Tag: keep going

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A Year Ago Today.

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.

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It Takes Longer Than You Think.

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.

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Keep Coming Back to Your Lists.

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.

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Spinning in Circles.

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.

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That’s Probably Normal.

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.

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Make Time to Review.

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.

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Just Ask The Question.

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.

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Shift, Pivot, or Sunset?

The sun sets behind clouds as trees glow in the foreground.

We sometimes need to make a change with the work we do. The question is: How big a change do you need to make?

Sometimes, you just need to make a shift. The change is small — you’re refocusing on something new, but it’s within the normal scope of what you’d do already.

Sometimes, you need to pivot. You’re making a big change — taking your skills and applying them to something outside your current orbit. The skills and the work might look similar, but you’re doing it in a different space.

And sometimes, you need to sunset things. You’ve done the work, you’ve learned the skills, but you’re ready for something brand new. You’re ready to shut down what you’re doing and move into a brand new field.

For my work, for instance, a shift would be changing my focus from working with newsrooms to working exclusively with non-profits. A pivot would be moving from newsletter consulting to building an agency to help newsletters grow. And to sunset would mean shutting down Inbox Collective to focus on something new.

None of these match where I’m at right now, but maybe they will be in the future. When it comes time to make a change, the big question remains: Shift, pivot, or sunset?

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That’s a photo of a sunset, taken by Dawid Zawiła for Unsplash.

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Keep Making It Better.

A few years ago, I was working on a project with the team at Poynter. They had a landing page for their newsletters, but it wasn’t very good. There weren’t any details about any of their newsletters — what they were, who wrote them, when they’d show up in your inbox. As a result, the page wasn’t driving many sign-ups.

I showed them a bunch of options for how we could make things better. We all agreed on a new template — but it was going to take a long time for us to build out that ideal page. Instead of waiting until that page was done, we decided we’d first take a small step in the right direction.

That next step was to update the existing page with more details about the newsletters. It wasn’t perfect, but it was an improvement over what they had.

And then, a few weeks later, the Poynter team launched the final version of the page, which had a brand-new design, more details about each newsletter, and the ability to easily sign up for multiple newsletters at once.

I tell my teams often: Direction is more important than speed. Everyone wants to make big leaps forward — but sometimes, the right move is to take small steps in the right direction.

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Those are screenshots of the Poynter newsletter page. Thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for the screenshots of earlier versions of the page.

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New Magic in Old Material.

Colin Hay plays guitar in front of a crowd at New York's City Winery.

I went to see Colin Hay, the former frontman for Men at Work, perform this week. He was great, as I’d hoped, but what really wowed me was watching him create new variations on old songs. Five decades of playing songs meant that he could improvise in the moment, taking one song and intertwining it into the next. He seemed to find new magic in old material.

And it was a reminder for me of how important it is to keep making adjustments. There are certain talks I’ve given over and over again, but I’m always trying to find ways to tweak things to keep it fresh. The core message is the same, but the delivery keeps changing.

You could play the same hits the same way, I suppose, but there’s something to be said for the performer who finds ways to keep things feeling new.

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I took that photo of Colin Hay performing at City Winery in New York on Monday, April 1.

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