Daily Inspire
Weekday encouragement and weekend insights for people doing meaningful things.
The Simplest Flow
SUPPORTED BY SQUARESPACE Hey Reader, One of my favorite creators right now is Katelyn Bourgoin, the founder of Why We Buy, and one of the most empathy-driven entrepreneurs I've ever seen. Katelyn digs deep into buyer psychology and I recently saw how she (automatically) adjusts her language and product recommendations depending on the buyer's specific problem. She asks a multiple choice question in her emails, assigns them custom tags, and based on that tag will send a dedicated welcome...
Magic in your junk drawer
SUPPORTED BY HALF-OFF HOSTING Hey Reader, When I was a kid, I had a junk drawer full of random springs and metal parts and scrap pieces I found in my Dad's garage. It was the bottom drawer in my nightstand and every evening I'd open it, sit on the floor cross-legged, and see what I could make. One time I made a Home Alone style door knob trap. It worked. Another time I made a perfectly usable slingshot. Ask my brother if it worked. But perhaps my favorite invention was a pulley-system basket...
My Best-Selling Products & Services
SUPPORTED BY SHOUTOUT.IO Hey Reader, Are you self-critical? Or are you one of those weirdos who has radical self-acceptance? (In which case, can we hang out?). Because one thing I notice about self-critical people like me is we've got a funny little wound around acceptance. Someone, somewhere said we were weird or different or too much or not enough and we made the mistake of internalizing it––of using every experience we could to justify why they're right. And oh boy, does that take its toll...
The Painter and The Architect
THANKS TO POCKET-SIZED COACHING Hey Reader, Yesterday, my business coach made an observation about the way I work that was both amusing and accurate (if not a little bit vulnerable). He said, "The thing that excites you and the thing that makes you feel guilty are the same thing." I'd mentioned how I love working in sprints which ultimately requires significant rest to recharge––and I feel guilty about that, but there's something about the urgency of sprints that just gives my brain the...
A New Kind of Business Bet
SUPPORTED BY STUDIO Hey Reader, When I was 14, my aunt said very plainly said to me: "Do you think I'd be in this relationship if I could support myself?" I was shocked. Partly because she admitted this to me but also because I didn't realize anyone could feel this way––like they couldn't figure something out. Color me naive, but I believed that come hell or high water, figuring things out was the thing we could all do. But I was wrong and lots of people don't believe that at all. When I...
Your 2-Step Guide for Overcoming Fear
SUPPORTED BY SQUARESPACE Hey Reader, Have you ever felt like you know exactly what to do, but are scared to actually do it? Even when something's good for you, change is scary. The trick for overcoming that fear and doing the thing you want is this: You can either make the thing less scary OR make the scary matter less. Make it less scary This is possible by priming our brain, and there's only two ways I know how to do that: Take on little bits at a time. Have a public talk coming up? Make a...
The Power of Real Life
SUPPORTED BY SQUARESPACE Hey Reader, What do you get when you put 40 extremely generous creative entrepreneurs in a room with unlimited coffee, curated dinners, and prompts for sharing best practices, personal blocks, and underrated opportunities? You get The Lab IRL. This in-person event by Creator Science takes its online community offline for an opportunity to collaborate, share, and connect in an industry which is more lonely than any of us care to admit. We met in a boutique hotel in...
The Business Case for Kindness
Supported by Kit Hey Reader, I'm sitting at a coffee shop in Phoenix––the first ever specialty shop here––reminiscing about the start of this spot. Back in the day, it was about pretentious baristas and great coffee. They were the leading local roaster for years, and knew it. Not only did they know it, but were kind of assholes about it. The comments and reviews were always about the pretentious vibe and the stuck-up staff, but we all dealt with it. They could afford to be assholes. And that...
Doing the opposite ☕️
Supported by Kit Hey Reader, When I was a kid, there was this bright red tunnel-slide in the park. Maybe it's still there; maybe there's a version of it in every park. But it's fully enclosed and the inside has an orange tint from the sunlight. And depending on your proportion, you'd either fly down and skip your butt on the grass or get stuck mid-way and have to scoot down. But the best part of that slide was turning around and climbing up from the inside. It defied design and reason, and...
Could you do less and be more?
SUPPORTED BY GUSTO Hey Reader, 55% of people in the US are experiencing real burnout right now. I believe it. Do you? Because it doesn't feel like just a statistic. It feels like real life: my inbox, my feed, my conversations with clients. We're all feeling the weight of having opinions about everything because everything requires an opinion these days. It's a particular exhaustion of caring deeply in a world that keeps adding things to care about. I don't want to add to that, so I'm not...
Weekday encouragement and weekend insights for people doing meaningful things.