Once a week, I break down what actually makes marketing work & how you can leverage your humanity to run your own business in a way that makes the self-aware robots jealous. Other times, I'm just in your inbox reminding you I'm in your corner and that community is our superpower (and also that swearing helps).
The creative crisis is coming from inside the business
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DISPATCH FROM A MEXICAN VILLA, WHERE SOMETHING DELIGHTFUL IS HAPPENING I'm sitting here in Puerto Vallarta, ocean breeze in my hair, Topo Chico in hand, watching some of my favorite business women have a collective epiphany. You'd think at a fancy business retreat we'd all be talking about scaling and systems and how to squeeze another zero onto our revenue. Instead? Several of us are writing novels, others have taken up crochet, and even more are plotting creative projects that have nothing to do with their "brand" and everything to do with making their souls feel less like shriveled-up raisins. Maybe it's because everything feels like it's teetering on the edge of collapse back home. Maybe it's because we're all seemingly one new law away from total dystopia. Maybe it's because we've collectively realized that in a world where everything could vanish in an instant, our spreadsheets aren't going to save us. But here we are, successful women on a business retreat, and what are we doing? We're talking about creating. About making art. About pursuing the kind of work that feeds our souls instead of just our bank accounts. I do believe that with AI seemingly taking over everything, that soon my robots will talk to your robots and we will sit by and watch because we're irrelevant now, creating is the most human thing we can do. None of us are planning to fully burn down our businesses or move to a commune. (Though maybe I’ll bring up the commune idea during our morning session.) Instead, we're all sitting here, surrounded by ocean views and fruit so delicious we’re looking up local real estate. We’re also asking questions like, "What if we could have both?" What if we could keep serving our clients, keep making the money, keep building something meaningful... BUT ALSO put our creativity first this year? Write the damn novel? Paint the plein air paintings? Create the thing that makes no business sense but makes our heart do that thing that reminds us we’re alive? Turns out even focused business owners who know how to scale and automate and optimize still have wild, creative souls that occasionally need to do something completely unproductive. I think maybe, in these wildly uncertain times, that's not just okay. Maybe, it’s necessary for us to survive. Maybe it's the secret sauce we've been missing while we were busy being professional and productive. Maybe making art is how we save ourselves. To fresh papaya and baby whales, P.S. Yes, I'm actually writing a novel. No, it's not about business. Yes, that feels terrifying to admit. No, I will not be taking questions at this time. (jk, I will take questions, you just have to ask) |
Business & Other Bad Words
Once a week, I break down what actually makes marketing work & how you can leverage your humanity to run your own business in a way that makes the self-aware robots jealous. Other times, I'm just in your inbox reminding you I'm in your corner and that community is our superpower (and also that swearing helps).
Introducing a morbid and informative segment I'm excited to call... Today's cadaver: The Duolingo Death Stunt You know you're out of marketing ideas when you resort to killing off your mascot for attention. This week, we're slicing open Duolingo's recent "kill the owl" campaign to extract whatever wisdom we can from the digital equivalent of faking your own death to see who shows up at your funeral. In case you've been blessed with better things to pay attention to, in early February Duolingo...
This morning, I stumbled upon a quote, one sentence from Dan Savage's podcast (someone I'd never heard of until today) about how activists fought during one of America's darkest chapters. "During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night, and it was the dance that kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for." - Dan Savage They were fighting a mountain of lies, that AIDS was a "gay...
After 5 days in Puerto Vallarta with the best community a girl could ask for, I hopped on a flight to Portland (at my husband’s encouragement) to visit my sister instead of heading straight home. “Thank you Jameson,” we say in unison. No visit to Portland is complete without also spending 3 hours in Powell’s. Powell’s is the world’s largest new & used independent bookstore, and is actually dubbed “Powell’s City of Books”. It’s absolutely enormous and ridiculously fantastic, with over 68,000...