034: Reader Mailbag (III)

This reminds me of the book The Dot and the Line.
I love metaphors. Visual or otherwise.
And questions.

This resonates with what I learned in one of my classes during b-school. It's about how you have to get worse before you see progress (can't go straight from the circle to the star - there has to be a dip).

People get impatient during that phase where we get worse.

Another is about vulnerability: People are afraid to embrace new challenges, whether it's learning a new skill, looking for new/better ways, or correcting themselves to be on the right path.

This one reminds me of a crossroads I perceive in launching a service. The first iteration is thrilling. Clients are engaged, the coach is passionate about the work etc. Then at some point, there's a lull.

I think when we pay close attention, we can see whether the service needs more of our energy, a structural change, or to be let go entirely. Hopefully this awareness allows us to find an upward trajectory or a different project. When we DON'T pay close attention, we risk the gradual bleeding of stressed energy.

I'm doing some Spring cleaning this weekend, and while the results of that may not be as cool as generating a bunch of revenue, you certainly end up feeling like you're going backwards as you clean before you get to the better end point.

The blue line accurately represents they way I felt about living abroad.

At first it was difficult and we def faced some doubt. But once we got settled in (about 1 year), the benefit of living outside the US / in Europe really took off exponentially. Y axis would be happiness prob in this case. We coulda continued living a fine and dandy life in Central Sq and things would be alright.

Moving abroad may have challenged us a bit in that first year, but we've been so f***ing happy here since then.

It reminded me of Paul Graham’s piece "Do Things That Don’t Scale" - have you seen this?

A lot of people think I’m “bad at marketing” because I don’t have a gigantic social media following and a lot of my business comes from word-of-mouth referrals. But I care about outcomes, not big numbers.

With a Twitter following of “only” 500 humans, I’m making a good living doing what I love most in the world—and the business is only about 1 year old. Some people keep pressuring me to put effort into things like social media, to do more to scale visibly in the near term. But I care much more about serving my existing network and gaining everlasting respect through 1:1 attention.

True to your post, as time passes, I’m earning more and more of that respect, and that yields a lot of benefits.

Mailbag - The Fire Jar

Letters to the editor. Readers respond! 📫

The Fire Jar