Last updated on November 3rd, 2021 at 07:56 am

My every career opportunity came because of my writing habit.

I wrote my way into my first Hollywood internship, covering entire book manuscripts in a day — that’d take others a week. I wrote a cold email that landed my job with Dennis. An article on how to get health insurance opened the door to working with Ramit for 2 years.

The quality of that writing fluctuated over the last 10 years, but the work ethic never wavered.

Until now.

I’ve thought a lot about this writing habit in the weeks leading up to the new year. Yes, I’ve benefited from it. All the 2-hour sessions at 6am, arm chained to the chair and coffee chained to the arm, made me an efficient writer — and occassionaly a decent one.

But those hours allocated to becoming a better writer came at the opportunity cost of becoming a good practitioner.

What is a good practitioner?

In the broadest defintion: a practitioner is “someone who can do”.

Thinking about 2019, there are three major projects I plan to undertake (more on that in a moment). Yet when I look at the skillsets I need to execute on those, my honest evaluation of my skills is they lie somewhere between that stuff you clean out of your shower drain and a steaming pile of garbage.

In that vein, I decided this is the year to shove my face into a slice of humble pie, until I either choke on my ineptitude or eat my way out.

Here are the three areas I want to work on:

● Reforge. This is the company where I work, my nine-to-five. We’re planning critical changes to the product, yet there are gaps in technical marketing skills that make me a liability. I have to fill those gaps.

● Shogun. This is the family restaurant. We haven’t paid much (any) attention to digital, social, or experiential marketing in the past 5 years. I couldn’t focus on it because I was away — but now I’m not. And while I’m confident about talking high-level strategy for a 6- or 7-figure online business, I’m not versed as an operator or marketer of a brick n’ mortar SMB restaurant with no marketing budget. Time to change that.

● Marketing There’s a ton of low-hanging fruit to pick on my own website, email list, and brand (SEO, conversion optimization, growth loops, etc.) I’ve put it off because I (1) stuck to my comfort zone — writing — and (2) I didn’t have the patience to learn. 2019 is the year to get that fruit.

There are other broad areas I want to improve, of course: spending quality time with family, meeting new people in my new-old hometown, training, etc. But those are the three main areas. To focus on those, it means I need to move writing to a backburner.

What’s that mean for this blog in 2019?

There are three implications:

1. I’ll continue The Connection Newsletter, because I enjoy sharing good reads (you can sign up here)
2. I’ll scale back from publishing weekly blog posts to monthly posts
3. I’ll narrow the focus of those posts to my progress on the above three topics (Reforge, Shogun, and Marketing)

I really enjoyed all the writing I did last year. I enjoyed tinkering with the process to squeeze it into my life. I could plod along and do the same thing this year, and everything would be fine.

Or… I can change everything. And see where I end up at the end of 2019.

I appreciate you continuing to read, and for coming along on the ride.