Dear Ones,

I’m changing up the newsletter format to be more intimate—instead of sharing a link, I’m going to tell you what I’ve been up to, share idea prototypes, and some of the thinking behind the scenes.

On a meta level, I realized that the newsletter I enjoy reading the most are the ones where the writers are willing to be vulnerable and share their lives. Hence the format switch up! Let me know what you think by replying to this email or commenting.

Here’s what I’ve been up to:

1. Published Virtual Meditation Retreats: Maintaining Mindfulness in Daily Life - This was my last Write of Passage assignment and I was dragging my feet on it. So I implemented a new system where I write my second draft directly in Notion, which forces me to publish since my Notion notebook is directly mirrored onto my website using Super.

2. Shared live notes of the various Zooms I have attended on Maven, Twitter Game, Newsletter Game, and creating Email-Based Courses (EBCs.) I realized that this is a professional skill I have that others can find value in, and as you can see with the EBC link, provides me with lots of Twitter fodder! I forget that I have learned to type up notes REAL FAST on complex topics, from summarizing a lot of pharmaceutical advisory boards on the fly for my day job.

3. Like many Write of Passage students, I’m now interested in creating my own cohort-based course (CBC), code-named “Buddhism for Smart People.” So I’m looking forward to enrolling in Maven’s accelerator program. In the meantime, I learned that email-based courses (EBCs) are a good way to test ideas and find target audiences. So I’m whipping up a prototype code-named “Ask Buddha.” It’s my first time building with Webflow, and I’ve decided to use it because it provides the most slick templates out of all the other landing page builders I’ve investigated. (Message me if you want me to talk through the process of shopping for the right tool!)

3 Bullets of Vulnerability:

I am giving myself a rare A+ for putting all that I’ve learned from Write of Passage into practice, and had made a lot of progress because of my newfound willingness to share incomplete ideas with others. So I have a lot of …the entrepreneurial equivalent of “new relationship energy” that is propelling me to build.

• Yet I know that from my past record, the things that trip me up finding the target audience, and pushing past the hard part of marketing. (Practically speaking, I know that the next step would be to use e.g. instagram/google ads to find customers…but I’ve actually never done that before! And I’m scared that I’ll waste money because I don’t know how to optimize ad targeting! Let me know if you have experience with this…)

• I’m scared because unlike a consulting job where I’m paid by the hour, I’m putting a lot of time and effort into something that pays…no money until it “succeeds.” Yet I know that this all feels…right, because I have so much fun doing it. David Perell’s newsletter about comfort with low status/chasing prestige struck me because it’s exactly how I feel now—on the knife edge of doing something “weird” that feels like it has variance potential. I have been here before, where I look back and wish I stuck to something, but shrunk back because it felt too high risk at the time. I often look at successful people who are creative and think gee, they can afford to be because they already made big money doing something else. But I think this is a mindset I need to change.

• I’m insecure about knowing how to price my value in this new creator economy, and in optimizing the conversion of all my current activities into value. Christine Carillo and crew were super helpful in opening this discussion in one of our Write of Passage peer groups, so I’m growing in this department. But one of the harsher voices in my head often is “someone smarter than you would monetize whatever-you’re-doing and made money from it already.” I can’t tell if that’s my impatience talking or if I’m truly missing opportunities!

Thanks for sticking with me as I go through this new chapter of my life. My goal here is to share all the successes and stumbles along the way, because I’m a very eyes-forward-only person, and not very good about looking back at what I’ve done. Hence, this newsletter serves as a way for me to reflect and not feel like “I didn’t do anything” all week. (The placeholder name for this newsletter format was “Swaddling Sunday Scaries!”) I hope there are tidbits here you find helpful too.

Warm Wishes,

Christin

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