"The past and present wilt. I have filled them, emptied them, and proceed to fill my next fold of future. Do I contradict myself? Fine. I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes."

I contain multitudes. You do, too.

Something I keep revisiting is this idea of contradictions. Maybe it's because I fail more than the average duck, but many areas of my life contain them.

I describe myself as prepared. Yet, I fail to be prepared for a 1:1 at work.
I say I'm a great husband. Yet, I fail to have patience.

The list goes on forever.

The first step to freedom from the dissonance created by contradictions is to accept them. We contain multitudes. It's okay.

And then learn to close the gap between who you want to be and who your behavior shows you to be. That's where I'm at.

Enjoy this week's letter:

Marketing Micro Essay 💡 How to Create Micro Content

(Time to read: 1:28 minutes)

If you haven’t read my Content Pillars essay, click here to skim. The TL;DR is that you should tie all content to a content pillar(s) at the intersection of your audience’s interests and yours. It ensures the content resonates and helps them make progress.

If you want your content to bring you ROI, you must create content people care about.

Thanks for letting me get that off my chest. Now, the first step I would take is understanding where your team has strengths.

Before I go further, I’ll share a hack: Video is critical in this process.

Not only does video continue to rise in effectiveness and popularity, but it makes cutting your large cake much more manageable (I couldn’t stop using the analogy…). A 30-60 minute conversation recorded on video (e.g., podcast or webinar) gives you enough micro content for 2-3 weeks. Let that sink in.

Before returning to your strengths, let’s cover the three mediums of content:

1. Written Word (newsletters, articles, white papers)

2. Video (vlogs, webinars, video-led podcasts)

3. Audio (mostly podcasts, but also pre-recorded messages if you call a number)

Choose one medium for your macro content and distribute it through all three.

Back to your strengths:

If you suck on video but can write like Hemingway, write a newsletter or essays. If you look like a bear but have a beautiful voice, podcasting is a no-brainer.

This applies to you and your business. If you’re a copywriting agency, you’d be silly not to have a newsletter or release frequent written content. If you do video production, making biweekly videos seems natural and would provide more practice.

The list goes on, but you get my point: Use your strengths.

EXCEPT if doing so limits your ability to experiment and use new mediums that maximize your content efforts. An example is video (who keeps inviting that guy back?). If you are a team that writes, so you never do video, you are leaving money on the table.

An example would be to take parts of your writings and record short 60-90 clips, adding thoughts and insights to them. This would help you use your strengths while staying relevant and effective.

Examples, you ask? I have a few!

Read those examples here... Click me, please

📹 Marketing Clip of the Week

What job should marketing get done for your business?

Eric Hess: It's a part of an organization that's there to supplement everything else with the end goal of helping you grow.

"We did a podcast on branding and why it's important. And you know, that (branding) was a big topic. ...like marketing is branding. It's a big piece of everything you should be doing."

"Without a brand, you can't do the other things (lead gen) that you want to do with marketing and sales."

Click here (or image below) to watch the video

Three Books – Three Quotes

"The question isn’t, can the reader follow you?
That’s a matter of grammar and syntax.
The question is, will the reader follow you?”

– Verlyn Klinkenborg (Several Short Sentences About Writing)

"Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.” – Parker Palmer

– Luke Burgis (Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life)

“The challenge is to look at the future not along a straight line but around the inevitable corners. To know how to do that, you have to practice looking at how the past has turned corners.”

– William Strauss & Neil Howe (The Fourth Turning)

Heard – Saw – Experienced

Heard:

Nothing excites me more than a riveting conversation.

I live for deep convos. And I also enjoy sitting in on them. Well, kind of.

I drove to Milwaukee last week and listened to a podcast episode with Derek Sivers. It was on Jim O'Shaughnessy's "Infinite Loops" podcast.

Here are a few nuggets (please listen):

1. Continuous Improvement: Sivers emphasizes a continuous drive for expansion and improvement, comparing musicians who evolve constantly (like Miles Davis or David Bowie) to those who find their niche and stick to it (like AC/DC).

2. Questioning Norms: Sivers shared the importance of questioning conventional ways of doing things to find more efficient or direct paths to goals.

3. Curiosity and Learning: Both guests express a deep value for curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge from multiple perspectives to grow and understand the world better.

Click here to listen to part one

Saw:

Get Lit(eracy)!

Sight's a funny thing. Our minds subconsciously block much of what our eyes take in.

They call this perceptual blocking.

"This process can happen subconsciously; our brains filter out distressing stimuli to prevent us from becoming overwhelmed by negative emotions or to maintain our current psychological state. This filtering is part of our brain's broader capacity to focus on certain elements of our environment while ignoring others."

This often happens to us with problems we'd rather avoid. Maybe it's implicit, yet we can still take action to "see" differently and become aware of those problems.

I did that this week and saw a whole new problem: 3rd-grade literacy scores in Brown County at lower levels.

I attended a community learning session, Reading For the Future (Achieve Brown County), and learned how vital this statistic is and why it matters that it's not trending upward.

"In Brown County, reading proficiency levels have slowly declined, even before the COVID-19 pandemic. During the 2016-2017 school year, 41% of Brown County students read proficiently. The most recent 2020-2021 shows a 14% decrease in reading proficiency, with only 27% of Brown County students meeting 3rd-grade reading proficiency targets." (Read more here)

I'm grateful to see this problem now and do my best to help make progress on the solution(s).

Experienced:

As mentioned above, I love good conversations.

I was grateful to have a few this week—one with my pastor and another with a dear friend. I enjoyed having dinner with my pastor as his son worked in the back. It was a nice experience.

The convo with my friend was incredible for many reasons. A major one is that I can build upon concepts with him quickly as he adds his thoughts. And he's also genuine and thoughtful. I am grateful to have friends that I'm better because of.

Personal micro essay 🙆‍♂️ ON Patience.

(Time to read: 1:16 minutes)

How often do you hear people discuss patience over dinner?

Rarely do I. And rarely do I talk about it myself.

This aligns with Parkinson's Law of Triviality. We give more attention to trivial (meaningless) topics and spend little to no time discussing critical matters like patience.

A friend over dinner sparked this idea as he asked why we don't discuss patience more. I shared that I'm working on patience, which spurred his question.

This made me step back and ask, what is patience? If we talk so little about it, how can I have clarity on what it is and how to achieve it? Let's first go back in time and figure out where patience came from:

The history of patience

Patience has a long history (going back to 4500-2500 BC).

Patience started as a word for "embodying a willingness to bear adversities and the calm endurance of misfortune." Imagine living in those barbaric and chaotic times. You experienced constant adversities, making patience critical for survival.

As a Christian, patience has always been on my radar (Galatians 5:22 – Forbearance). But I never looked deeper into the word. I never understood what the writers of the Bible meant when they said to have patience.

The word patience in the Bible comes from the Greek word "Makrothymia." It appears 14 times in the New Testament and is a crucial virtue Christians should aspire for.

I thought it would be neat to end with some of those uses:

1. 2 Corinthians 6:6: "In purity, understanding, patience and kindness; in the Holy Spirit and in sincere love;"

2. Ephesians 4:2: "Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love."

3. Colossians 1:11: "Being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience,"

   1. And Colossians 3:12: "Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience."

Continue reading the essay here (and comment your thoughts!)

Click here to find all my micro essays

– Jo (every second counts)