At the end of 2018, I decided there was a large “skill-gap” that I wanted to bridge. Some skills I wanted to improve were more technical:
- Excel
- SEO
- SQL
Other skills were softer, but equally important to me:
- Email automation
- Food photography
- Instagram marketing
I didn’t see a way to work on these skills without making certain sacrifices. So I made a decision: I’d give up blogging for a year.1
This article is a follow-up article to the one and only article I published in 2019.: kicking off 2020 by recapping 2019. If you want to uplevel your skills in a year (and you’re willing to devote the time), you can accomplish a lot. I hope this article is a helpful example of what you can get done.
How I spent 2019
I focused on becoming a practitioner by focusing on select projects:
- Reforge. My nine-to-five, where those skill-gaps were most obvious.
- Shogun. That’s the name of the family restaurant. I wanted to test select marketing skills.
- Marketing. I wanted to improve this blog, which meant learning all the things I was doing wrong.
Here’s the progress I made in each of those arenas:
Reforge
When I first came onboard, I was in a program development role (what’s now called the Product Strategy and Development Lead). Late in 2018, I joined the product team and switched to a product manager role.
I owned features like in-program feedback, application improvements, and the redesign of our dashboard. I also owned the email automation, marketing pages, and application process for both our classes in 2019 — getting another 2,000 participants through six programs.
This is not the journey of someone who 80/20’ed their way to product management success. In the last year, I went from Googling “what does a product manager do?” to being a mediocre PM. More about that journey in a later post.
Shogun
I learned about food photography, kicked off and grew the Instagram page, and migrated the website off of a custom build onto Squarespace.
Once I migrated the website, I focused most of my resources on building the Instagram following and testing Instagram ads. We got just under 500 followers before I pulled the plug on this project.
If I had to summarize this project: I missed most of the goals I set for this project. Reasons why:
- I didn’t lay the groundwork to get alignment from management and employees
- There was a 50/50 shot we’d sell this store by year’s end, which came to fruition
- Instead of diving full-on in, I took an intermediate position
More nuance on that last point — my friend Ramit recently said something to me that really resonated:
If I were going to do it again, I would commit. The “in between” is no good.
Not sure if I’d do it again, but if I did, I’d commit.
More about this in another post.
Improving my site
I finally set aside time to properly set up Google Analytics and built my own dashboard in Sheets to track site analytics. This was necessary to implement SEO tweaks that I’ve been learning throughout the year. The results were good, though I think I was adversely affected by the Google algorithm changes in July 2019.
A little disheartening to see first-hand what an algorithm change can do to traffic, but on the flip side, if I didn’t set-up tracking or my dashboards, I never would have even recognized there was an issue.
I also redesigned the site and thanks to generous help from Michael Alexis, made massive page speed improvements.
While I didn’t blog, The Connection newsletter has continued to ship nearly every Monday. I’ve put out about 40 newsletters last year. The system is in a good place. Growth was flat in 2019.
Everything else that happened in 2019
Other important, non-work related accomplishments this year:
Instead of writing, I’ve been vlogging. Doing a nearly daily vlog has a been a great exercise in documenting snippets of my day and random thoughts. It’s kept me sane this year, when I didn’t give myself much opportunity to write.
Being all-in on family time. I like to work a lot. This cuts into family time, which means when it is family time, I do my best to be all in. Some tactical things that help: putting the phone on airplane mode, almost never turning on the television, and being mindful the End is closer than it appears.
Blue belt. I’ve been doing BJJ on and off for 3-years. I might have the record for slowest blue belt promotion. I am a slow learner, but I learn.
Major improvements to my personal finance system. I’m more excited about these personal finance improvements than the blue belt. Pumped to share them in a post this year.
What didn’t I do last year?
A lot. Two things stand-out:
Family interviews. I wanted to start interviewing family members to get their stories about coming to America, growing up in New York, and working in the family restaurants. I slowly tested this, but ran into two major challenges that I haven’t been able to unblock.
The first is time. I rarely made scheduling and conducting these interviews a priority in the week.
The second: it’s not easy to get people to open up. In every family, there are hurt feelings and notions of being wronged. Difficult things to talk about, and even harder doing it on the record.
Like I said, I’m not sure what will unblock that. Maybe just time.
SQL proficiency. I’m able to navigate the SQL queries my team uses, becauseI have just enough of an understanding of our database to get what I need. For what I need to accomplish in my role, I’m functional.
However, anytime I have to write a query from scratch, it’s painfully basic and slow. Similar to the above, developing proficiency above just doing my job rarely rose to a high priority, so I’ve kicked the can on this.
What will 2020 look like?
This all leads to the question: How will I spend 2020?
The Reforge team tripled in size in the last six months. We’re also adding as many as five new programs to our curriculum. Basically, this means that all the processes that have kept us running and profitable for the last 3 years will no longer work, and we’ll need to revisit everything. It’s going to be an exciting year.
For my personal projects, the three I want to mention for now are:
- This blog. Where I’ll continue to write about whatever interests me, but will start to focus on career advice.
- The Connection. No major updates here. I enjoy doing this and want to continue.
- Pickleball. I’ve started a niche site on pickleball, which I’m looking forward to building in 2020.
I want to get better at setting and evaluating my performance against quantitative goals, so I’ll set goals for these projects within the next month.
I’d love to hear from you: What goals have you set for 2020? Do you quantify those goals at all, and if you do, what’s your (rough) plan to hit those goals? Let me know in the comments.
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1 For perspective: I’ve written everyday for 11 years, starting In the summer of 2008, I committed to building a writing habit. Instead of buying a laptop, I bought an Alphasmart Neo wordpressor.
No Internet, no messaging, no fun.
There wasn’t enough storage to hold a one-subject notebook’s worth of bad, drunken poetry. But it had a 6-line LCD screen and a full-sized keyboard — more than enough real estate to work on.
For the next 2 years, I hammered out 500 words a day. Sometimes it took 30 minutes, other days 2 hours. After two years, the habit was built. I upgraded to a laptop and wrote nearly everyday since.
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