Morning Coffee 62: June 19th, 2023

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Good morning! Started this morning in the gym before daylight (two miles on treadmill, 30 minutes of strength training). Wrapping up this week newsletter at a coffee shop (vanilla latte, extra shot). Heading into my second week with new job. First week went a lot smoother than I expected. Still thin on time, but I didn’t feel nearly as much stress as the weeks before. A lot of great feedback from last week’s newsletter, so this week is a continuation of that theme. Hope this letter finds you well.

Table of Contents

1. Why Am I Here?
2. Hole In The Wall

Hole in the Wall

This week on Morning Coffee, I discuss what makes me want to write a newsletter every week, and why I keep showing up.

Why Am I Here?

To tie into last week’s newsletter about time and what deserves my attention, I want to discuss the importance of this weekly newsletter, and why exactly is this considered important to me. Finding the humanity in what keeps bringing me back each week.

There’s several reasons I write this every week:

• Working out a muscle: Writing is like running or lifting weights. If you stop doing it, it’ll be harder to do when you pick it back up. I know from experience: taking a big amount of time off from writing crippled me for over a year as I tried to find my writing voice and flow again. Showing up weekly like this ensures that doesn’t happen again. Practice and discipline equals being on number 62.

• Tell stories: I think it’s very important to tell stories. To have a thought, and be able to round it out with a beginning, middle, and end. I think I’m decent at storytelling, but I hope to be great at it one day. And the beauty of writing is that I can be 100 years old and still writing, so I have many years ahead of me to improve. This newsletter gives me the opportunity to tell some kind of story, once a week, as I work on getting better at shaping a story.

• Help others: At 37 years old, I feel like I’ve accrued knowledge in a couple areas, and this newsletter gives me the opportunity to share that knowledge with others. When someone replies to an email saying that it helped them, then I feel like I’ve accomplished what I set out to do. Just helping one person a week is enough for me. This newsletter aligned with my real job: both are designed to help people. That’s a great feeling.

• Social: I don’t do social networks much anymore, so this newsletter is the closest thing to me being social online. I think of my website as a little local shop in your town (I’ve always enjoyed the thought of my site being a little hole in the wall on the web, like a local shop), and in that shop, it’s often quiet, but occasionally, someone stops by to visit, says hello, and maybe even spends a few dollars.

• Unscattered thoughts: That’s not a word, but it’s true. This newsletter helps me take all the random thoughts and ideas I’ve accumulated all week, and it gives me a place to put them. Otherwise, they’d drive me crazy. As I learn new information or have interesting ideas, they’re not being added to a pile of thoughts that aren’t being used. This newsletter puts random information and gives it a home.

These are just a few reasons I write this newsletter each week, and 62 in a row, I’m very happy with what I’m building here.

I appreciate everyone that reads these each week, and the conversations that are built around the ongoing topics are priceless. They continue to help me think through the upcoming weeks.

Keep it coming.

This is Morning Coffee: a weekly newsletter that arrives in your inbox every Monday morning. I write about productivity, technology, and cool things I find on the internet. My wife wants this to be my only job, so pay what you want, purchase my books on Amazon, or join my Music Program.