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 keep thinking about this line from poet Andrea Gibson in their book, “You Better Be Lightning”:
Regret is a time machine to the past Worry is a time machine to the future
I’m as guilty as any of having my head somewhere else. Sometimes that means thinking about mistakes I’ve made or things I could have done better. Sometimes that means spending too much time thinking about all the stuff I have to do in the weeks and months ahead.
Gibson’s lines are a reminder: Wherever your feet are, keep your head there. There’s work to do right here, right now. That’s where your mind needs to be, too.
This interview with Jason Alexander, of “Seinfeld” fame, popped up in my feed the other day, and I think it’s worth watching in full. In it, he says:
I went to Boston University as a theater major, and because William Shatner was my muse, I wanted a dramatic career. I really thought I was going to play some of the great classical roles and be a dramatic actor. Sure, I hadn’t done much comedy. I’d done some musicals, so there was that, but I hadn’t done much comedy. And the summer second semester of my sophomore year, I had a professor named James Spruill at Boston. He was the only black member of the faculty. He was a guy who had come up in the ‘60s with street theater — theater is to change the minds of the masses, affect change. He brought me into his office for my my semester consultation, and he had this great basso kind of James Earl Jones voice, and he sat back, and he just kind of nodded his head and looked at me for a minute. He went, “I know that your heart and soul is Hamlet, and you would be a profound Hamlet. You will never play Hamlet, so you best get good at Falstaff.”
And he basically said, look, look in the mirror. You are 5’6’’. You are 20 to 25 pounds overweight, and you are losing your hair. You have a large performing persona. If you want a a commercially successful career, you’re going to be a comedian, and you’re not embracing it, you’re not looking at it, you’re not doing it.
Had he not said to me, “You ain’t Hamlet, man,” I would have finished that school and gone into the professional world thinking, ”Here’s Jason Alexander and the Iceman cometh. It’s what everybody is waiting for.”
And I would have been wrong.
It’s such a wonderful reminder: We all need someone in our lives who’ll be truly honest with us. Sometimes, we need that person to lift us up. Sometimes, we need them to keep on the right path. But all we need those voices we can trust, and if you find someone who can do that, you owe it to yourself to listen to them. They’ve got something worth hearing, even if it’s not what you want to hear at that moment.
A funny thing about being a parent, especially a parent of a young child in daycare, is that your entire schedule can change in a moment.
One phone call from daycare — “Hey, your son has a runny nose and a weird cough, so I think you need to pick him up” — and suddenly, there goes your week. Calls get canceled, work gets postponed. That big project you wanted to do today? It’s definitely not happening today anymore! (And maybe not next week, either.)
All of this has made me weirdly grateful for the days when things go right. There are days when things actually work out, where the work gets done and your child comes home completely healthy. Those are great days, even if this winter, it feels like there are far fewer of them than before.
Still: The mindset shift is important. I used to get mad when the work didn’t get done. Now I know it’s part of being a parent — and it’s my job to adjust how I work, adjust what I work on, and adjust my mindset. I’m a dad and a business owner. This is just how things work now, and that’s part of what I signed up for.
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That’s a photo of my son carrying a reusable bag upstairs. Why? Who knows, but parenting means a lot of unexpected moments — like my son deciding that a bag is far more fun to play with than the toys we got him.
I had this moment yesterday where I wanted to skip ahead.
I sometimes get jealous of the parents who have a few kids who are already in elementary school. They’ve gotten through the toddler years where kids get sick every 20 minutes. (My son has RSV right now; so does everyone in his class.) They’ve gotten through sleepless nights and potty training. They can take their kids on big vacations and really do fun stuff with them.
Plus, they don’t need as much attention every day — so I could reclaim a bit of that time to get stuff done at work.
And then I thought about it some more and remembered: I don’t want to skip ahead. I don’t want to miss these moments. I hate that Ben is sick, but there are also wonderful moments these days, too. Yesterday, he climbed into my lap and gave me a huge hug — in a few years, he’ll be too big for that! (At this pace, he might be too big for that by July.) Those moments won’t last forever.
So I’m writing this to remind myself: I don’t want to hit fast-forward. I want to be here, right now, in the moments that will never happen again — big smiles and new foods and new experiences and colds and restless nights and all of that. This is part of the journey; I want to make the space to really be here for it.
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That’s a photo of Ben wearing my sunglasses around the supermarket. When I talk about not skipping ahead, I’m talking about moments like that — he’s such a silly little guy!
I set a big goal for 2025 — something I’ve never set in the six years I’ve run my business.
My big goal isn’t around revenue.
It isn’t about growth.
It isn’t about launching new products.
My goal? I want to be able to ski or play golf 50 times in 2025.
To me, success isn’t about building the biggest, most profitable business. It’s about making something that brings in the revenue I need, has the impact I want, and gives me the time to do the things I love.
If I can run a business that does all three, then I must be doing something right.
Here’s to a lot more days on the mountain in 2025 — and on the links this summer.
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That’s me on the mountain at Deer Valley a few weeks ago. If you see a tall guy in a loud jacket skiing around Park City, it might be me!
Well, last week was one of those weeks where everything seemed to go wrong. My wife got strep. My son got hand, foot, and mouth disease and had to be held out of daycare. The heat broke in our house.
And the day we were set to send our son back to daycare, there was a pinkeye outbreak at his school.
It was just one of those weeks.
Sometime around Wednesday, I decided that I wasn’t going to get anything big done. I had some sizable projects that I was hoping to tackle — and it was very clear those weren’t going to happen. My only goal was to make it to the end of the week.
So I declared Parenting Bankruptcy. I cleared everything off my to-do list, and made it my only goal to get to Friday.
The hard part about parenting — at least for me, a dad with a toddler — is time management. (I’m betting that I will have a very different take on this in a decade!) When things are good, there’s a good balance between parenting and work. But when a few things go wrong, the balance gets entirely out of whack.
I’ve had tough weeks before, though I can’t recall one where I kicked all of my to-dos to the next week. This was my first time declaring Parenting Bankruptcy.
I’m sure I’ll do it again one day. This whole “being a dad” thing isn’t always easy; there will be more days and weeks like this.
But I also have to remind myself: There will be even days and weeks where things are great, where my son is an absolute joy, and where I’m so grateful that I’m a dad.
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That’s a photo of my son reading at this little table in our living room, in a far quieter and less hectic moment than the one we went through last week.
One little thing that’s worked for me when it comes to New Year’s Resolutions: Starting just a little bit early.
I used to do the thing that everyone does: I picked a resolution or two at the end of the year, started in January, and completely quit on it by the end of the month.
But what I discovered works a little better for me is if I start now — not in January.
Let’s say the resolution is to work out more in the new year. (In this case, this is something I genuinely want to do next year!) I know that if I try to go from 0 to 60 in January, it probably won’t stick. I need a little time to warm up to the new habit.
So instead, I’ll start now — in December. I’ll put a few workout classes on my calendar. I’ll make sure to make time during the month to use that stationary bike. And by January, I’ll already have started to slowly build that habit.
Once you’ve gotten the ball rolling, it’s so much easier to keep it moving when January comes around.
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That is 100% not me on an exercise bike, but it is a lovely black-and-white photo of someone biking from Josh Nuttall for Unsplash.
I tried a little experiment in my newsletter today. At the top of the email, I wrote:
I’ve found LinkedIn to be a useful channel for meeting new folks and discovering interesting newsletter content, and I’d love if you connected with me there. But if you do, will you also attach a note to your connection request? I accept pretty much every request as long as they add a note…
I got about 20 requests on LinkedIn today. Of them, seven had a note attached.
I find that to be amazing. I don’t personally know most of the people making these requests — I hadn’t met one in person, to my knowledge, and in many cases, I hadn’t even received a previous email from them! Why would I connect with someone who I don’t even casually know?
I think part of this is how LinkedIn is set up. It’s really easy to send a connection request without adding a note. (In fact, I did that this evening — I clicked the button to connect but it didn’t pop up with the ability to send a message.) I’m also a little bummed — if I knew that these folks were definitely readers, I’d happily connect with them.
I know some people on LinkedIn hate all the notes because they feel obligated to reply to each one. (I usually reply with a “thanks, and thanks for reading!” Takes two seconds to do so.) But the little bit extra goes a long way — at least in my book.
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That’s the basic LinkedIn request form: “How do you know this person?” The screenshot is from Barry Schwartz and is re-used here thanks to a Creative Commons license.
Election Day was Tuesday, and the results are still rolling in. We know who the President will be, and we know who will control the Senate. The House is still up for grabs, and two toss-up Senate seats are not yet called, as well as many other local races around the country.
And yet, 48 hours later, I’m seeing a lot of pieces offering explanations as to what happened and why.
So what happened?
The truth is, we don’t really know yet. Most of the data — not just votes, but the behind-the-scenes data that can inform why people voted the way they did — isn’t in. We might not know for a while why the results were what they were.
I understand the desire to rush to provide answers. It’s frustrating to have to wait to understand something that just happened.
But what often happens is that the wrong lessons pop-up in the few days after the election, and those stick around even when they’re later proven inaccurate. I’d rather wait — the data, however long it takes, will help us understand what’s really going on (and what might happen next).
This is one of those cases where the only right answer — in the short-term, at least — might be to say, “I don’t know yet.”
I was driving down with my son to pick up my wife at the airport. It’s an easy drive — 35 minutes, especially on a low-traffic day like a Sunday. There was no one on the road when we left home. We left two hours early so I could run a few errands beforehand. I was already thinking about activities to fill all the extra time we might have.
The drive was going fine — until it wasn’t. About two miles before the highway exited the canyon out into Salt Lake City, we hit a standstill. What we didn’t know was that an 18-wheeler had crashed, and the road was completely closed. It would take officials nearly eight hours to re-open the road.
I almost always check Google Maps before we leave, just to make sure there’s no traffic to be aware of. Had I done that today, it would’ve re-routed me to an alternate road. That trip to Salt Lake would’ve taken an extra 15 minutes.
I didn’t, though.
Instead, we got stuck in traffic for over an hour. Luckily, after a whole lot of waiting, police were able to route smaller vehicles like mine over a bridge and to an alternate route. We did make it to the airport for pick-up — it just took two hours for what should’ve been a 35-minute trip. Even more luckily: My son napped through most of the traffic.
Still, it was a reminder: No matter matter how many times you’ve done something before, you still should go through your routine. A five-second check of Google Maps would’ve saved me 90 minutes.
Next time, even if it’s the 1,000th time I’ve done something, I’ll still make sure to check.
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That’s the photo I took while stopped in the canyon on I-80 today. We saw a out of red lights for a very long time. I’m grateful we didn’t have to sit there for 8 hours — I’m not sure what we would’ve done!
