Reading time: 3.01 716 words Read this email in your browser. Hey Reader, Traditionally, I would rather walk into the chicken coop and fall over face first into a pile of hen poo than write a landing page. Despite my background as a copywriter, writing landing pages is my least favourite thing to do in marketing. I will always find something more pressing to do, like pluck those weird hairs off my big toe. So when I decided to do a New Thing, I avoided the landing page like it was Nigel...
4 days ago • 3 min read
Reading time: 2.01 478 words Read this email in your browser. Hey Reader, I was still squatted on my rock like Gollum, watching the tide come back. “I’ll see you back at the tent,” he said. I waved and blew a kiss, and turned back to my sunset and my tide. I’d been there for about an hour, just watching. Estuaries are cool. If you stand still for long enough, herons join you. So do sandpipers and oystercatchers. But I was there for the patterns made by the tide meeting the river flow. Which...
5 days ago • 2 min read
Reading time: 1.38 386 words Read this email in your browser. Hey Reader, Like most animals, I am highly motivated by treats. Get myself to the dentist? Little treat. Clean the bathroom? Little treat. Write my daily email? Ring a bell, little treat. Ring a bell? Salivate at the prospect of a little treat. Easy peasy; habit formed. Right? Wrong. They’re not habits, they’re complex behaviours rewarded with a little treat. Which is fine as far as it goes but let me ask you this: Do you want...
6 days ago • 2 min read
Reading time: 1.01 239 words Read this email in your browser. Hey Reader, You’ve heard the advice “travel like a local” yes? Well, how about instead we do this: Local like a traveller. Everyone thinks they have to travel far, far away to get inspired, to see new things, to meet new people, and you can do. Of course travel is amazing for so many reasons. But your local area is a vast treasure-trove of undiscovered wonders. Seriously: how much of your local area do you really see? Joe and I...
7 days ago • 1 min read
Reading time: 2.15 534 words Read this email in your browser. Hey Reader, You won’t often find me talking about a “writing habit.” Most people don’t have a writing habit at all. I don’t. I have a practice. But I do use the word “habit” to beat myself up on occasion, and I bet you do, too. “Just make writing a habit!” they say. But they don’t provide instructions on how to do that, and they also don’t really understand what a habit is. A habit isn’t just something we do regularly. It’s “a...
8 days ago • 2 min read
Reading time: 4.14 1,005 words Read this email in your browser. Hey Reader, “My book is a Trojan horse.” Last night at The Marketing Meetup in Birmingham, Sophie Blackmore described her book as a Trojan horse and my antennae started tingling. I hadn’t really thought about books in those words before… Sophie wrote her book with me this year — It’s Only Bloody Marketing — and it is doing exactly what she wanted it to do. She didn’t write it with the intention that book sales would make her bags...
11 days ago • 4 min read
Reading time: 1.25 334 words Read this email in your browser. Hey Reader, Do you have any weird little hobbies? Yesterday I was round at my neighbour’s house. They were packing things to take to Ireland to visit family next week, Christmas gifts and whatnot, and they invited me to peep into an old box. Inside was treasure. A radio transmission log book and a stack of QSL cards dating from the 1940s and 50s. Until yesterday, I knew virtually nothing about amateur radio. Now, I’m mildly...
12 days ago • 2 min read
Reading time: 0.54 211 words Read this email in your browser. Hey Reader, You there. Yes, you! You’re doing great. You really are. You’re living in a timeline in which, frankly, fast zombies could pour out of the kettle at any moment to nobody’s suprise, and yet here you are, doing the thing. Even if today’s thing is “I got up” I celebrate you. You’ve survived billions of years of evolution, from single-celled organisms to your present magnificence, and every single one of your ancestors was...
13 days ago • 1 min read
Reading time: 3.03 722 words Read this email in your browser. Hey Reader, “Advanced porridge spinning.” I stare at the scribbled sentence in my notebook, and snort. I’d almost forgotten. Back when Joe and I were first married, the first time we stayed over at his parents’ house oop north, I received an induction into “first on the right”, “hot-cold custard”, and “advanced porridge spinning.” Joe and his dad were advanced porridge spinners. It goes like this: Joe’s mom makes porridge on a...
14 days ago • 3 min read