I’ve been reading Jacques Cousteau’s Diving for Sunken Treasure, a book that is featured directly in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, while Cousteau is the main inspiration for Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. I’m a huge Wes Anderson fan, so of course I knew this going into reading the book. But it’s funny how easily I can imagine the director reading this book and finding inspiration and writing material within.

Take this quote from p 105:

Wednesday, July 24. Didi Dumas arrived at San Juan on schedule, at four o’clock this morning. And there was no one to meet him. He was furious; and he was perfectly justified. Our agent, who was supposed to meet him and bring him to the Calypso, did not show up, for some reason.

This is so obviously the inspiration for the introduction of Cate Blanchett’s character in The Life Aquatic

We tend to think of creators and artists, especially those we revere, as blessed with some divine gift. Like they’re just filled with boundless creative energy just waiting to be used. That they somehow can see and create something that eludes the rest of us. Yet when I can see the process so plainly on paper, I think it adds some much needed humanity to the people we idolize. The reality of Wes Anderson, or anyone creative, is they get inspiration and ideas from everyday experiences, just like the rest of us. That anyone is capable of applying that knowledge in novel ways, so long as we take notice of the opportunities, and are willing to act on them.

That last bit that is worth emphasizing, for often the act of doing is the only thing that separates us from the creators we admire.

It’s tempting to. After all, what’s another five, ten, fifteen minutes of sleep? And you’re already so comfortable….

Of course if you’re me, one hit of the snooze button turns into five, and all of a sudden I’m an hour behind schedule. Waking up goes from being a quick win to the first failure of the day.

It’s tempting to do this with our work too. To look at a task and say “yes, but later.” To delay a project because now just isn’t quite urgent enough. But we’re so much better off if we take action, even a small step, now instead of later. To build some momentum, as often the first step is the most meaningful. It means we get to start off with a small win instead of a small failure.

P.S. The trick I’ve found to skipping the snooze button is to make the snooze period a meaningless amount of time, say one or two minutes. This makes it more annoying to snooze than just get out of bed. Oh, and make sure your alarm clock or phone is out of arms reach.

Craig Mod was talking about production and consumption systems in his newsletter recently, the idea that social media has evolved to be become both in one. You can’t post on Instagram without being tempted by the photos in your feed. You can’t get to your business’ Facebook page to post an update without catching a glimpse of your friends posts too.

When I was working in social media, we used to get so frustrated by the fact that Facebook required a personal account to maintain a business account. There was no separation between the two. And it made supporting our clients a little tricky as a result. Back then, it never made any sense to me why they wouldn’t build a separate stream for business users.

It’s almost impossible to decouple the two processes. I’ve tried. Which is why, as I’ve increasingly pulled away from most social media consumption, my production on those sites has also slowed to a trickle.

But now I know why. The tangling of consumption and production functions in these services is a feature, not a bug.

If you’re a brewery, a coffee shop or cafe, then mounting bag hooks on the underside of your tables is just smart customer service. It’s a simple invitation to those who want to stay and read a book or get some work done to relax and stay awhile. It’s a small thing, but almost ubiquitous (at least here in Seattle), so much so that I really notice it when businesses miss this simple step.

Customer service is at times a huge undertaking and others just a small gesture. Yet often it’s the small stuff that sticks in the customer’s mind .

Even if it isn’t literally bag hooks, there are plenty of small improvements to the customer experience you can make if you take the time to tune into them.

(Though if you’re a coffee shop, definitely check on those bag hooks)

Isn’t it funny how we make such a huge deal out of new year’s resolutions, while knowing full well how unlikely we are to keep them, even a few weeks into the year? I think a big reason we fail on January 1 plans is the pressure. We act as if the day is some special moment that is perfect for trying something new. Yet that opportunity comes around every day, if we choose to see it that way.

So why not make today your resolution day? There’s less fanfare and theater in a “June 20th Resolution”, but if what you’re resolving to do is worth doing, why wait to start? Start today.

I’ve always enjoyed washing the dishes and cleaning the kitchen. There’s a certain satisfaction with putting things away in just the right locations. It occurred to me that the kitchen is the most organized room in my house. It may be for you as well.

Lately, I’ve found that part of the satisfaction of doing the dishes comes when the work is done regularly. To wrangle the daily mess. But when the dishes are left for too long, even just another day or two, the task of kitchen cleanup shifts from this satisfying ritual to a true chore.

Once I noticed this, I saw the same phenomena everywhere. Whether it’s chores I traditionally hate (laundry), or tasks at work. If you leave any cleanup task to pile up so that it can be dealt with it one big job, you tend to rob yourself of the satisfaction of organization and tidying up. That’s not to say that a big closet spring cleaning can’t have appeal, but when regularly tidied instead, you free up a ton of bandwidth that task was occupying in your head. Instead of a big project, it becomes habit. Almost involuntary.

And once you have those areas in order, you suddenly have more mind-share for the work that can’t be habituated. The important work that needs doing.

So whether it’s clearing your inbox after each day or week. Or filing expenses when they come in, or doing the dishes as they’re used, treat the little tasks like they’re daily routines instead of for some future “chore day”.

I’ve had this site for years, but up until recently, I only occasionally wrote new posts. I’d build them up into these huge projects in my head. So much that it was hard to ever start, let alone complete any of my ideas.

And yet those articles were quite important to my visibility, particularly in the Marketo community. I wrote in-depth guides on topics hardly anyone was talking about then. Even today, the majority of the the traffic that makes it to this site is to some of those early protips articles.

This gave me some great validation on the work I was doing, but also caused me to get in my head about what was worthy of posting . Another challenge I recognized was the open ended nature of my posting. Because I had no real “due date” for an article, I could spend forever perfecting it. And as a result, I hardly published anything. About 7 months ago I decided to go in completely the other direction. Instead of an open ended writing schedule, I’d follow a much more rigid plan. Instead of focusing on perfection I’d focus on repetition and hitting publish, flaws and all. And instead of binding myself to one niche topic, I’d give myself more creative license.

And that’s what I’ve done, five days a week, for the past seven plus months. I still suffer from perfectionism, but with this new process, I don’t get have the luxury of obsessing over it any more. I definitely publish stuff I’m not happy with. But I’m amazed how often I put together an article in a day or two that really feels like it’s up to my standards.

Of course, the catch with this new strategy is that most of my audience has left. I’m not writing much about technical Marketo stuff these days, as my focus now is more around building teams and strategy than finding automation hacks. I still love a good technical article and maybe I’ll still share some of that occasionally, but increasingly this site is an outlet for me to develop ideas on paper.

The three takeaways I’ve had after building this habit are:

1. Writing is a skill that develops over repetition and doing the work. I am a stronger writer than I was when I started this, but it’s a spectrum, and it’s easy to see where I need to improve next. If you want to improve your writing, daily blogging is a great place to start.
2. Structure is the key. It’s easy to look at a 5-posts a week schedule as unreasonable. To find excuses not to write some days. To start with a tamer schedule, like once a week. But for me, this has always caused me to abandon the whole idea even faster. The value of a daily ritual like this over even a one post a week schedule is the routine you create in your days. It’s just a task in my day, like brushing you teeth. The fact that I do it every day means I eventually find a place for it. And the work and willpower to get going starts to come almost automatically. I won’t claim it’s always easy every day, but if I had first followed a weekly post schedule, I can almost guarantee I would’ve failed by now.
3. Write for yourself. There’s nothing wrong with writing for an audience, and I’m always happy to have one if they choose to listen. But there needs to be something in it for you in order to stick to a habit like this. And for me, it’s an outlet to get ideas out of my head, and see if they can stand up straight on paper.

If your emails still list this in their unsubscribe message, it’s time to find a new email provider. Though if I’m being honest, I suspect most companies list this sort of message to cover their asses more as a technical limitation anymore.

But there is no scenario where this should be considered acceptable from a customer service perspective. When someone doesn’t want to hear from you any longer, even “instantly” isn’t nearly fast enough.

It’s a bit of a rule of thumb that some of the best tacos come from food trucks, often those with the most humble appearance and the least flash. The trucks making the best tacos do so because that’s all they’re focused on. The rest of it is a distraction.

Some of the best blogs I read around the web have nothing memorable about their look and feel. The reason I read them is for the content, which I’m always willing to get to, even if it means a dated design or a clunky UI. These writers are more focused on function than form. And if the substance of their writing is good enough, readers are willing to look past a lot of shortcomings in the design.

I don’t mean to say design doesn’t matter. It’s that too often we get wrapped up in the look and fell of a thing before we’ve established the substance of it. Great content can stand on its own (and bad design will eventually slow it down). But great design with crap content can’t even stand on two legs.

Figure out how to make amazing tacos first. Then you can worry about the logo.

I recently switched to an Android phone, as a longtime iPhone user. My new phone, the Google Pixel, is a top of the line device, with one of the best smartphone cameras available. It looks and behaves like most any other flagship smartphone device. It’s fast, functional, and trendy.

And it drives me crazy. I can’t wait to switch back to an iPhone.

My first smartphone was an Android. The Motorola Droid I think. But I quickly switched over to iPhone once my carrier offered it. The app ecosystem was far better. The hardware was too. But nowadays, you’d be hard pressed to argue on objective grounds alone that one platform – iOS or Android is truly “better”. Even the hardware is so similar that it’s getting hard to even tell which brand makes which black slab of glass and metal.

And yet, subjectively, the two couldn’t be more different. The settings aren’t where I expect them, and the options to customize are almost paralyzing. Not just because there are more options, but because, in my opinion, they’re poorly explained, and sometimes seem to conflict with one another.

I’m missing out on stuff like iMessage, but that’s less bothersome to me than just the experience of using such an unfamiliar, and foreign platform. And I know this is all silly and overblown. And that’s the funny thing about human nature. These platforms aren’t really all that different. But it’s a testament to how sensitive we are to change. That even small changes can be quite disruptive.

Remember when Facebook would change something about the UI and a bunch of users got angry and threatened to boycott the site? Maybe those petitions still happen. It wouldn’t really surprise me. But it’s the same idea. Human’s don’t like change, even small changes. Yet we tend to underestimate how much change affects us.

We can’t control most of the change in our life, but it’s worth remembering that when we are making a change in our control, to recognize it’s probably going to be harder than it appears. It’s also worth remembering that we can adapt to change quicker that we think. Maybe that’s a lesson for me to stick it out with Android a bit longer.