Tag: do the work

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Try It. Then Figure Out What You Want to Keep.

A few years ago, I saw Adam Sandler perform live. He was recording what would become his first comedy special in decades, and honestly, I wasn’t sure what I was in for.

What I was in for, it turned out, was something both funny and unpolished.

Sandler’s set, which he’d trim down to about 70 minutes for TV, ran nearly two hours. He performed original songs and some stand-up material. Some bits worked; others didn’t. The cameras rolled the whole time.

What I discovered later was that this was Sandler’s creative process. He does the same thing with movies: He records lots of takes, lots of different ways, and then figures out which is the funniest once he gets to the editing bay. The goal when he’s recording is to capture all sorts of options — he’ll figure out what works later on.

That’s not a bad way to approach your work. Some things become hits, and others flop. You don’t really know which is which when you’re making it. You can’t always see around corners.

So instead of hoping that your first idea will be the right one, try doing a bit more than you expect. Leave yourself some alternatives. If something doesn’t work, that’s OK. You’ll have a Plan B already waiting for you.

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Should You Work on That Idea?

Using Domainr, I can see if a domain name is available

Here’s a little trick I use to decide if I actually want to work on a project:

Let’s say I’ve got an idea, and I get really excited about it. I buy a domain for the website for the project, and start jotting down notes. I’m convinced that this is my next big idea!

The next step’s been a game changer for me: I go and add a note to my to-do list — one month in the future. I remind myself to revisit the idea then.

And then I do nothing — at least for 30 days.

Often, a month later, I look at the idea and go: Why was I so excited about this? That’s not a bad thing, I think — I’ve just saved myself a bunch of time and effort on an idea I wasn’t all that excited about!

But if I’m still excited about the idea a month later, that’s how I know it’s worth the investment, and that’s when I actually start to work on it.

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I like to use Domainr to come up with domain names. But I don’t think yournextnewsletteridea.com is my next project!

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Find What Works For You.

I talked with a group of publishers a few weeks ago, and they told me they’d just come back from a conference where a speaker told them that the right number of links to include in email was 15. They wanted to know: Did I agree?

And I told them what I know to be true: There is no “right” strategy for email.

There is no right topic.

There is no right format.

There is no right number of links.

There is no right number of emails to send per week.

It’s up to you to figure out what works for you and your audience.

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That’s my first BuzzFeed newsletter. It had just five links. We tested it — and figured out that we could add a lot more!

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Your Imperfect Next Step.

I was on a call with a client a few weeks ago, and they told me they wanted to build the best possible email strategy in 2024.

“That’s great,” I told them. “But I don’t want you to be thinking about what’s best. I want you to be thinking about what’s next.”

Thinking “best” can lead to magical thinking, to dreaming of blue sky situations where you’ve got all the budget and resources you need. It can lead to planning for a day that may not come.

Instead, take a look at what you’re doing right now and ask yourself: What’s the next thing we can do to make our newsletter strategy better?

It might be a small step, and that’s OK. Some of the best newsletters out there were built thanks to a lot of small steps forward.

The next step may not be perfect. It may just be… what’s next.

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I took that photo, more than 15 years ago, while walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain.

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I Am Not The Wolf.

I was rewatching “Pulp Fiction” on a flight the other day. My favorite chapter of that movie is the scene with Winston Wolf, the fixer. Vincent Vega and Jules Winfield get themselves into hot water, and The Wolf gets them out of it.

And I was struck by a thought, rewatching it, that a lot of people think that my job at Inbox Collective is basically that of The Wolf.

Some teams come to me thinking that I’ve got all the answers or magic fixes. I often do not.

What do I actually do? A good advisor isn’t there to have all the answers. My job is to help you ask the right questions — and figure out how to find the answers together.

I’ll admit, it’d be fun to be The Wolf, to be able to come in, survey the situation, and identify a quick fix.

But my job, if I do it well, is to do more than fix the glaring short-term issues. I’m here to help teams build the right strategy in the long term.

All of that starts, not by having all the answers, but by figuring out the right questions.

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How I Knew.

Here’s a story I’ve never told before.

In the spring of 2019, I was starting to think about leaving the New Yorker to start Inbox Collective. But I was still nervous about it. Was it the right time to leave? Was I ready to take on the responsibility of building a new business?

And that’s around the time a recruiter reached out to ask about a job.

It was a good job with a big title at a major news organization, making more money than I’d ever made it my life. I wasn’t looking for another job, but I interviewed anyway. It was the kind of offer I had to at least consider. I wasn’t sure what to expect.

Within 20 minutes of the first interview, I knew what I wanted to do next.

I wasn’t excited about the idea of taking another job. I still loved my job at the New Yorker.

But more than anything else, I felt excited about the idea of starting my own consulting business — well, equal parts excited and nervous. Whenever I feel nervous, that’s usually a good thing. It’s a signal that I really care about something.

So I started to ask myself: Why, exactly, am I still doing the same old thing if I’m ready for what’s next?

By the end of the month, I told my bosses that I was leaving to start Inbox Collective.

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That’s a photo of me talking to a group of newsrooms in Sydney in fall 2019, a few months after starting Inbox Collective.

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The Work is Never Done.

The chambers of the Economic and Social Council, with its unfinished ceiling.

For the past decade, I’ve lived just a few blocks away from the United Nations. And yet, until this week, I’d never actually been inside.

If you’re visiting New York, the UN is worth a visit. It’s tough to visit the UN and not feel a little bit optimistic about the future of the world. Diplomacy is never easy, and yes, we’ve got massive global challenges ahead of us, but it’s amazing to visit a place where all the countries of the world have come together to try to solve big problems. World hunger, nuclear disarmament, climate change — the world gathers here, at a campus on 1st Avenue, to try to find the answers.

I was familiar with a lot of the places we saw on the tour. I’d seen the big Assembly Hall on the news. I’d seen photos of delegates sitting around the table of the Security Council Chamber. But there were a few rooms I’d never seen.

One was the chamber for the Economic and Social Council. The room was designed in 1952 from Swedish architect Svem Markelius.

It’s a beautiful room, featuring wood from Swedish forests. But there’s one particularly unique feature of the room: The ceiling is unfinished.

That’s on purpose, our tour guide informed us. It’s a subtle reminder: The ceiling is unfinished because the work of the UN will always be unfinished. There will always be more to do.

Here’s to whatever work and whatever challenges lie in the year ahead.

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I took that photo of the Economic and Social Council chamber on a visit to the UN.

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Try It For Yourself.

A purple pencil and yellow pencil on pink and yellow paper.

There’s this great piece of research out from the teams at Trusting News and the News Revenue Hub. They worked with five non-profit newsrooms that serve communities in five different states — Connecticut, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin — to test messages around the work these newsrooms do and how they operate. All five tested out similar messages.

The results?

There was no clear trend across participants, which is to say that each newsroom had different messaging work best for them.


This tells us that each organization is unique and has a unique relationship with their audience. We plan to test this more in the future, but for now, this indicates… that every newsroom should assess their own data and audience feedback regularly and tailor their messaging accordingly.

It echoes something I advise my own clients: Don’t just assume that what worked for someone else will work for you. Use the work you’ve seen from others as a starting point — but then test out those ideas and see what actually works for you and your team.

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That photo of pencil and paper comes via Unsplash and Dev Asangbam.

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No Shortcuts.

a photo of the corner kick area of a soccer field

Everyone wants to go as fast as they can go. Everyone wants to find ways to move a little bit faster. Many are willing to cut corners.

But resist the urge to chase shortcuts.

The good stuff takes time: Building relationships, testing new ideas, talking to your audience. There are no shortcuts there — you’re going to have to do the work, and the work doesn’t always happen quickly.

Be patient, and embrace the work. It’s the way forward.

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That photo of the corner of a soccer field comes via Unsplash and David Pisnoy.

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Maximize What You Have.

I’ll often talk with newsletter operators who tell me they want to launch another new thing: Another course, another ebook, another product.

But the question I always have to ask is: Have you gotten everything you can out of the stuff that’s already out there?

I’ll see newsletters with great engagement that are missing obvious monetization opportunities, like running ads or affiliate content.

I’ll see operators with a paid membership who aren’t promoting it nearly as much as they could — even though with every new member they get, they’re getting more value out of a thing they’re already working on.

Forget about launching new stuff for a second. Look at what you’re already doing — is there an opportunity there to get more out of the work you’re already doing?

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That’s a random snippet of emails in my inbox at the moment. (I’m not trying to pick on any of these particular newsletter operators!)

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