I’m Dan Oshinsky, and I run Inbox Collective, an email consultancy. I'm here to share what I've learned about doing great work and building amazing teams.
It’s been a decade since I graduated from college. I thought that when I graduated — after all those years in school — that the learning would stop there.
Turns out, that was just the start.
As you go through your career, you’re always going to be working to learn new things, and discovering new ways to learn them. You’ll find that you can:
At the bottom of every New Yorker email, there’s a message to readers: “We’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please send your thoughts and suggestions to [email protected].”
Readers do write in — sometimes with thoughts about the newsletter, but also with questions, complaints, comments, and pitches. And we try to reply to every single one. (The only exception: If a reader is extraordinarily rude. But we don’t get many of those.)
In fact, replying to our readers is the first thing I do in the morning. I wake up, open the reader mail inbox, and work my way through the messages. By making it my first task of the day, I’m always making sure that the needs of our fans, readers, and customers are met first.
This simple act — putting them first on my to-do list every day — has completely changed the way I think about our readers. I know that if we make a big change in the newsletter, I’m going to hear about it from them. And when I’m thinking about what they might say or how they might react, it means I can include their voice in the conversations we’re having and the decisions we’re making at work.
Does it take a lot of time? Certainly. It’s a task that usually takes at least 20-30 minutes a day, depending on the volume of emails. But it’s also an opportunity to build a personal connection with a reader. My hope is that in the long run, a reader who got a personal note from us will be more likely to have a positive impression of us and renew their subscription. And someone who isn’t a subscriber might be willing to open their wallet and pay for a year of the magazine.
Lately, more members of our team — editors, designers, product folks — are asking if they can be looped in on these conversations with readers. The more of us involved the process, the more likely we are to build a magazine and a website that truly represents the needs of our customers.
We couldn’t make The New Yorker without these readers. So it makes sense that they should come first — quite literally.
I loved this post from First Round Review highlighting six pieces of career wisdom — aimed mostly at new grads, but useful for anyone in their career. Their six pieces of advice are:
1.) Picture your career as a painting, not a ladder.
2.) Nurture your rookie spirit. It will serve you for your entire career.
3.) When you make tenacity a part of your identity, it can help you tune out the naysayers.
4.) Before you reach out to a potential mentor, be specific about what you want out of mentorship.
5.) Take ownership of your career by proactively managing your manager.
6.) You’re allowed to quit when you’re unhappy. But make sure you’re not quitting because you’re impatient.
If you’re the bride or groom at a wedding — or if you’re just the host of a big party — here’s something I’ve learned: You have to make time to eat.
Sure, you spent a lot of money on the food at your party. You did a tasting. You thought carefully about what you wanted to serve. You were really excited to actually eat that one dish on the big day!
And then the big day comes, and you don’t eat. It’s your party, which means that every guest knows you, and every guest wants to come over and chat. It doesn’t leave you much time to actually eat.
The secret is: You have to make time to eat. You need to carve out time for it, separate from the party. (On our wedding day, Sally and I took 20 minutes after our ceremony to go into a private room to eat dinner, just the two of us. It was one of the best decisions we made all weekend.)
The same thing holds true for taking a managerial role at a company. There are going to be big, ambitious projects you want to take on — that you suddenly won’t have time for. You’ll have 1-on-1s, stand-ups, big meetings, calls, etc. Your time at work becomes your team’s time. Your week will be filled with meetings, and the stuff you want to do will end up getting pushed off to another day.
The challenge is figuring out how you want to make time for yourself and for the things you care about. At Stry.us, I made the mornings my time — anything between 6 and 9 was my time to write, plan out strategy, or work out. I’ve seen co-workers carve out big chunks of their week, adding two-hour blocks on their calendar where meetings can’t be scheduled and work can get done. Or maybe you want to limit your meetings to certain days — no 1-on-1s, let’s say, on Mondays, so you can get ahead on your tasks and projects for the week ahead.
Whatever you do, just remember: You have to make time for these things. Don’t be the person who didn’t get to enjoy the ice cream sundae bar at their own wedding — and don’t be the manager who never gets to work on their favorite projects because they couldn’t find a spare moment for it.
Here’s one way to decide what you should work on next:
Think about the work you’ve been doing in your current role, and write out the bullet points you’d include if you were putting together your resume today. What projects have you completed? What work are you most proud of? Make sure you explain the impact of your work — how much you’ve actually done in your role.
Then think about the work you’d like to brag about on a resume. What are the projects you’ve been dreaming of launching? What are the things you’d want to tell a future employer about?
That’s the work you should be prioritizing on in the months ahead.
It was the summer of 2013, just before the royal baby was born, when I started to believe that what we were working on at BuzzFeed was actually going to work.
Maybe I should back up and explain.
I’d gotten hired to lead the newsletter program at BuzzFeed in 2012. Over the first few months of the job, we started building the framework for our newsletter program. We created a basic template for our newsletters and started testing. We launched a daily newsletter, and a handful of emails tied to sections of the site, like animals and tech.
And then Kate Middleton and Prince William announced that they were going to have a baby.
This was the first royal baby born in the social media era — and BuzzFeed was ready for it. We had staff in the U.S. and U.K. prepared to write, pretty much daily, about the royal baby. It made sense that we should also be the ones to launch a newsletter about the royal baby.
But we’d never launched a newsletter quite like it before! Would readers respond to such a specific product? Would they sign up for a newsletter that was only intended to run for a few weeks? And how would we even get readers to sign up for such a newsletter? Did we have the right channels to grow our royal baby list?
Over the next few weeks, we learned that, yes, readers would most definitely sign up for such a newsletter. We learned that these pop-up products could work well for a site like ours. And we learned so much about how to write marketing copy and how to promote a new product like this. The royal baby newsletter was where we first started learning how to use newsletters to create powerful relationships with readers around specific communities and moments — and how to build audiences from those relationships.
Much of what we went on to do — content strategy, growth, measuring success — started with that royal baby newsletter. That newsletter gave us the learnings we needed to really start to grow our newsletter program.
I just finished Taylor Jenkins Reid’s new book, “Daisy Jones & The Six.” I suppose the word “finished” isn’t quite right — I cancelled plans and stayed in so I could keep reading it. If you liked “Almost Famous,” or if you’ve watched “History of the Eagles,” or if you have strong feelings about Fleetwood Mac, you’ll probably enjoy this one, too. It’s a fictional oral history of a chart-topping ‘70s rock band that burned out too quickly, and halfway through, you’ll be convinced that they were real.
The book doesn’t just nail the rock and roll voice of the era — it also has a few quotes that feel like they’re ripped from a rock documentary. Here’s one I’ve been thinking about the past few days, from a member of the band:
Warren: Let me tell you the sweet spot for being in rock ’n’ roll. People think it’s when you’re at the top but no. That’s when you’ve got the pressure and the expectations. What’s good is when everybody thinks you’re headed somewhere fast, when you’re all potential. Potential is pure fuckin’ joy.
I’ve been lucky to have been there in the early days of some incredible projects, when you realize that you’re onto something good, and the potential paths start opening up in front of you. Sometimes, an idea sparks just right, and you’ll find yourself jotting down page after page of ideas, or having a conversation with a co-worker where every potential next step excites you. There isn’t pressure, and there aren’t any expectations. It’s just you and your team and this idea. You don’t know what’s up ahead, but you’re thrilled about the potential of it anyway.
What I can tell you, too, is that those moments can be frightening. You may doubt yourself: Do I have enough experience to take this opportunity on? Am I good enough to do this? (You do, and you are.)
If you’re excited about the idea or the opportunity, press on. Embrace the moment. Run with it. Those moments of true, limitless potential are special, rare, and worth chasing. Embrace those moments — they really can be pure fuckin’ joy.
I started my first job in journalism 16 years ago this summer. I’ve been working in email for seven years. I’ve got some experience to fall back on, but sometimes, I fall back on that experience too quickly. Someone will pitch an idea, and I’ll dismiss it. No, I’ll say, I tried that five or ten years ago. It didn’t work.
And when I say “It didn’t work,” what I’m really saying is: “That never works.”
But that’s not necessarily true! What worked a decade ago might not work today. What didn’t work a year ago might work now. And if I’m too quick to dismiss those ideas, we might miss out on a potentially valuable opportunity.
I was thinking about that last week. Most days, I eat lunch quickly at my desk in the first available 10-minute window after noon. But on Thursday, I had a bit more time. I took my sandwich, went out, and found a spot a few blocks from the office to sit and eat. I’d never sat in that spot before, and started looking around. And just across the street, I noticed a building going up, still half-complete. When I looked up, I spotted something in the reflection of the glass:
The World Trade Center, poking out from behind another building.
I work in the World Trade Center. I’ve seen that building from just about every angle, from Brooklyn and Jersey, from planes flying into LaGuardia. I’ve seen 1WTC a thousand times, but never from that angle. From most parts of the metro area, the building looms above the rest of the skyline. But from here, up close, I saw something different: a stalk of a building, stretching upwards to find a small piece of the Manhattan sky.
I’ve been thinking about that for a few days now. If it’s possible to see something so iconic as the World Trade Center with fresh eyes, what else have I been missing? What else do I need to approach from a new perspective?
I’ve been lucky to have tried a lot of interesting things in my work. Now I’m trying to figure out what else I can try — again, for the first time.
I’ve written before about how important it to invest in your teams, and how one of the secrets of BuzzFeed’s success was the company’s learning and development team. Here’s a great example of that from an unexpected source: The Miami Marlins baseball team:
Teaching English to minor league players from Latin America has understandably become commonplace. Nearly 30 percent of players in the major leagues — and even more in the minors — were born in that part of the world. The Marlins, however, are among the few teams also doing the inverse: conducting Spanish classes for English speakers throughout the organization, from players to coaches to top executives….
So when [Derek] Jeter, 44, took over the Marlins, he and Emily Glass, 25, who oversees the team’s education efforts, made it a goal to address this weakness. He called for an overhaul of the club’s player development program, including a focus on life skills — from cooking to financial planning to language classes.
