Why I fell down, and why I got back up

Hey!

If you’re in the States, Happy Labor Day.

Also, if you’re in the States, stop reading this and spend some time with yourself or your family.

If you’re not going to do that, stop reading this and learn a little something about our country’s labor history (see: The Triangle Fire, Bread and Roses Strike, Barbara Koppel’s documentary American Dream, or basically any page of the People’s History of the United States).

If you’re outside the States, or are simply planning on ignoring all that advice, please, read on…

Today in the newsletter:

• I fell down

• Why I got back up

I fell down

I’ve been remarkably consistent with my content over the past three months. Remarkable for me, anyway.

Specifically, I have posted 5-6 days a week on LinkedIn, published at least one short form video, and published this letter every week, and published one long form video to YouTube every other week.

Two things I know about myself:

1. I am a spontaneous person. I feel alive when I am flying by the seat of my pants.

2. I am terrible at maintenance. Home maintenance, relationship maintenance, financial maintenance, it does not matter, I suck at it.

So, in order for me to be so consistent, I have to treat content like a practice. I have to build careful process around ideating, producing, and publishing. Then I have to treat it like a regimen.

So when I fall down, as we all sometimes do, I’m less interested in how than why?

I interrupted a routine, a routine that was working for me and (because it is a practice) was contributing to my well being. Why did I stop?

I think the most important thing you can do when you are unhappy with an action or behavior of your own is to STOP beating yourself up about it and START asking yourself why.

Here are the conclusions I came to:

• I had a big launch last week and a few meetings that caused me to think about the future, rather than the present. These are good things, possibilities… but they took my eye off the ball. Am I ok with that? Yeah, probably - as long as I understand it.

• Some of the good things that happened during the week made me rethink whether I was taking the right approach to content and audience strategy. Am I ok with this? Yes, rethinking is core to my approach to strategy and life in general. BUT… rethinking, retooling, readdressing should be built into your process. Three months is about right for this, but rather than scheduling a pause, evaluating, and recommitting, I let these questions deflate my will to stay consistent.

My takeaway for you is:

Build rethinking into your process. Schedule it, design it, and make it the benchmark you’re working towards with your consistency.

Studies show that you can run farther, faster, if you have a visual target. You may be running a marathon, with the end point two dozen miles away, but if you always keep a goal within vision, within reach, you will perform better.

Being kind to yourself means being flexible. Stop beating yourself up and start figuring out why.

Ask any health coach- when you’re on a diet or a workout routine, the worst thing you can do is be too rigid. Some encourage you to build “cheat days” into your routine, others just encourage you to listen to your body.

You know what not one single coach who is worth anything ever said? “You cheated on your diet so the best choice now is to just give up.”

You want to beat yourself up. You want to prove you are resilient. And yeah, of course you want to get back up.

But my advice is - don’t wallow in the dip, use the dip. Use it to fricking rest. Add some value in your life and work by taking a deep breath and catching up.

But also, use it to ask why - to learn something about your conviction, your intention, or your performance.

You want to make sure that, when you get back up, it’s for a reason. It’s with conviction. It’s moving you closer to your goal.

Why I got back up

It was the most fun I’ve ever had watching basketball. Dwayne Wade put the Miami Heat on his back in 2006 and won an NBA championship. He averaged 34.7/7.8/3.8 in the Finals.

What Wade did on the court felt impossible and the way he did it felt defiant.

I ate that shit up. I was feeling the exact same way.

By June of 2006, Jeff and I had launched Bright Red Pictures, the very first iteration of Bright Red Pixels, on our conviction that internet video was about to happen.

We were making our first video podcasts and, in five short months, we would launch Wallstrip with Howard Lindzon.

We were in it.

Have you ever felt that way?

I’ll level with you… I feel that way now. And that’s why I got back up.

What’s possible is always tethered to expectations. Maybe you meet expectations for what is possible, or maybe you blow them away.

But no matter what, those possibilities are defined by their relationship to expectations.

When expectations change- it ushers in a whole new universe of possibilities. That’s when I start to feel urgency.

In 2006, expectations about video were changing. Apple stuck video into their most popular product, the iPod. They didn’t change the price, they didn’t make a separate video iPod.

They simply changed the expectation. And what was possible began to change.

Now it’s not Apple. It’s Open AI. It’s Zoom. It’s TikTok. It’s Personality Led Growth. It’s this:

Expectations about Content are changing.

Which means possibilities are changing.

Here’s the best advice I can give anyone reading this. ]

When you have a conviction about something, get in it.

Don’t wait for things to get clear. You can’t plot your course on a map. There is no map.

If you wait the opportunity won’t be there for you anymore.

I got back up because I feel that urgency now. If you have conviction about something, you owe it to yourself to fight through. To get back up. To see it through.

Your success in meeting a moment of conviction is defined by only two things:

1. Patience - waiting as long as it takes for the right opportunity

2. Preparation - when the time comes, being ready to strike quickly with force. All that time spent waiting must be time spent positioning and preparing.

Canva collabs ftw

The most important thing I maintain in my life is my relationship with my daughter and the consistency of my parenting.

And like I told you, I suck at maintenance.

So I’m always looking for little routines, games, and moments that can strengthen our relationship.

One thing we tried recently was a canva collaboration. My daughter uses Canva at school, and I use it constantly for work. So we started a new project.

She went first, and used AI to create a background based on her imagination. Then we traded the computer back and forth, each adding a little something, building our image together.

All together, it took about an hour and we created two images. Here’s my favorite.

Super fun, super easy, and creative - I call it a win!

But also… what are we doing? We’re ideating, we’re working together, we’re building a creative process, and most importantly we are shipping our work.

That makes it a solid lesson for my daughter and for me. Maybe for you too.

Until next time,

Be Spontaneous 🦋

ae