Last updated on November 3rd, 2021 at 07:59 am

I debated whether to write a “year end review.” Typically, the tone of something like this is more self-congratulatory than I’m comfortable with.

But there are benefits.

Looking at what you’ve accomplished (e.g. how much debt you paid off, how much wealth you accumulated, pounds loss, PRs hit, words written, etc.) can propel you into the new year with gusto and enthusiasm. If looking back helps drive you forward towards, you should do it.

In that vein, I found a way to write this I’d be comfortable with:

• The majority of this article, I’ll review the work put into this blog and the newsletter, The Connection, over the last year
• Then I’ll do a shorter year end review of work, training, and my personal life
• Finally, I’ll preview some things I’m excited about for next year

Let’s start.

The blog and the newsletter

At the beginning of 2018, I started with a simple goal: write a monthly blog post and send out a monthly newsletter, for a total of 12 each.

At the time of this writing, I’ve written and published an article every week since October 2017, or about 60 articles. After people seemed to enjoy the first few The Connection newsletters, I turned it into a weekly instead of monthly, and sent a total of 35 newsletters.

A consistent question I’ve gotten about this work is…

Why?

• “Why write a weekly newsletter?”
• “How are you monetizing any of this?”
• “Why do you spend so much time linking to other people’s articles?”
• “What’s the goal of the blog?”

Reasonable questions, disappointingly simple answers:

• It’s a great way to keep in touch with people and share cool articles
• I’m not monetizing anything
• I read them, might as well share them

The answer to the last question (“what’s the goal of the blog”) is a bit more nuanced.

“What’s the goal?”

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Christopher Ming (@christopherming) on Sep 29, 2018 at 8:06am PDT

It took time to articulate the goal. I couldn’t explain it.

Then I saw Lin Manuel-Miranda’s In The Heights, and it clicked. I wrote this as a caption to the above Instagram post, and it crystalized my driving motivation behind the blog:

Watched a local performance of IN THE HEIGHTS Loved it and loved seeing the journey Lin-Manuel Miranda had to go through to create HAMILTON.

Every other scene there were parallels between the two: themes of legacy, of being an orphan, racism, rising above one’s station, and more.

Without ITH there would be no HAMILTON.

In a world of going viral, it’s an important reminder that for most of us, we don’t only get “one shot.” Living like today is your last… is actually shit advice.

You are not your last job, project, show, performance, deal.

Each matter, but the sum is greater than the parts.

What matters is the journey, the progress you make each day until at some point you look back at your body of work and realize: “I built that.”

The goal of the blog is to build a body of work, in a sustainable way.

The last part, the sustainability, is key. Sustainability is important. I’ll talk a bit more about that below.

Growing the blog and newsletter

My friend Lauren asked if the newsletter was seeing a lot of growth.

I didn’t hesitate.

“Nope. It’s been really stagnant.”

The blog audience is more or less on the same (flat) trajectory.

Would I love to be able to say that after a year of toil, the site now gets 10k visitors a month? Would I love to publicly brag about the massive list I grew in 90 days with my lead magnets? Of course. But I have to do it my way.

This year was about consistently writing and publishing, creating a large body of work, and doing it in a sustainable way. Sustainable means I have to do this and my job and be a good husband, father, son, brother, in that order.

Building sustainability required investing time and money to create processes around writing and publishing, not just pushing myself to wake up earlier, stay up later, and work harder. Currently, some of the processes I have in place to help me publish a weekly article and newsletter include:

• Systems to collect future article ideas
• Systems to tag interesting articles I want to share with the list
• Systems to quickly outline and create visual assets
• Getting help with proofreading
• Getting help with formatting and scheduling blog posts
• Getting help with formatting and scheduling the newsletter
• Getting help with scheduling social media promotion of both my articles and articles I recommend

The processes above hum along quietly in the background now, but they took a lot of work to get set up. This illustrates a hidden benefit of having a small audience at this stage: you get away with making a lot of mistakes.

I’ve written and published things I realized were mean and/or in poor taste. As far as I know, no one noticed, I deleted them without fanfare. I’ve published sensitive details I forgot to get permission for, sent out a newsletter with all broken links, and made an unfathomable number of typos.

It’s been a blessing to do it all in relative obscurity.

How to build a sustainable writing and publishing habit

Here’s how I did it:

First, make it almost impossible to fail. A big problem I see with goal setting is we get too ambitious:

“I’m going to start doing 50 push-ups a day” or “I want to text 10 friends a day” or “I’m never going on Facebook again.”

Then we get excited. We imagine what our future life is going to look like, a blemish-free, Valencia-filtered version of ourselves, and it looks splendid. But no matter how good our intention, inevitably real life creeps back in.

You wake up late and don’t have time for push-ups. It’s busy at work and you forget to text. You “need” to go onto Facebook to check that invite your friend sent you. Suddenly three hours have passed and you’re looking at photos of your cousin’s best friend’s boyfriend from 2014.

It’s better to set easy goals (do 5 push-ups, text one friend, limit Facebook to 20 minutes a day) and hit it consistently.

For me, my goal was writing and publishing one article and newsletter a month. I write every day, already had a blog set-up, and knew how to create a simple newsletter in Mailchimp, so publishing once a month was a small lift for me, one I knew I could do no matter how crazy life got.

After a few months, I got my processes into place and decided I could bump the cadence from monthly to weekly. But without first making it impossible to fail, I never would have had the breathing room to invest in those processes.

Then, I stacked the deck. Once I set my easy goal, I wanted to give myself every advantage to hit that goal consistently and effortlessly. To do so, I cheated and bribed as much as possible.

Here’s what I mean by cheat: to hit the monthly (then later, weekly) goal, I outlined and wrote 6 or 7 articles ahead of time. That created enough of a buffer so when work got busy, I still had no problem publishing. And while I enjoy writing long, in-depth articles, I accepted that “publishing is publishing.” In other words, I didn’t need to write a dissertation. It could be a short blog post. The point was, I just had to publish something.

By bribe, I mean I invested in the process. I hired people to help me. I hired a virtual assistant (VA) via Fancyhands to proofread each article. I worked with different VAs to help post and format articles and newsletters. That gave me more wiggle room to hit my goals.

If you find yourself having to “will” your way through every week, or get up extra early or stay up late every night, ask yourself: What can I do to make this easy? How can I stack the deck in my favor?

I said “no” to a bunch of things. Maintaining the writing and publishing habit required focus, and focus meant saying “no” a lot. Here are some things I said no to this year:

• Nearly all list building activities (pop-ups, lead magnets, etc.)
• Consulting opportunities
• Paid advertising on Facebook and Instagram
• Drastically cutting down publishing original content on social media

At the start, if it wasn’t directly related to the goal, it was a hard “no.” For example, early on in the year, a friend asked if I was interested in being a paid writer for Medium. I declined. Later, my processes were further developed and it freed up enough time to start experimenting with the platform. So I started publishing on Medium as well.

If adding a new activity, it needed to fit my “stack.” My time was already stretched thin as it was, which is why any activity that started from scratch was a hard pass. If I was going to say “yes”, it needed to naturally align to existing activities. I call this “adding to the stack.”

Publishing to Medium made sense. I already did all the hard work of outlining and writing articles for the blog and newsletter. Publishing that content to Medium only required minimal lift: find a slightly different angle, rewrite parts of the article, then format the article so it was a better fit for the platform.

Same with promoting articles on social media (whether I wrote the articles or I wanted to share interesting articles I read). The hard work of producing or sourcing great content was already done. I just needed to put together the best process to share on social, a relatively smaller lift.

I made one exception. A few times a month someone would ask if I had time for an informal phone call or meet. Some people wanted to talk about growth or product strategy. Others wanted to chat about building online programs, moving to LA, or career advice after graduating from college.

I always tried to say yes. (I think the only time I said no was in the middle of the Reforge programs).

Doing one-on-one calls doesn’t scale. It’s not the most efficient use of my time. Most people I’ve never heard from again. But there’s something visceral about listening to people describe their challenges in a one-on-one setting that’s more powerful than exchanging 10 emails or 100 Facebook messages.

Plus, I’m flattered people would ask for my advice. So I do my best to fit these in.

Everything else

Here’s a quick year-end-review on work, training, and my personal life:

Work

Reforge launched two new programs this year, a Deep Dive on Retention + Engagement and a Deep Dive on Growth Models. We hit our financial goals, and I continue to be impressed by our participants: super smart, ambitious, nice people.

One of my favorite things is heading out to San Francisco or New York City to meet them. I hosted 4-5 events in NYC this year and hope to do more in 2019.

Training

I competed in my first BJJ tournament in March, and it was a terrific learning experience. Some things I learned:

• The adrenaline dump is real
• In competition, you return to your base instincts. The goal of training is to replace those instincts with sound technique
• Keep your chin tucked when going for a double-leg takedown

The goal was to compete twice in 2018, but the second half of 2018 got too busy. I’m happy that I’ve recently started training again, after moving out of NYC. The past few months, I’ve been trying to find my cadence between training BJJ and weight training.

Personal

In June Amy and I left our beloved NYC and moved into our first house in Albany, NY. A few days later, we were joined by our son, Oliver.

Homeownership and living in suburbia has been an adjustment. Paying to heat your home was a rude awakening, as was hauling a sprinkler around to water your lawn (after two weeks of that I had an underground sprinkler system installed). We live close to my parents, which I love, and I think will be terrific for Oliver. I do miss walking everywhere (in suburbia, you drive).

Parenthood has been an adjustment as well, but I’ll save that for its own article another time 🙂

What’s next in 2019

In 2018, my big goal was to write and publish consistently. I’ve been writing every single day for the last 10 years, and I built processes to make this easier, but it still takes a great deal of my time. To keep growing in 2019, I need to invest some of that time elsewhere.

So I’ve decided to pull back on the writing schedule.

I’ll continue sending out The Connection newsletter, with a digest of the week’s interesting reads, but I’m going to write and publish an article monthly, instead of weekly.

I’ll allocate the time to become a better operator and marketer . Ways I’ll do that:

• Getting better at Growth. Working at Reforge, I learned a lot about Growth, but being able to regurgitate theory doesn’t mean you can apply it. I want to invest time in applying what I’m learning, not just teaching it.
• Restaurant marketing. I’ve begun helping one of the family restaurants with marketing (you can follow our progress on Instagram). Again, understanding business concepts is not the same as being able to allocate marketing dollars and show a ROAS.
• Building a network. I grew up in this town but was very much a homebody. I have a small network here and to change that, I’ll have to take a leaf out of my Hollywood notebook: drink with everybody. (Seriously though, I did an okay job meeting new people when living in NYC, but I also spent a lot of time behind the computer screen. Now that we’re settled in Albany for the next few years, I want to double-down on meeting new people again.)

Finally, life will only continue to grow more complicated. It becomes an arms race, and to keep up I will continue to optimize processes (like the writing and publishing processes discussed above), paying for help (like paying for a financial advisor rather than DIY all of my financial decisions) and continue building a sustainable life.

This was my last post for 2018. I’ll take the rest of December to rest, and plot how to start stacking the deck in 2019.

As always, thanks so much for reading.

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Photo Credit: Lady Bird