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.
I ask myself this a few times a quarter when projects start to pile up: I’ve got a lots of things to tackle. Where should I start?
And the truth is: You can start anywhere — as long as you start.
I know I can find myself paralyzed by all those choices. Instead of getting stuff done, I end up worrying about all the stuff I have to get done. (And then I find myself with a lot less time to actually do the things I need to do!)
Don’t worry about finding the perfect starting place. The end result is far more important than where you start.
Start somewhere, and go from there.
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That’s a photo of an American Airlines jet taking off, with pink flowers blurred in the foreground and the moon behind. It was taken by Sachin Amjhad for Unsplash.
I read this line in a New Yorker article, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since: “They never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”
There have been so many times when I’ve showed up for something without knowing exactly what I might get out it. I didn’t want to miss out on something, even if I wasn’t sure what it was! When you show up, you don’t always stumble into something good — but sometimes, you do. (Case in point: My MLK Day story.)
Point is: There are certain opportunities that only come along when you take the time to show up. Don’t miss the opportunity to miss an opportunity. Just show up and see what presents itself.
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That’s a photo of a departures board with flights from Singapore’s airport to destinations around Asia. It seemed as appropriate a photo for the “show up” message as any. It was taken by Benjamin Wong for Unsplash.
It’s been a busy week. We went to a wedding last weekend and are going to another in 48 hours. I’ve got some new clients starting this month, a few talks coming up, and generally just a lot of work happening. It’s a ton for a small business like mine — and of course, having a 1-year-old at home adds a whole lot to your plate.
So I really could’ve done without coming home on Sunday night to find that the garage door opener wasn’t working. it was just one thing too much for me to handle — the classic straw that broke the camel’s back.
I got myself twisted in knots for a few minutes about the garage door opener. I procrastinated for a day and got myself more angry about it. Really? Now this? And then I stopped spinning my wheels and decided to fix just the one thing.
I went to YouTube (bless you, YouTube), and found a tutorial. Two minutes later, I’d fixed the garage door. (Turns out it was a super simple fix. I literally just had to push a button.)
I still have a mountain of work to do. But just getting that one tiny task completed felt like a victory. I did this one thing — I can do the rest.
I didn’t need to do it all. I just needed to take care of that one thing.
I’ve been keeping a daily journal for well over a decade now. Every night, I write a little note to myself about what I did that day or what I learned. Often, I’ll go back and look through old entries to remind myself of the progress that I’ve made or the things I’ve done.
But what I didn’t expect about parenting is that my phone’s photo album would be just as powerful of a reminder tool.
I’ll often look back through the archives to see what photos I took a year ago on this date. With a one-year-old, the photos are astonishing — could our son really have been that small a year ago? That bald? Remember that outfit? He used to fit into it all the time! Remember that trip we took? Yeah, that was a year ago today, too.
The time really does go by as quickly as everyone says, and it’s by grounding yourself in these moments from the past that you can appreciate the progress. I know a year from now, I’ll be amazed at the things my son is doing that he couldn’t in the fall of 2024.
Make time to pause and to rewind. We all need those moments to show us how far we’ve come.
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That’s a screenshot of my phone’s photo album. A funny thing happens when you have a kid: You replace lots of photos of food and trips with literally thousands of photos of your kid.
Last night, we went down to Sundance to see a few singer-songwriters from Nashville — Trannie Anderson, Josh Jenkins, and Matt Jenkins — perform on stage as part of a series of concerts with Nashville’s famed Bluebird Cafe. Together, the three of them have written songs played by some of the biggest artists in country music: Lainey Wilson, Walker Hayes, Keith Urban.
But as they told stories about their work, one thing came up over and over again: It takes an awful lot of writing songs just to get one song on an album. The Jenkins brothers told a story about writing a song for an artist, who passed on it — before deciding to record it several years later. Anderson told a story about working a job as a dog walker for a famous country musician who ended up recording one of her songs almost a decade later. All of the artists on stage said that they might have to write a 100 or more songs just get one that’s worthy of being recorded. (And there’s still no guarantee that the song will end up on an album!)
Sure, there are overnight success stories out there, but to me, the night was a reminder that it usually takes a lot of work, a lot of patience, and a lot of rejection to get to where you want to go.
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I took that photo during the show. The stage at Sundance is absolutely spectacular — it’s built into the hill, with just a little backlight against the dark night sky. If you get a chance to go there for a concert, you should.
I have all sorts of to-do lists. I’ve got a list of ideas — “somedays,” I call them — that I want to try. I’ve got notes written down on yellow legal pads and in various Google Docs. I know I won’t act on many of these ideas.
I never worry about running out of ideas, but I know that sometimes, I forget about a really good idea. So it’s helpful to keep coming back to these lists to look through things. What am I still excited about? What could I work on as part of another project? Often, I find a chestnut in one of these docs — but I have to make sure to make time to review and give each of the ideas some thought. I don’t want to let anything slip through the cracks.
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That photo of a small notepad and wooden pencil on top of a wood table, was taken by Michaela St for Unsplash.
My son has this funny habit. We’ll take him upstairs to the hallway in front of his room. There will be a few doors open: One to his room, one to the guest bathroom, and one to the guest bedroom. Ben will start to crawl towards one room — but then pause, and spin towards another, and the pause, and spin towards a third. Sometimes, he’ll spin in a circle, for an entire minute or two, unsure what room to crawl towards. There are just too many choices!
And I get it! I often do this myself. I’ll have one too many choices, and instead of just making a choice, I spin my wheels and end up going nowhere.
But the next time I find myself doing that, I’ll try to think about Ben moving in circles. When he does, I try to give him a little pat on the butt to nudge him forward. It doesn’t really matter what choice he makes — he just needs to make one. I need to remember to do the same.
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That photo is from Joel Fulgencio for Unsplash, and it’s of a series of blue walls, with holes cut in the middle, that are in Hong Kong on top of a parking garage. It reminds me a little of when you’re standing between two mirrors, and the reflections seem to go on forever.
On a call today, a client asked me an interesting question. “A few people unsubscribe every time we send an email,” they said. “Is that normal, or is that something that happens just to us?”
The good news, I told them, is that it happens to everyone. I used to write a newsletter called This Week in Cats, which had a 60%+ open rate — at a time in which being above 40% was rare — and we saw unsubscribes every week. (I still have no idea what those readers thought they were getting into.) If that newsletter lost readers every week, then every newsletter will lose readers.
But the bigger thing: I’m glad they had the courage to ask the question. Building something new can be a lonely business. It takes guts to be willing to ask: Is this normal? Or am I going through something that nobody else goes through?
Be brave enough to ask. You might find that what you’re going through is a lot more common than you think.
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That’s a photo of an early edition of This Week in Cats, featuring that week’s cat of the week — a cat, with a white belly and brown and black striped fur, sitting upright and looking surprisingly sad.
Jon Stewart did this great interview the other day with Matthew Belloni on “The Town” podcast, and this part really stuck with me:
Jon Stewart: Post-mortem is the gift to the gods in terms of improving content and really anything.
Matthew Belloni: So Tuesday morning, it’s, “What did we do right? What did we do wrong? Did this land? Did this not?”
Jon Stewart: It‘s Monday night, and it has to be an agnostic process. It’s not a blame process. It’s always a constructive, like, “How do you feel that worked out?” You always have to be self-examining, reflective of the process, little things, because it’s the only thing that keeps you on top of it.
It’s a lesson I think more of us could apply to our work.
Running an end-of-the-year campaign? Make sure you put time on the calendar the week after the campaign ends to review everything and document lessons for next time.
Launching a new newsletter? Set up check-ins on the calendar every few months to make sure you’re meeting your goals and want to continue investing in that newsletter.
Building a new business? Make sure you hold quarterly reviews to track what’s what working, what isn’t, and what you want to do next.
It’s not enough to put the work out into the world. You also have to make space to review, reflect, and iterate.
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That photo of Jon Stewart accepting a Peabody Award on stage in 2005 — he’s in a black suit with a dark tie and is behind a podium with a gold replica of the award — comes via the Peabody Awards and a Creative Commons license.
Before my son was born, I wondered how long it would take before I asked a truly stupid question.
Other friends had told me their stories about asking that first dumb question. One friend confessed that they called the pediatrician’s emergency line the first night home from the hospital because their child was crying. “Yeah, they’ll do that,” the pediatrician chuckled, and hung up. Another told me that they misinterpreted the doctor’s instructions before leaving the hospital. They called the pediatrician the day after they got home, reporting back that they child had pooped three times when the doctor had told them to make sure their newborn pooped once. “We meant at least once, not only once!” the pediatrician laughed. Every new parent, it seemed, asked something stupid.
I was a new dad who’d never changed a diaper before. The only thing I knew for certain was that I knew nothing. I knew I was going to ask something dumb — eventually, at least.
It took me 45 seconds.
Ben was born, and the doctors called me over to a little scale where they were weighing Ben. I looked down at his tiny feet. They were black.
I hadn’t remembered reading anything about black feet in any of the parenting books.
So I asked them: Are his feet supposed to be black? Is that normal?
That’s when they held up a piece of paper with his tiny footprint on it. They’d pressed his feet in black ink to make the footprint.
It was the first of what would be many, many stupid questions.
But getting that first one out of the way really did help! With a baby, new stuff happens all the time, and I quickly became unafraid to ask, even when I knew the answer was going to be something obvious. I didn’t have to preface questions with, “I know this might be a dumb question, but….” I just asked.
I constantly remind myself: There’s so much I don’t know, and there’s no reason to pretend like I know everything.
Even when it feels like it might be a stupid question, I now just ask.
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That photo at top is of me the night we got home from the hospital. I’d changed about five diapers at that point. I didn’t have my technique down, but hey, I got better.
