I wish somebody would have told me babe / Some day, these will be the good old days
– Ke$ha
At the start of 2022, I said these were my 3 focus areas:
Building my audience, career, and relationships.
From the Q2 recap, my objectives and priorities for Q3 were: :
- (High) Publish 1 thread per week
- (Med) Systematize blog posting processes to speed up my publishing
- (Low) Publish 3 new blog posts about remote work and career navigation
Below, I’ll dig into how things went this quarter.
How did your quarter go? I’d love to hear about it, feel free to let me know.
What happened in Q3?
I achieved these 3 objectives.
The only “gray” area was publishing a weekly thread: I missed a week here or there, so give myself an 8 out of 10. Not perfect, but solid.
When looking at the outcomes these processes were supposed to drive, I fell short. Reality vs. expectation off by these percentages, respectively (list out). More on that below.
So how do I feel about this?
I feel good about the processes developed. I feel confident and undaunted about achieving my long-term goals.
It’s critical to get the process in the right place. To win the audience building game, I need to be (1) consistent and (2) I need to survive. Accomplishing both while managing the vagaries of raising happy small children and an ambitious career is hard.
But the long-term goals I wrote about in What is Rich? continue to motivate me.
Your financial independence boils down to just a couple of numbers. Here are mine:
– $75,000/month
– $6,000,000 net worth
They’re stretch goals for sure, but definitely within reach.
There’s also an element of motivational competitiveness: When I look at other creators in the field, so many further down the path than myself, I don’t see anyone who makes me say: “this person is so much smarter, more hard-working than me, that I couldn’t do what they do.”
I feel like I can be the very best at what I choose to do.
And whether that’s true or not is actually irrelevant.
What matters is that ambition will at the very least make me extremely proficient. So deeper down the rabbit hole we go.
How do I feel about missing quarterly quant metrics?
To be honest, it sucks. It hurts the ego. It’s not fun to post these images of flat lines quarter after quarter. I’m working on shaking that mentality because attaching a feeling, good or bad to these short-term metrics isn’t productive.
They don’t take me out of the game (as they would a CEO of a public company that misses targets quarter after quarter).
These quarterly metrics are not meant to serve my ego. They’re designed to keep me honest. They’re meant to give me signals on what’s working, what’s not, and what needs to change for the next quarter.
Here’s what I’m focused on for Q4
(High) Consistent, sustainable output
Post 3x per week on social. Reduce the frequency of posts (move away from daily and trim back to 3x per week, but improve the quality).
1 newsletter & blog post every 2 weeks. Build reusable content atoms that can be remixed and reshuffled and used in various templates that scale up in components: tweets, newsletters, blog content, products, courses
(Med) Flip from Twitter > LinkedIn to LinkedIn > Twitter
Posts perform better on LinkedIn, get better feedback, and it’s easier to rework that into new content, feel like I’m able to write longer stuff there anyway. So I’ll focus on LinkedIn first, and adapt it for Twitter.
(Low) Find the right balance with engaging on social
Engaging regularly definitely helped with goals. I learned a lot, met cool people, and I liked it
But it came at a cost. I had notifications turned on, it was hard to do focused deep work
So I went the other way and stopped doing it altogether.
Now I’m ready to bring it back towards the middle.
The numbers behind building an audience
As mentioned, quantitative goals were a miss in Q3. I didn’t give much thought to new goals for Q4, but do find tracking this good for my own visibility and posterity.
Twitter Followers
LinkedIn
Blog traffic
This drop in organic traffic was most interesting. One of my popular posts, 10 Remote Jobs With No Experience Required dropped 50% in organic traffic after the latest Google algorithm update. Good reminder about the importance of channel diversity. *
Newsletter subscribers
Changed strategy mid-way through Q3 and started sending the newsletter again. Really enjoying this.
Short updates in other areas:
Career. Started a new role this quarter with a new company, Persefoni. I launched our freemium product, Persefoni Essentials, in my first 90 days. Really enjoying this work and its mission. It’s got its dysfunctions (as all companies do). Fortunately, they’re the dysfunctions I can live with.
Went deep into Deep Work this quarter. Starting to think deeply about problems and challenges again for the first time in a long time.
Relationships / Family. On a trip to Croatia, it dawned on me that long-term travel with family is easier than ever. I used to think that a year abroad, traveling to a different country each quarter would be out of reach as the family grew. But I’m more confident and optimistic than ever.
Training. Training is going well, the goal for 2023 is to get my purple belt. Considering competing in a BJJ tournament in Q1 2023, but not sure yet.
Sleep. Vastly improved with a “shutdown” routine. I track my sleep with HealthMate (from Withings) and it’s been motivating to watch my “sleep score” tick up month after month.
