff relay to you before you eat.

It’s the napkins.

A meal at NOMA is a multi-hour affair — our meal was more than a dozen courses and four hours long. I stood up at one point to use the bathroom, and when I came back, my napkin was no longer where I’d left it. I couldn’t figure out where I’d placed it.

I sat down, and that’s when I noticed it. The napkin had a small piece of string on the back, and the staff — in the 90 seconds while I was gone — walked over, and hung the napkin on the side of my chair.

It was such a tiny detail. Who spends time thinking about where your napkin should go when you stand up? But the fact that they did think about it, and then figured out such an elegant solution? That they took the time to made sure to put care and attention into the absolute smallest elements? To me, that was almost as impressive as the Norwegian king crab.

(Though, don’t get me wrong: the Norwegian king crab was darn good, too.)

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That’s the little hook on the back of the napkin. It was clearly something they’d made themselves — they took a linen napkin, sewed on a small piece of fabric to attach the hook to, and then inserted the string around it.

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Be Grateful For the Opportunity.

Back in 2021, I got the chance to speak at Email Summit DK, Denmark’s largest email conference. (It’s also one of the biggest email conferences in all of Europe.) I loved the event — the warmth of the attendees, the incredible venue, the little touches.

And this week, I got to go back and stand on that stage again — this time in front of 600 people.

And as I closed my talk, I told the attendees this: It’s not lost on me what a gift it is for all of us to get together, for a day like this. We have so many things competing for our time; it’s so easy to stay glued to our desks. So to see everyone, in one place, sharing and learning and eager to grow — that is an incredible thing, and I’m grateful to be a small part of it.

I’m lucky to get the chance to give talks like this. Each and every one still feels special. I’m grateful, as ever, for the opportunity.

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That’s a photo of me on stage in Odense, Denmark, at Email Summit 2025.

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No Skips. No Fast-Forwarding. Be Here Now.

I had this moment yesterday where I wanted to skip ahead.

I sometimes get jealous of the parents who have a few kids who are already in elementary school. They’ve gotten through the toddler years where kids get sick every 20 minutes. (My son has RSV right now; so does everyone in his class.) They’ve gotten through sleepless nights and potty training. They can take their kids on big vacations and really do fun stuff with them.

Plus, they don’t need as much attention every day — so I could reclaim a bit of that time to get stuff done at work.

And then I thought about it some more and remembered: I don’t want to skip ahead. I don’t want to miss these moments. I hate that Ben is sick, but there are also wonderful moments these days, too. Yesterday, he climbed into my lap and gave me a huge hug — in a few years, he’ll be too big for that! (At this pace, he might be too big for that by July.) Those moments won’t last forever.

So I’m writing this to remind myself: I don’t want to hit fast-forward. I want to be here, right now, in the moments that will never happen again — big smiles and new foods and new experiences and colds and restless nights and all of that. This is part of the journey; I want to make the space to really be here for it.

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That’s a photo of Ben wearing my sunglasses around the supermarket. When I talk about not skipping ahead, I’m talking about moments like that — he’s such a silly little guy!

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