Category: Uncategorized

Posted on

Everyone’s Success Expands Opportunity.

There’s a clip going around with Jon Stewart, who recently sat in on Howard Stern’s show. Stewart’s success in show business is incredible — he won, roughly, a billion Emmys as host of “The Daily Show,” and gave dozens of comedians and writers a huge boost in their careers. Just look at the page of “Daily Show” alums for a moment. It’s a who’s who of current comedy legends.

So Stern wanted to know how Stewart felt about seeing some of the biggest names from his show — comedians like Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, and Samantha Bee — go on to success after leaving “The Daily Show.” Did he ever feel envious of their success?

His answer was so wonderful:

“I never had that sense that someone else’s success was to the detriment of mine. I think it leads to such bitterness when you look at the world as finite and resource-guarded. It leads to such bitterness, and it’s destructive as an emotion. I’ve always felt that everybody’s success expands opportunity.”

I love that quote, and have been thinking about it in relation to the work that I do now. In the newsletter space, it’s easy to look at the success that others are having and think: That should be me! But the truth is: Every time someone launches a great new newsletter, it opens up doors for so many new writers. Those success stories show us all what’s possible with email, what can be done. And when someone succeeds in the industry, it gets so many new writers and creators excited about trying to replicate that success.

There are so many more opportunities in the newsletter space now than there were a decade ago, or even three years ago. Those success stories have expanded opportunities for all of us.

Posted on

Try Something New Every Time.

that's me and Sally on a fanboat. Turns out that at 60 mph, your hair gets blown into unusual shapes

Every year, we travel to South Florida to visit family. The trips are always a good time, but sometimes, they can feel a little repetitive. We go to the same restaurants, the same beach, the same hotel. We realized a few years ago that we needed to shake things up a little — otherwise, making the trip might start feeling like a checklist of things to do, instead of a true vacation.

So last year, Sally had a brilliant idea: She booked us on a fanboat trip through the Everglades. It was an absolute blast — driving through swampland at high speeds was the highlight of our trip. And afterwards, we agreed: Every year, we’d try something new when we came down to Florida to visit.

This year, that meant a trip to Spring Training to watch baseball, and then an afternoon on a water cruise. Next year, I’m thinking we might rent a speedboat or book a few nights at a fancy new hotel.

Whatever you’re doing — whether it’s going about your day-to-day work or going on a trip to visit family — it can be easy to get stuck in a rut. The easiest way to break out of that is to add something new to the mix. Maybe you change up your commute, or do a pre-work workout to give you a boost. Maybe it means getting away from the office to work out of a different location. Maybe it means shifting your hours, or taking on a new project with different colleagues.

Whatever it is, don’t be afraid to break your routine and try something new. Sometimes, trying something new is exactly what you need to find that spark and help you enjoy things again.

———

That’s a photo of us on the fanboat last year. We had a freaking blast on that thing.

Posted on

Timing Isn’t Everything — But It’s A Lot.

That’s a photo of a train station in Switzerland

When I was 16 years old, I had a news story published in The Boston Globe. I wish I could tell you it was because of hard work or talent, but it wasn’t. I was interning at a news service in Washington, D.C., and one day, thousands of protestors in yellow shirts marched past our office. I asked my boss if I could go outside and ask them a few questions. Turns out they were protesting against the Chinese government — they were from Falun Gong, and one of their members had been detained in China. They’d rallied to try to pressure China into letting him go. The man detained was from Boston. The news service I worked for had a relationship with The Boston Globe. I got some quotes, wrote up the story, and the next day, read my piece in the paper. Right place, right time, right story — that’s how I ended up in The Boston Globe.

When I was 24 years old, I got a job at BuzzFeed. I wish I could tell you it was because I truly believed that BuzzFeed was about to become one of most influential publishers in the world, but it wasn’t. They were launching a section for feature stories, and I’d been doing a lot of that sort of thing with Stry.us. I was curious about what the were doing, so I reached out to chat. I wasn’t the right person for that role, but they invited me to pitch them on a new role within the company. I’d had some success with my newsletter, Tools for Reporters, and thought email might be a good fit there. They agreed. Right place, right time, right background — that’s how I ended up at BuzzFeed.

When I was 32, I left my job at The New Yorker to start Inbox Collective. I wish I could tell you it was because I knew that email was about to become one of the hottest channels in the digital space, but it wasn’t. I’d been working in this space for several years and had learned a lot. I’d launched Not a Newsletter to share some of the things I’d learned. My readers started reaching out to ask if I could consult for them, and at the same time, I started getting invited to travel both in the U.S. and abroad to speak about newsletters. It seemed like a good moment to take the leap. Right place, right time, right strategy — that’s how I started Inbox Collective.

There are so many things that can make or break an opportunity. Do you have the right skills? Do you have the right team? Do you have the right funding?

But then there’s timing. Whatever you’re working on, it might not work if you’re too late or too soon.

Timing isn’t everything. But it needs to be right for you to have a chance to succeed.

———

That’s a photo of a train station in Switzerland. It was taken by Jan Huber for Unsplash.

Posted on

Keep It Simple For As Long As You Can.

Here's a photo of a golfer. Not to overcomplicate things, but he could probably use a little more rotation here in the backswing.

There’s a famous quote from golfer Arnold Palmer about the sport: “Golf is deceptively simple and endlessly complicated.” Arnie’s absolutely right about golf: It doesn’t seem all that complicated until you really start to get into the sport. There are how many different ways to swing a club? To chip? Even to grip a club? The objective is simple — get the ball in the hole in as few strokes as possible — but the ways to achieve that goal are limitless.

The same is true with so much of the work we do. I had a conversation this week with one of my clients about the daily newsletter they want to launch. The goal with their newsletter is simple: Give readers a quick daily update to catch up on the day’s news. But the ways to deliver that to readers are endless. Do they want to have it come from a single writer or from a generic voice? Do they want to send it in the morning, afternoon, or evening? Should they focus on bringing readers stories in the inbox or requiring them to click out? How many stories should they include? What kinds of stories would make sense to include? I’d go on, but you get the idea: A single newsletter will end up being the result of dozens of different questions.

But what I’d tell you if you were learning to play golf or learning how to launch a newsletter: Keep it simple for as long as you can. It’s easy to overcomplicate things at the start. As you learn more, you’re going to want to try more advanced tactics. Save all of that for another day — and just focus on starting with the basics for now.

———

That photo of a golfer comes via Matt Aylward and Unsplash.

Posted on

Put Your Team In Position to Do The Right Work.

That's a photo of bagels, though weirdly, the Unsplash alt text describes this as "brown donuts on gray tray photo." No idea what's going on there.

There’s a bagel place on my corner here in New York, and I’ve been going there for years. It’s a great spot with really good bagels, but there’s something that’s always bugged me about it.

On a weekday, this bagel place has about five employees behind the counter taking orders. On weekends, they might have eight or nine. And they always operate the same way: One of the employees takes your order, and then slices your bagel, and then makes your order, and then walks over the cash register, where he then takes off his gloves, and then throws them away, and then rings up your order, and then bags your bagels, and then puts back on a new set of gloves, and then, finally, walks back to the front of the line to take another order.

I know, it’s a bagel place — no one’s expecting them to operate with maximum efficiency. But the one thing that surprises me is that in all the years I’ve been going there, they’ve never added one thing to the line: A cashier. Adding a single dedicated cashier to the operation would speed up the entire operation. The cash register is always a chokepoint on their line — sometimes, it takes longer to ring up a customer than it does to make a bagel. Instead of being back at the start of the line serving another customer, the staff is waiting at the cash register for their turn to collect payment. Maybe that doesn’t seem like a big deal, but every time I go in on a weekend, I see a handful of people who pop in, realize that the line’s too long, and decide to go elsewhere. If the line moved even a bit faster, many of them might wait around to buy.

Every time I go to this bagel shop, I think about what it’s like to manage a team. So much of being a good manager is freeing your team up to do their job. Sometimes, that means taking on responsibility for stuff that isn’t glamorous or exciting, or finding strategies to streamline the process so your team can do the work it needs to. Or it means paying attention to the obstacles in your team’s way, and looking for solutions to remove those hurdles.

Until you stop and really pay attention to what’s happening, you might not notice the little things — like how spending the money to hire a new cashier might actually make your business more money.

———

That photo of bagels comes via Vicky Ng and Unsplash.

Posted on

Making Something Good With People You Like.

That’s a photo of the “Parks and Rec” cast receiving a Peabody Award in 2012

I’m a big fan of the show “Parks and Recreation.” It’s one of those shows that I loved when it first aired, and have kept watching over the years. It’s fun and silly and always leaves me in a good mood.

I’ve also been listening to the podcast “Parks and Recollection,” where Rob Lowe, an actor from the show, and Alan Yang, a writer from the show, revisit old episodes. On a recent podcast, they brought on Ben Schwartz, a frequent guest star from “Parks,” and got to talking about what it was like to be on set. Every TV show cast talks about how fun it was to work together, but the way Lowe, Schwartz, and Yang described things seemed a little different. What all three kept coming back to was a simple concept: The show worked because the cast and crew got along extraordinarily well. When you make something good with people you like, they said, you get a finished product that’s truly special.

It can be easy to overthink the elements of a great strategy — do you have the right tools, the right amount of funding, the right timing? But sometimes, the best work comes from a simple start: A great team, working together on something they care about. Let the rest come from there.

———

That’s a photo of the “Parks and Rec” cast receiving a Peabody Award in 2012. It’s reused here thanks to a Creative Commons license.

Posted on

Try Something Unexpected.

the swings in Waterfront Park in Burlington

I spent a few days last week up in Burlington, Vermont, and one day, with temperatures a bit warmer than usual, took a walk down to Burlington’s waterfront park. (It’s called, accurately enough, Waterfront Park.) It’s a beautiful park, with a bike path and a science museum and gorgeous views of Lake Champlain. But the thing that stood out to me most were the swings.

Alongside the water, where you’d expect benches to be, Burlington’s placed these swings, maybe a dozen of them alongside a quarter-mile stretch of waterfront. On a warm day, you can sit there, watching the water slowly move towards shore, as you swing back and forth back towards the water.

A swing instead of a bench isn’t a huge change — at the end of the day, they’re still a place to sit and look at the water — but because I didn’t expect it, I stopped and spent a few extra minutes in that park. It was something different, something unexpected. I found those swings absolutely delightful.

All of us could try to bring the same spirit to our work. Try something small, new, and unexpected. It might lead to the creation of something special.

———

That’s a photo I took of the swings in Burlington’s Waterfront Park.

Posted on

Overdeliver Without Overwhelming.

that's a screenshot from an audit I produced last fall

Newsrooms sometimes hire me to produce an audit of their email strategy. They’ll give me logins to their email system and their analytics, and I’ll interview key staffers to understand what they’re doing and where there are opportunities to improve. Then I’ll turn my findings into a slide deck.

When I first produced these audits, the final deck was about 50 slides long. But as I did more of these, and started to identify other areas to cover during an audit, the decks started getting longer. 50 slides became 100, and then kept growing from there. My most recent audit checked in at 206 slides.

As a partner for these newsrooms, my job is always to overdeliver. I want to make sure I give them everything they’re looking to learn — and then some.

But last year, I noticed that when I’d present these longer decks, I wasn’t getting much feedback from the newsrooms. They weren’t asking questions about specific slides or tactics, which seemed odd, since they’d been so curious earlier in the process. What had changed? After I followed up with a few clients, I got my answer: I was overwhelming them with information.

So that became my new challenge: How could I overdeliver without overwhelming?

A few changes really helped. Up front, I started setting clearer expectations for what a client could expect from the audit. I told my teams: This is going to be a lot, and I don’t expect you to do every single thing in here. That freed up the teams to pick and choose what tasks to execute on based on my findings. 

I also changed the structure of my presentations. Instead of one big audit reveal at the end, I started coming to my newsrooms with initial findings — a shorter presentation, about 45 minutes long, to talk through the most important topics, and to get feedback about things they wanted to see more of in the audit. That gave them a chance to start thinking through the big themes of the audit before the final deck was presented.

I changed the structure of the deck itself, adding a section at the start with a list of suggested tasks to prioritize. That helped teams understand which tasks were ones to work on right away, and which were ideas to put on the back burner.

I told newsrooms not to invite their entire team to the final audit presentation. Did the sales team really need to sit through 90 minutes of discussion about email deliverability or growth? No, not really. Instead, I started giving the audit presentation to a core group of stakeholders, and then set up smaller presentations to specific teams (sales, product, editorial) so they could focus on the findings most important to them.

And lastly, I started setting up monthly calls to check in with teams after the audit, to talk through their prioritization list, and to help remove any roadblocks in their way.

I’m still searching for other ways to overdeliver without overwhelming. The audit process isn’t perfect, and there are going to be ways to continue to make it even better.

———

At top is a slide from an audit presentation to an Inbox Collective client.

Posted on

It’s OK to Fail. Just Don’t Fail to Pivot Away from Failures.

Post it notes on a white board

If you launch lots of new products or features, several aren’t going to work. You’ll be excited about a big new newsletter launch, and you put it out into the world, and the audience just doesn’t like it. It happens!

The truth is: If you’re not failing, it means you’re probably not trying enough new tests.

And it’s OK to fail! The only mistake you can make is failing to pivot away from your failures.

When you fail, move on quickly. Don’t double down on your mistakes. Keep testing, keep trying. The more you try, the better the chance that you’ll eventually stumble into something that truly works.

——

That stock photo of various sticky notes comes via Unsplash and David Travis.

Posted on

How I Keep Notes With Clients.

that's an example of a notebook + running notes doc

I have a few dozen Inbox Collective clients that I’m working with right now. Some I talk to daily or weekly. Some I talk to once a month or once a quarter. And there are days when I’ll have five or six calls, often stacked back-to-back-to-back. When clients hop on that call, they expect me to be able to pick up exactly where we left off. They pay me too much to be disorganized or unprepared.

Part of my organizational strategy is spending an hour or two every Sunday prepping for my meetings. The other key part are my running notes.

When I’m on my call, I’ve got a notebook where I jot down notes and ideas. I find that I stay more focused if I can write things down on paper instead of trying to type up notes as we go.

And at the end of the day, I go through my notebook and type up the notes in a Google Doc designated for every client. If they’re not a client, I create a new Doc for them — often, I’ll find that a casual conversation might lead to something a few months down the road, and having those notes is a hugely valuable tool. I’ll document everything — the date, who was on the call, updates from the team, ideas we discussed, and next steps. 

What it means is that over time, I’ve fully documented everything I’ve talked about and done with that client. Some teams have been with me since 2019, and I can’t always remember what we might have tried three years ago. In those cases, it’s great to be able to open up their Google Doc and search for a phrase to figure out if we might have tackled a particular issue already.

If you’re holding regular meetings with a variety of stakeholders, you might want to try the running notes system, too. Set up a doc for every team or individual you meet with, and document your notes from the day. That way, when you need to find notes from a conversation, you’re not searching in your desk for that one notepad that might have your notes, or searching through your inbox hoping to find an email that mentions the topic. You’ll have a document of exactly what you discussed, and when.

———

That’s my notebook and a running notes Google Doc, both for WBUR, a client that’s worked with me for nearly three years. At this point, my Doc for them is 44 pages and more than 9,000 words long.

Proudly powered by WordPress