Good morning, friend! Welcome to a special year-end edition of this newsletter.
If your feed this week is like mine, it's full of two things: Predictions posts riding into 2019, head out of the window, lapping at the new air! And Best Of posts catching 2018's weak, last rays in the rear-view mirror.
Which I suppose is fitting on December 30, this second-to-last day of 2018.
On my short walk out to the Tiny House, where I write these letters to you, I had in my head that I would combine those two things: That I would share with you my Prediction for 2019, and also offer up my own 2018 Best Of that would give you the most popular clicks from this baby newsletter's first year of life.
But high-stepping through the tall weeds of data just so I could pull together that Best Of list, I slipped into a rabbit hole: Is most-read the same as most-loved? Or more simply: Is popular the same as best?
And drilling down more: If something is popular, can it also be good?
Hemingway would say no, categorically: "If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work," he famously said.
But we're marketers. Not novelists. Data is everything, right?
Yes and no. Metrics can tell you what resonates with your audience. But it's also worth remembering that performance is a rear-view-mirror metric, expressing what was popular, not necessarily what is now or what will be popular. (Of course, predictive analytics is also a thing. My friend
Chris Penn can tell you all about that.)
For marketers and content creators, rear-view-mirror metrics are only part of the story. The other part is what you put into the work: the creativity, inspiration, and artfulness you bring to the work you do.
And the courage to put it all out there, too. After all, writing and publishing is an act of courage.
And the only way to really measure that is in the pride and joy your work brings you.
In 2018, I was on 30-ish different stages talking to 30 different business audiences. Each time, I brought up the need for Marketing to focus relentlessly on the people we seek to serve: to develop "pathological" empathy for prospects and customers, to create real value for them.
But as we head into 2019, I worry a little bit that I've done a disservice to the people in those audiences I spoke to—because what about the person doing the work...? What about each of us who is doing the marketing?
What about creating as much for the joy and satisfaction it brings to us as much as for the benefit it brings others? Don't we matter here, too?
🚨 Heck yeah we do!!! 🚨
This past year I've come to realize more and more that we need to focus on the value our work gives us. We need to celebrate the joy we get, not just the value it gives to others.
Not in a self-indulgent way. I'm not saying Marketing needs to ignore the audience and start publishing recipes for banana-nut muffins because you as a marketer really, really, *really* love banana-nut muffins.
But I am saying that we should add a spark of delight in whatever content we're conjuring up on the job. Whatever email you send; whatever video you produce; whatever sentence you write.
(Or, if you aren't a marketer, in whatever work it is that you do.)
Why? Not for money or applause or recognition or clicks or any external metric that comes after your work is out in the world. Just for the internal swell of pride that comes from knowing that you did your best.
Actually, that you did your best right now. Within the confines you have. Within the budget. The time. The mental energy. Your current skills. All of it.
This isn't a pass to do substandard work. But it is an honest acknowledgment that all you can do it your best work within whatever limits you're dealing with right now. Because, you know, there are always limits.
In the end, "creativity is a gift to the creator, not just a gift to the audience," as Elizabeth Gilbert writes in Big Magic.
I think that's true of Marketing, too.
What we create to connect with others must feel like a gift to ourselves, too.
I write this newsletter to you because I love doing it. If I didn't love it, you'd be able to tell. You'd feel my halfheartedness, my reluctance, my drudge, my ugh at another Sunday rolling around like oh sweet lord not again.
But, instead, I hope you feel how this simple newsletter ignites a bit of a spark within me. I write to you because I want to. Because I like it.
I wish the same for you, in 2019. Whatever job you have or work you're doing in 2019, put a little more of you into it: Your likes, your loves, your weirdness, your obsessions, your own emotions and humor and character.
Ignite that New Year spark first. The rest will follow.
That's my prediction, anyway.
* * *
Top 12 Content, Writing, Marketing Posts of 2018
Each fortnightly newsletter has two parts: My letter to you, and content, marketing, writing links to resources worth sharing. Today's list is a mix of 12 reads, resources, tools, and flat-out fun stuff from the second part—one for each month of this newsletter's first year of life.
Letters more your love language...? (Dude: SAME!)
Here we go...
🏠
1. What does
Mister Rogers' Neighborhood have to do with empathy and marketing?
A lot, actually.
📖
2. Related Words is better than a thesaurus because it gives writers a much broader set of, well,
related words rather than straight-up synonyms. I use it to look up words or phrases I already know, because that sometimes sparks ideas for more descriptive writing.
✍️
5. How words make it into the dictionary. (Why was
dumpster fire added in 2018 and not, say,
fetch a la
Mean Girls?) It turns out that writers have a lot to do with it: Dictionary makers read, read, read, and watch for moments when a writer doesn't explain what a word means
because he or she presumes a reader knows what the word means.
📍
6. This "
road map" of marketing.
It's the clearest, simplest articulation of marketing's work I saw in 2018. And the shortest, too: Just nine powerful paragraphs. It maps into how I think about marketing: At the highest level, marketing articulates a compelling narrative of what
could be.
⏰
7. This time-traveler for words. Try entering your birth year here to see what words might have the same birthday as you. (Buy it something nice.)
💡
8. The original Webster's 1913 dictionary. It's a writer's dictionary, where definitions for words don't read like they could come from a pharmaceutical company's prescription warning label. Instead, they come from philosophers and writers—John Locke, Tennyson, Shakespeare (Webster's 1913 calls him by his street
name, "Shak").
📊
9. This free data-visualization product, Onimics. Paste in your data, make beautiful charts for free, no reg required. For when you need a chart to illustrate a post or a presentation, but you don't have a spare art director lying around. Stuff yourself silly with data tables, vertical bar charts, horizontal bar charts, line
charts: It's like a data-based Hometown Buffet.
