Tag: keep going

In the past 24 hours, I stumbled upon two very similar quotes from two very different people.

The first: I was reading a New York Times essay by Christoph Niemann about a trip to Eastern Europe, and he quoted former Estonian President Lennart Meri, who in 1992, just a year after his country was granted independence from Russia, famously said: “Our situation is shit, but this is the fertilizer for our future.”

The second: J.B. Smoove of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” went on a podcast recently to talk about his comedy career, and he said, “I like to plant seeds. I’m a seed planter. Whether that tree grows a week, a month, a year, five years, ten years from now, at some point, it’s going to grow. It’s just a matter of how fast it’s gonna grow.”

None of us really knows what things will look like a few weeks or a months down the road. We don’t know if we’re headed for a recession, a depression, a global change in the way we do business — or if this all just a blip.

But what I do know is that this is a moment for us to plant seeds. In the next few weeks, I’m going to launch a few small projects — some on my own, some with partners in the news space — to try to be helpful. I’m not focused on driving revenue with these projects. The goal is just to help, in the way I can be helpful, at a time of need.

Long term, my hope is that the help I give and the relationships I build now will lead to interesting things down the road — whenever and whatever that might be.

As the former President of Estonia and a guy on HBO both wisely noted: Now’s the moment to plant the seeds for whatever’s next.

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That photo of plants growing comes via Unsplash and photographer Markus Spiske.

A friend is starting a brand new job on Monday, after more than a decade in his previous role. We were chatting the other day, and I was asking him: What’s it going to be like starting a new job like this? How are you going to approach it?

His reply was incredibly smart:

I’ve got a lot of big ideas for the job, he told me. But my job isn’t to tear everything down and start fresh. I want to figure out how to take what they’re already doing and make it better. So the first couple of weeks, my job is simple: I need to ask a lot of questions, listen to the team around me, and then try to figure out how to get others to buy into the vision that I have for the job.

I love everything about that reply:

1.) He’s putting listening first.

2.) He’s trying to build a team with a shared vision.

3.) He’s thinking about incremental changes as a way to build respect and drive the organization in the right direction.

Big changes don’t happen overnight — direction is more important than speed. But if you listen, if you get others to buy in, and if you work to make positive changes — even small ones — you can make a difference in the long run.

That illustration is by Katerina Limpitsouni for unDraw.

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:

• Ask something to learn something.

• Make something to learn something.

• Meet someone to learn something.

Whatever you do, keep learning. There’s always going to be more to learn.

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That illustration is by Katerina Limpitsouni for unDraw.

What are you good at? Think about it for a moment. What skills do you bring to the table? What are your best qualities or habits?

Then think about your team at work. What is your team best at? What are your collective strengths?

Lastly, think about your entire workplace. What is your organization great at? What do you do well?

Give yourself a second, and really think about your strengths.

Now think about your weaknesses. Think about yourself, your team, and your organization. What do you do poorly? What do you need to improve on?

Now let’s consider one more thing: If you had an opportunity to improve one of these things — to double down on your strengths, or to better your weaknesses — which would you choose?

Many would choose to improve their weaknesses. That’s natural. People tend to focus on their own faults — I’m not good enough, I’m not smart enough, I’m not talented enough — and would love to have the chance to improve.

But my advice would be to do just the opposite: Do more of the things you already do uniquely well. Take the things you’re good at and truly master them.

Imagine for a second that you’re a Major League Baseball pitcher, pitching for a National League team. In the NL, pitchers have to hit, too, and even the best-hitting pitchers are, by any other standard, bad hitters. (Madison Bumgartner, one of the best-hitting pitchers ever, has a career .183 batting average.) Let’s say it’s the start of the offseason. You’ve got a few months to improve as a baseball player before the new season rolls around. So what would you do: Work on your hitting, and try to become a passable (but still poor) hitter? Or would you work on adding new pitches and becoming a dominant pitcher? The answer is easy: You’d work on your pitching. Baseball teams don’t need good-hitting pitchers — they need great-pitching pitchers.

It’s rare to find a true jack-of-all-trades. Most people specialize in just a few things — and that’s OK!

I started thinking about all of this a few weeks ago, when I was talking with a group of news organizations. Many of them were thinking about launching new newsletters, and trying to decide what to focus on. So I asked: What do you do uniquely well? What’s something you do that your fans fans already love? Many of them talked about their coverage of local news or sports or culture — the areas of expertise that their readers, listeners, and viewers rely on them for. That’s where to focus your attention, I told them. Invest in products to serve those audiences, and give them more of the things they already depend on you for.

There’s a great Steve Martin quote: “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” He’s right. Be so good they have to hire you. Be so good that your fans have to pay to get more of what you do. Identify your strengths — and work hard to get even better at the things you do well.

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I took that photo of San Antonio Missions pitcher Simón Castro — who later went on to pitch for the White Sox, Rockies, and As — back in 2010.

I was having a conversation the other night with a friend from college, and we were talking about how much has changed in the decade since we graduated. “Did you ever think you’d be doing the job you’re doing today?” she asked.

I didn’t. Ten years ago, my current role — being the person in charge of a newsletter program for a news organization — didn’t exist. It was six years ago this week that I launched my very first newsletter at BuzzFeed, and I remember struggling to find many other people in the industry who were working on email full time. There just weren’t that many of us around — email was usually a small part of someone’s job. Six years later, most newspapers, websites, and magazines have someone in a dedicated Newsletter Editor or Director of Newsletters role. (Often, they have an entire team devoted to email!)

I’ve been thinking about this a lot: The job I’m working in today didn’t exist five years ago. The job before that didn’t exist before I helped create it.

Which means that the job that comes next may not exist yet, either.

If you ever get worried about the future, remind yourself: There is no defined path forward. Embrace the uncertainty. Keep learning, keep reading, keep asking questions, keep working. Every day is a chance to build whatever future comes next.

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That’s a screenshot of the very first BuzzFeed Today newsletter, sent on Feb. 4, 2013.

“The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s eleven-thirty.”

That’s what Lorne Michaels, creator and producer of “Saturday Night Live,” said about “SNL.” As Tina Fey explained a few years ago:

This is something Lorne has said often about “Saturday Night Live,” but it’s a great lesson in not being too precious about your writing. You have to try your hardest to be at the top of your game and improve every joke until the last possible second, but then you have to let it go.

I remember reading those words back when “Bossypants” came out in 2011, and they stuck with me. In 2012, I decided to make a commitment to this blog, which I’d first started in 2008, but hadn’t written for regularly. I decided I wanted to write three times a week for the blog — and somehow, despite everything I was doing with Stry.us that year, I somehow stuck to it. Then I went through a lull — just a handful of posts per month. In 2015, I made myself re-commit to writing one post a week, and have stuck with that pace ever since.

I’ll admit: Many of my blog posts aren’t great. (In fact, they’re mostly bad!) But it’s something I always do. The work happens, and then I move on. Writing for this blog has taught me so much about how to do the work even when I’m in a creative rut.

Lorne and Tina are right: Don’t be too precious with your work. Your work isn’t going to be perfect. Some of it will suck. But the show goes on at 11:30 — just get it done.

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That illustration at top (of one of Dan Aykroyd’s most famous sketches), is titled ”SNL 40th Anniversary,” was created by James Gilleard, and is used here thanks to a Creative Commons license.

Most of my ideas are bad. Recently, I started a notebook that I’ve been filling exclusively with bad ideas: TV shows that should never get made, apps that should never be launched, products that should never be spoken of to another human being. It’s humbling to add another bad idea to the notebook. For every 100 ideas I have, 70 are incredibly bad, 20 are acceptably terrible, and maybe — if I’m lucky — 10 are decent enough to do something with.

And I think that’s a pretty good success rate.

In my time at BuzzFeed, I learned that it was OK to have ideas that didn’t work out. There was so much that we did at BuzzFeed that worked, and worked incredibly well. But for every launch that grew into something big, there were dozens of ideas that failed: BuzzFeed University (a program to get ad agencies to create their own BuzzFeed sponsored content), Star.me (a collaborative social media site that was a cross between BuzzFeed and Giphy), or Fre.sh (a leaderboard for the internet). These were the kinds of projects that, as Jonah Peretti wrote in a 2013 memo to the staff, “don’t distract from the core and have the potential to be much bigger in the medium term future.” They weren’t, but that didn’t matter. As the internet mantra goes: We failed fast, and often.

But here’s something I didn’t always understand about that saying: It’s not just about trying lots of things and seeing what sticks. The hard part is reminding yourself that it’s OK to be wrong.

I’ve never met anyone who liked being wrong. But I’ve met some who have accepted it as part of the process. You come up with ideas, or you test out a new theory, and it doesn’t work out. Then you have to admit to yourself and to your team that the thing you believed in isn’t worth pursuing anymore, or that you need to change course. (Sometimes, even when it’s painful, you’ll even have to admit to a colleague: “Yes, you were right.”) The most productive people I know have these conversations on a monthly basis — or sometimes, weekly.

In other words: If you’re doing things right, you’ll often be wrong.

It’s not easy to admit that your ideas aren’t great. It’s not easy to admit that you were wrong. It’s not easy to kill your darlings.

But it’s part of the process: Come up with lots of ideas, pick your favorites, and be willing to be wrong. Don’t get discouraged: Just because you were wrong before doesn’t mean you’ll be wrong forever. The great ideas will come soon enough.

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That photo of a stop symbol comes via Kai Pilger and Unsplash.