Tag: do the work

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The Importance of Glue Work.

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I wanted to pass along this wonderful talk from Tanya Reilly, an engineer at Squarespace, where she talks about a concept she calls “Glue Work.”

What’s Glue Work? These are the behind-the-scenes contributions that someone puts in to help their team. At any successful company, there are always a few folks who quietly do this type of work. It’s not core to their job, and they don’t always get recognition for it, but it makes a difference.

And reading through her talk, it reminded me of something from sportswriter Seth Davis, who covers college basketball. Every year, he releases his All-Glue team: a list of unheralded players who elevate the play of their teammates. Here’s what he wrote in 2009 about J.T. Tiller, from my Missouri Tigers:

The Atlanta Celtics are one of the most glamorous programs on the amateur basketball circuit, which is why Mike Anderson, then UAB coach, watched them play many times during the summer of 2005. But instead of locking in on mega scorers, Anderson instead found his gaze drifting toward J.T. Tiller, a 6-foot-3 guard from Marietta, Ga., who was drawing scant interest from other high-major schools. “He was one of those kamikaze guys who did all the little things that add up to winning,” Anderson recalls. “He played so hard and gave everything he had, and he had a huge impact on the game just from a defensive standpoint. Most guys don’t get after it defensively during the summer, but this kid had no ego. He was all about winning.” …

Every coach asks his players to do the subtle, unglamorous things that don’t show up in a box score, but Tiller is one of those rare players who specializes in doing just that.

He is, in other words, the consummate Glue Guy.

I love this kind of teammate — unselfish, and committed to doing the extra work to make the team better. At Stry.us, all of us sometimes had to do Glue Work. I remember one reporting trip, to Joplin, to cover the story of a mosque burned down by arsonists. That day, I needed to serve as a last-minute photographer, an editor, a driver (and at one point, the last two things simultaneously, during one memorable drive down I-44). Having a team full of people who could glue things together meant that we could always get done whatever we desperately needed to do — but didn’t yet have.

On a great team, you need that glue. Reilly’s talk is a wonderful study of why it matters, and how those who do that type of work can make sure they get the respect, recognition, and career success that they deserve.

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That photo at top comes via the Elmer’s Instagram.

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It’s OK to Believe.

In the waning moments of Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Semifinals, with my Washington Capitals leading the Pittsburgh Penguins, and the team just one game away from advancing to the next round of the playoffs, Caps radio announcer John Walton said a wonderful thing on the radio:

“It’s OK to believe,” he said.


If you’re a Capitals fan, that was easier said than done. The Capitals had been around for 43 seasons. They had made the playoffs in 28 of those seasons — but prior to this season, had only made one Stanley Cup Finals. In 10 of those seasons, the Capitals had held either a 3-1 or 2-0 series lead in a playoff series — a commanding lead by hockey standards — and lost. No team in NHL history compared when it came to playoff collapses.

And yet, there was John Walton on the radio, reminding all of us: “It’s OK to believe.” I think we all needed that reminder — we’d been through so many playoff losses that the idea of a win seemed almost impossible.

The next game, Game 6, on the road, in overtime, the Capitals finally broke through and beat Pittsburgh.

In the next round, down three games to two, the Capitals won two in a row — shutting out Tampa Bay in both games — to secure a place in the Finals.

And then, after going down 1-0 to Vegas, against a team that hadn’t lost three games in a row all season, the Caps won four consecutive games to win the Stanley Cup.

I still can’t believe it: The Capitals are Stanley Cup champions! Caps fans have been through so much over the years: We were told our team didn’t play hard enough, or were too unlucky to break through. Whatever the case, the team always seemed to lose — until they broke through, shed their playoff baggage, and changed the narrative forever.

I keep thinking back to what John Walton said during the Pittsburgh series. You were right, John: It really is OK to believe.

It’s OK to believe to believe that you can do something great.

It’s OK to believe that all the work you’ve been putting in might lead to something big.

It’s OK to believe in the team around you — even if others have their doubts.

It’s OK to believe that your best work is still ahead of you.

It’s OK to believe that this time will be different.

It’s OK to believe in something that nobody else sees — and to be willing to sacrifice something for the opportunity to prove yourself.

There is so much that goes into being successful at the highest level. You need the team, the resources, and a lot of luck — but the Caps just proved it:

It’s OK to believe.

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Why A Side Project Can Be So Valuable.

If you’re still in school, or just out of college, you should really have a side project. If you’ve got a job or an internship for the summer, that’s great — but that gig probably isn’t showcasing your work in the way you want. It’s up to do to build your own showcase.

But you should also understand this: As someone who’s hired (and, at this moment, hiring), when I look at your side project, I’m going to be asking two questions:

1) Does that side project make you better at the thing you really want to do?

2) Does it reveal something about you?

Let’s take those one at a time:

Does it make you better at the thing you want to do? — If you’re applying to a newsletter job, and you’ve got a side TinyLetter, I’ll be intrigued. I’ll want to see how you’re applying relevant newsletter skills on a personal level: Are you running A/B tests? How are you measuring success, and what tools are you using to measure it? If you’ve been working in a non-editorial job for a few years (like marketing or advertising), having a TinyLetter as a showcase for your skills might be a good way to prove that you’re ready to transition to a newsletter job, and to show me that you’ve been honing your skills through that side project.

Does it reveal something about you? — Maybe you’re applying to that newsletter job but your side project doesn’t have anything to do with newsletters. Maybe — and I’ll use a random-but-real example from two of my old co-workers — you launched a podcast about the Baby-Sitters Club series.

Making that podcast won’t tell me a lot about your ability to edit a newsletter, but it’s still relevant, because it tells me a lot about the way you think and the way you take on big tasks. Just from listening to your podcast and talking with you about it, I’ll be able to learn a lot: What you’re interested in, how you approach a new project, what kind of tools you use to stay organized, and how you collaborate with others.

I can’t say this enough: Start something new. It’ll give you an outlet for your creativity, showcase your work — and it might help you get hired.

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That stock footage at the top doesn’t have much to do with this post — I just kinda liked it. It comes via Unsplash, my favorite site for stock photos, and photographer Stephen Di Donato.

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You, Too, Can Make A Thing.

I was so excited to find a story in the New York Times Food section this week, titled, “A New Generation of Food Magazines Thinks Small, and in Ink.” Here’s how it starts:

Shayne Chammavanijakul, a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, felt let down by the way some magazines depicted Asian cuisines — framed as alien, styled with visual clichés and oversimplified. So she started her own.

Last summer, between her freshman and sophomore years, she fried corn chips and rolled burritos at Chipotle, saving her wages to pay a few contributors. She gathered enough financial and editorial support from friends and family to print 10,000 copies of the first issue of Dill, packed with articles about noodle dishes, from Indonesian soto ayam to Filipino pancit puso.

“We present things in a way that isn’t sensational,” said Ms. Chammavanijakul, 20, whose family has roots in Thailand. “Food isn’t bizarre or cool or something you do on a dare. We have no interest in exoticizing it.”

At a time when traditional food magazines are shrinking and cutting staff, Dill is part of an unexpected groundswell across the country: a wave of small, sophisticated print magazines, produced on a shoestring by young editors with strong points of view and a passion for their subjects — from the subtleties of regional Thai home cooking to the intersection of food and queer culture.

I read that story and smiled because… well, this is exactly what I’d be trying to do if I was still in college.

I’ve written before about stry.us — what we did right, what I did wrong — but I don’t think I’ve ever written about this before: Part of my plan in Biloxi involved a print magazine. (Somewhere back in a closet in D.C., there are still probably 50 copies in a box. At the top of this post, that’s a photo of the cover.)

Why a print magazine? When I was in Biloxi, I wasn’t quite sure what I was building towards. I didn’t know if stry.us was going to be a business, or just a showcase for my work. But I knew that either way, I needed to be able to showcase my best work — and the basic WordPress site I’d made together wasn’t quite it.

So I found a printer in Biloxi who liked what I was doing. I took my favorite 8 or 9 stories, and packaged them together into a more cohesive story about the Katrina recovery. The idea was that if I was meeting with a publisher, I could always pull a copy out of my bag and say, “This was what I was working on the whole time.”

If they asked who wrote the stories, I could say: I did.

If they asked who took the photos, I could say: I did.

If they asked who laid the thing out in InDesign, I could say: I did.

I didn’t want to be a designer or a photographer. But I did want to prove that I was capable of being more than a reporter.

The barriers to making something basic weren’t high: It took a lot of time, and a few hundred dollars. I wish I’d tried something like it in college: I think a group of reporters, editors, photographers, and designers could have made something pretty amazing — and it would have been a heck of a showcase for our work.

It doesn’t have to be a business. It doesn’t have to be anything more than an issue or two. It’s just something to show off your work.

When you make something new, you show us how you work — and what you can do.

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How To Do Better Work, Faster.

Here’s something I’ve been told: You can do work well, or you can do work quickly — but you can’t do both.

I don’t think that’s true.

I believe you can learn how to do quality work with speed. The way to get there is through process.

If routines are the habits that individuals use to get through their day efficiently, then processes are the series of routines that a team uses to accomplish a goal quickly. Think of those processes as an assembly line of tasks — each member of the team has a specific set of responsibilities within that process. The goal is handle those tasks as quickly as possible, and move things along to the next person to handle their role. If everyone does their job, good work gets done quickly.

When you’re building out a team, you’re doing more than just hiring. You’re actually building out the processes for that team to do its work. And every time those processes get put into action, you start to see the gaps — what isn’t covered, what needs refining. There are always holes to plug, and always ways to move through the tasks more efficiently.

When things go wrong, sit down with your team and talk about your setbacks: What happened last time? What got lost in the process? What do we need to do better? Who can own those new tasks?

Over time, by creating these processes and putting them into practice, and by tweaking the processes when things go wrong, you start to accomplish quality work quickly.

Here’s what I believe: You can’t go fast when you’re working alone, and you can’t go fast when you’re working with a group but not truly working together.

But when you build out those series of steps to work together, you can do quality work, and you can do it with speed. That’s the power of process.

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That photo of a crew team — each with a key role in the process to make their boat move as fast as possible — was taken by Matteo Vistocco on Unsplash,

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Just Because It’s Hard Doesn’t Mean It’s Complicated.

I’m watching college basketball last Saturday. Clark Kellogg, who’s been doing games for CBS for 20+ years now, is on the call. It’s the Missouri-Florida game, and Mizzou’s on offense. There’s a mismatch: One of the Florida guards is matched up in the post against a Missouri player who has seven inches and probably 70 lbs. on him.

The ball goes into the post, but the Florida defender doesn’t give an inch. So the Mizzou forward kicks the ball out, then reestablishes position on the inside. He gets the ball back, turns, and hits the shot.

“It’s not always easy,” Kellogg says, the replay playing over his commentary, “but it certainly isn’t complicated.”

I’d never heard anyone say something like that before — it really clicked for me. So I paused the game, grabbed a notebook, and drew this up:

Most of the things I work on fall into one of the two categories on the left: Easy + simple or Hard + simple:

Easy + simple — This is the category for things like A/B tests on a subject line, or small tweaks to a newsletter.

Hard + simple — This is for the projects that don’t seem like they should be all that hard — for instance, changing a CTA on our website — but might require a handful of engineers and a complicated series of steps to execute.

A smaller percentage of work falls into the two categories on the right:

Hard + complicated — These are the big picture projects that involve multiple teams and ambitious goals or testing. If we’re launching a new newsletter; moving our email operations onto a new piece of technology; or attempting to shift to a new roadmap, we’re probably operating in this quadrant.

Easy + complicated — There aren’t a lot of things that fall under this heading, but here’s one: Having a really tough conversation with a co-worker, or attempting to get buy-in from your team. Those things seem simple on paper, but once you attempt to factor in all of the relationships, opinions, and egos on a team, things can get complicated quickly.

As your grow in a role, you’ll find that your work tends to shift from the left half of the graph to the right half. You’ll take on bigger projects, with larger goals and more on the line. But there will always be left-half types of projects to maintain. The challenge for all of us: Figuring out ways to handle the little things quickly so that you can stay focused on the big picture.

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Everyone Needs A Good Editor.

A few weeks ago, I flew to Australia to give a talk about email, and I flew down on Fiji Airways.[1. I should say: Their customer service was excellent. I’d absolutely recommend them if you’re flying to that part of the Pacific.]

Ever since, I haven’t stopped thinking about the flight map in their in-flight magazine. I’ve always been fascinating by these route maps — I recently discovered a Tumblr dedicated to old airline maps, and wasted a few hours browsing through maps from the past. But the Fiji Airways map was a little different.

At first glance, everything seems pretty ordinary.

But when you zoom in on the North American section of the map, you start to notice something: It’s wrong.

Toronto is basically at the Northwest Passage. Chicago, Indianapolis, and Salt Lake are in Canada. Raleigh is in Baltimore, Charlotte and Phoenix are in the Midwest, and Reno is in Portland. St. Louis added an “e” to its name and moved to the Bay Area.

I don’t know how the map ended up this inaccurate — but it really could have used a good editor.

I used to think that editors were just for catching big mistakes — like the ones on this map. But really great editors do more than that. They can also help shape the projects you’re working on. They’re people to bounce ideas off of, and people who can challenge your point of view. They’re there for typos, yes, but also partners to help turn your work into something amazing.

You don’t have to go it alone. Find an editor, a mentor, a partner — someone to work with on your ideas. Whatever you’re making, a great editor can help you make it better.

As for Fiji Airways: If you need an editor for this map, I’m happy to help. All I’ll need is two first-class tickets back to Fiji and a week or two off work to help you get this one right, OK? :-)

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Direction Is More Important Than Speed.

A co-worker asked me this week: How busy are you these days?

I’ve been at this job for four months, and my co-worker knows that we have a thousand things to do. We have to improve the way we drive newsletter growth. We have to launch new products. We have to improve our existing products. We have to work more closely with our sales and marketing teams to serve their needs. We have to improve the types of data we collect, and find and build better tools to work with.

That’s why my response seemed to catch my co-worker by surprise: I have a list a mile long of things to do… but I’m not crazy busy.

Yes, there’s a lot to do. And yes, I want to get these things done as quickly as I can.

But I can’t make all these things happen at once. I don’t have the team in place yet to take on all these projects, and I’m still getting buy-in from other teams in the office that we’ll need to work with.

Sure, I could try to run through walls to try to get stuff done. But I know I can’t get past those walls by myself. The only way to get through them is with time, teamwork, and money. But I don’t have those things yet — and if I push too hard, too fast, I’m going to drive myself insane.

Instead, I’m trying to work smarter — not faster. I wrote about this last week in my annual Things I Believe post:

“Direction is more important than speed. It doesn’t matter how fast you’re going if you’re headed the wrong way.”

Building something new is going to take time. For now, the best thing I can do is help point the team in the right direction. I’m spending a lot of time meeting with other stakeholders, figuring out what they want and how it lines up with what I want. I’m spending a lot of time asking questions, and a lot of time listening.

We’re not moving as fast as I want to, but that’s OK. We’re starting to move in the right direction, and it’s OK to take slow steps towards progress. If we’re heading the right way, and if we’re working with the right people and tools, we’ll build up speed over time.

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That photo is by Robin Pierre on Unsplash.

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Be Willing To Suck.

samuel-edwards-road

I talked to a journalism class this week, and they asked me about Silicon Valley mantras, like “Move fast and break things” and “Fail fast, fail often.”

How do you feel about them?, they wanted to know.

I’ve written a few times over the years about failure, and I’ve been thinking about it more at this new job. Here’s what I told them:

The first time you do something, you’re not going to do it very well. I look back on things I wrote a decade ago — sometimes even stuff I wrote a year ago — and I’m embarrassed at how bad it is. I look at old projects of mine, and I can’t believe how average the work is.

My earlier work sucked.

The only way to get better is to keep pushing yourself, and to surround yourself with people who push you just as hard. It takes time, and it takes work.

And yes, it will often suck.

The best people I know are a lot of things: Talented, creative, and lucky. And nearly all have something else in common: They’re willing to go through periods where their output isn’t very good, and they’re willing to work hard to improve.

Those Silicon Valley mottos miss one key point: The only way forward is being willing to suck. If you’re just starting out, remember this: It will be a long time before your work is any good, and that’s OK.

Doing great work isn’t about failure — it’s about perseverance. You’re not failing — your work just isn’t very good yet, and there’s a difference.

They won’t put this on a bumper sticker or a poster, but it’s the truth: Be willing to suck. Adversity and struggle is how you get better. Keep at it until you get to a place where you’re doing the work you really want to do.

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Unfortunately, I still suck at picking images to run with posts, so here’s a very cool (but very generic) photo of the road less traveled. This photo’s by Samuel Edwards, and was posted on Unsplash.

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Make It Work.

oscar-nilsson-13605

If you don’t have all the money you need to build something, you can still make it work.

If you don’t have all the knowledge you need to build something, you can still make it work.

If you don’t have all the time you need to build something, you can still make it work.

It won’t be perfect. It might be far from perfect, to be honest. But find a way to get started. Find a way to make it work.

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That generic desk photo comes via Oscar Nilsson on Unsplash.

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