Time-Bound vs. Timeless

I have been thinking a lot about time-bound content vs. timeless content, and this recent post from Nathan Barry helped me frame it well. The former — if presented correctly — can improve and even inform the latter.

Instead of considering short form posts an annoying requirement to stay relevant, we can think of them as opportunities to test and refine our ideas—opportunities that also happen to build our audience.

If you have a decade of experience, hard skills, and a refined idea already ready to share, sure, write the book.

But most of us have ideas that would benefit from further refinement. Shorter form content doesn’t have to be a distraction from the deeper, “more important” writing or something you “need” to do to stay on the hamster wheel of relevancy. It can be a chance to workshop your ideas.

When you share short form versions of your ideas in public, you’ll discover new references and get feedback that will hone your idea into something even better.

The problem is when the only thing you’re doing is shorter form, ephemeral content with no focus on longevity and impact. Having a bigger vision gives purpose to your daily habits and ensures you’re building toward the plan you have for the next decade.
Nathan Barry Newsletter

Talking to Customers

This is just straight up stolen from the James Clear newsletter this week. It’s smart, and I have found it to be true.

Entrepreneur and investor Paul Graham on the common mistake made by entrepreneurs (and anyone hoping to make something new):

“What you will get wrong is that you will not pay enough attention to your users.

You will make up some idea in your own head that you will call your “vision”, and you will spend a lot of time thinking about your vision. In a cafe. By yourself. And build some elaborate thing without going and talking to users, because that’s doing sales, which is a pain in the ass, and they might say no.

You will not ship fast enough because you’re embarrassed to ship something unfinished, and you don’t want to face the likely feedback that you will get from shipping. You will shrink from contact with the real world, contact with your users. That’s the mistake you will make.”
A Conversation with Paul Graham

Journaling Three Wins

I have started writing three wins down in my journal at the end of the day. This is good because it reminds me of what was done in a given day, but it’s also good because it encourages me (even subconsciously) to have something to write down at the end of the day. I get excited to write interesting things down at the end of the day, which pushes me to get off Twitter and get to work in a given day.

Leveraging What You Cannot Control

My friend Joseph LaMagna writes an excellent newsletter on golf strategy, analytics and gives terrific insight. His most recent post is about aiming away from trouble and being smart with course management. This sentence stood out as one that could also be applied to life.

There is only so much that is within your control. Appreciating and leveraging what you cannot control is far more valuable than fighting against it.
Joseph LaMagna

There’s Magic in Story Writing

I enjoyed this little tidbit from my guy, Dalton Mabery, who writes a blog and newsletter that I love.

John Steinbeck’s anti-advice for aspiring writers: “If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.”

On Subscription Sites

I found this on Techcrunch’s subscription process interesting.

Matching those revenues was a structural advantage in terms of traffic. As one of the most venerable sites covering tech on the web, major announcements from Elon Musk, Tesla, Apple, Facebook and other big technology companies drove heavy traffic to TechCrunch. Most of this was relayed via Google Search and Google News, and at times, more than 90% of the site’s traffic came from just those two sources. Critically, this coverage was eminently affordable. Writing up an article on the latest ravings of Elon Musk might take about 15 minutes (there usually wasn’t that much to say other than his statement, after all), but that one article could drive 100,000 page views or more. That was the secret treasure that funded the real in-depth reporting: cheap coverage of a big tech company coupled with the lucre of comparatively extraordinary ad revenue.
Lux Capital

I find the above to be true broadly for most media companies. I also find it to be a horrible long-term strategy. You are not building any affinity for your product or your brand or your reputation. You’re simply submitting yourself to the machine.

The most important challenge of modern media is balancing an audience’s desire for certain types of stories with a human reporter’s ability to deliver them. Unlike a tech company building an app or a cloud service, this is not an easy product to iterate. If you want to improve coverage of the automotive industry, an editor must seek out and develop a reporter who loves cars and understands how they get manufactured; what points of competition exist between companies; what auto economics are and how they are changing; and what disruption might look like for the industry in the years ahead. Passion plus perspective plus precision is asking a lot of one person or even a small band of reporters.
Lux Capital

It might be asking a lot (it is), but Passion plus perspective plus precision is also a worthy mission statement for any media company or individual.