I’ve yet to publish any kind of review of 2023 (I might not at all), but here’s my quick take on what last year was about: establish my coaching business with enough revenue to give me infinite runway for future creative work. And that’s exactly what I did. I now have a healthy client base that meets our financial needs as a family and I’ll continue to grow that side of things with time. As long as I keep doing what I’m doing, I get to be in business as long as I put the work in. That’s a huge gift.
The other big arc of 2023 was the inner growth I experienced alongside establishing my coaching business. There’s too much to say on this to do it in an intro paragraph, so suffice to say that I feel much more aligned to myself than ever in my life.
It took years of therapy, confronting past pain, leaving relationships and jobs that were holding me back, and working to change old patterns that were no longer serving me. Exactly the kind of work a person has to do in order to be a decent coach. But also the work necessary to do creative work based in a solid foundation. That leads me to the year ahead.
In 2024, I’ll continue growing my coaching business by layering in additional client availability, expanding my strategic planning work, and accepting a very small number of speaking engagements. But the big growth will happen on the creative side, including this newsletter and a new podcast.
I’ve sent a newsletter in spurts over the past few years as I searched for the lane that felt most authentic to the future I want to build. Taking the most popular format from the past and adapting it to the mission of my work today, this will be the format:
- A thought-provoking quote from a book I’d recommend for leaders like you
- Three links to high quality, often long-form content about becoming the leader you’re meant to be
- A leadership concept or idea from me, rooted in my coaching work with clients
I went back and forth on whether to bring back three exec level jobs at mission-driven companies and decided against it. That said, if it’s something you’d really like to see from me, just hit reply and I’ll consider it.
I’m publishing on Saturdays because I’m a long-form person, and much of what I include will take 8-10 minutes or more to read. I know most people don’t have 20-30 minutes to read on a workday. My hope is that Saturdays will give you time to sit and enjoy what I share, much like sitting and reading the Sunday newspapers of yore.
Without further ado…
A quote to make you think from a book worth reading
“[…]most of the time “good” and “bad” aren’t so easy to discern. In stories there are good guys and bad guys. In life there are people in pain, people who are broken and making decisions from a place of brokenness, people living with wounds we can’t see—and these people, these fallible human beings, are our mothers and fathers, our husbands and wives, our sisters and brothers, our children, our teachers.”
- Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful
…
This was by far the best book I read in 2023. On the surface it’s about divorce, grief, healing, and what comes after everything falls apart. Underneath, this is a book about what it means to be human. About how to honor our partners and children. About how to grieve. About how to come back from the bottom of the pits of despair and hopelessness. Looked at in my unique way, this is a book about how to lead – open-hearted, broken-hearted, and vulnerable.
I have a growing belief that memoir might be the most overlooked and underutilized category of writing for personal growth. We go to the shelves of the self-help and leadership sections of bookstores for prescriptions on how to grow. As I mature, I’m realizing that no one else can tell me how to grow. I must find the path for myself. Memoirs offer us a view into how others are finding their own paths and growing in the ways they need to.
Memoirs give us the chance to make our own meaning rather than being told what meaning to make. Memoirs are like a good coach. How-to books are like a consultant. I’m mining the depths of the memoir genre during this phase of my own growth. Perhaps you’ll find it serves you in this chapter too.
Three links to encourage deep thought and breakthrough growth
1 The Nine Breakthroughs of the Year by Derek Thompson
“Will fusion heat your home next year? Fat chance. Next decade? Cross your fingers. Within the lifetime of people reading this article? Conceivably. The naysayers have good reason for skepticism, but these breakthroughs prove that star power on this planet is possible.”
…
There is a danger in human nature that we adapt to present reality quite rapidly. This is even true when present reality is leagues better than 1,000, 100, or even 10 years ago.
You may have encountered a cultural narrative that goes something like “everything is f***ed, so let’s tear it all down and start over.” To be sure, there are plenty of problems to be solved and we are more aware of them ever before thanks to the media we have available.
But from a data-driven perspective life is unequivocally better for the average human on planet Earth than ever before. As leaders, part of our job is to embrace the vulnerability and risk in hoping for (and building) a better future. Part of hope is acknowledging progress and seeing examples of possibility to inspire us to keep building. This article is full of what 100 years ago would be considered miracles.
2 Toward a Shallower Future by Noah Smith
“The passions of people raised in a kinder, gentler world may be alien and incomprehensible to the older generation, but they are no less intense, and the culture around them is no less complex. Adversity forces us to rise to its challenge, but abundance allows us to discover who we might become, and that is a different sort of adventure.”
…
Noah is a fascinating human to follow on both Twitter and Substack. This piece in particularly rang out as something approaching poetic philosophy about what kind of world we want to build. Do we fully see how much suffering we have relieved through technological and societal progress? Do we fully understand what we’ve gained in the process? And would any of us really hope for a world that requires ongoing trials merely for the sake of the resulting learning… when we don’t have to?
This one made me think deeply about progress, suffering, and what lies on the other side of solving society’s most important problems.
3 The Ultimate Annual Review by Steve Schlafman
“This blueprint was carefully designed to help you gain perspective on what you learned, what you want to achieve, and who you want to become. You’ll walk away with clear goals and action steps to create momentum in early 2024.”
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You might already have an annual review process that works for you. You might have already completed it if you do. But just in case you don’t, I found this template from “Schlaf,” a fellow coach and thoughtful leader, to be quite good. Since I haven’t created my own template I’m endorsing this one as a great starting point for your own process. It’s still early in the year and I’ve found taking the time to reflect, dream, and plan to be one of my most valued practices for inner and outer growth.
An idea sparked by my client work to help you lead better
This is a bit of a meta idea for the first newsletter of the year. The topics I’ll cover in the year ahead are related to the questions I confront in my own life and the questions I see my clients challenged by.
While leading a company means there are operational questions nearly every day, my coaching work often explores deeper questions. These deeper questions relate to our inner lives and allow us to acknowledge the emotions, patterns, and stories we take with us everywhere we go.
Only by exploring our inner lives can we truly learn to serve our teams, customers, and communities from a place of alignment and wholeness.
These are questions like:
- Who have I been?
- Who am I becoming?
- How can I align my inner and outer lives?
- What does it take to reach my potential as a leader?
- How can I use my potential to make the most impact possible?
- What causes and societal problems do we most need new founders to tackle?
- How do I need to change in order to grow from a founder or creator into a CEO?
- How should I handle the tradeoffs between my competing values?
- What are the costs of our decisions as leaders and how do we reckon with those costs?
- What emotions am I repressing, avoiding, or ignoring in order to protect myself
- What needs to end, transition, or transform in order for me to continue to grow?
These might be fruitful questions for journaling to start the year (and then to ask each year hence).
This newsletter will rarely get into the nitty gritty of operational challenges. There are even better writers on those topics. People like Lenny Rachitsky and Lulu Cheng Meservey are great examples of operators writing well. They do it better than I will ever care to.
I’m more interested in the human questions. The questions of how we can do the most important work of our lives and reach the potential that we think we might contain. What it takes to become the leaders we are capable of being, the leaders our teams deserve. Think of this like the leadership companion to all of the operator content you should rightly be reading.
An ask before I go
Would you hit reply and tell me what would make this newsletter as valuable as possible for you? What do you want to see from me?
Much love and respect,
If you enjoyed this newsletter, forward it to a founder friend. You can also recommend me to a founder or creator as a coach.