When I’m feeling restless late at night, I turn to simple projects. Normally that ends up not being Coach.me work because if I had something simple to do there I would have already done it.
And so, one recent evening, I browsed through my unused domain names and made the connection that many of them would make entertaining Medium publications. And, being late at night, the critical thinking skills that would normally protect my wallet were depleted.
That’s how I ended up on Upwork, hiring freelancers to staff the following publications.
iheartdancemoves.com
memeparty.xyz
ratemydogvideos.com
ratemycatvideos.com
and ratemyfighting.com (🤔🤔🤔 A much…
There is so much going on on this platform that it’s hard to keep up. So let me help. Here are some people and publications to follow that consistently produce…
Why we teach a Cue→Routine→Result methodology for habit coaching, and how that deviates from other methods.
Coaches and clients often come to us with some knowledge of pre-existing habit models, all of which use similar language. You might have run across these in Power of Habit or Tiny Habits or Atomic Habits.
As coaches, we try to work with the common knowledge of our clients, but there are places where we deviate. Those deviations are the secrets that you can only learn from experience.
You might have noticed if you are a long time reader of Better Humans that we are obsessed with real world experiences. That comes from curiosity that we learned in coaching. …
Sometimes tag lines are easy. For example, one reason I really like our Moneyball project is because the tagline was easy to come up with and helped guide the product design: “Make more money on Medium.” Easy and clear.
Right now on Better Humans we say something about trustworthy self improvement. First, if you have to say trusthworthy, then maybe that’s a problem.
But it’s also the classic trap of leading with your features rather than your value. The trap is to tell people what you do rather than who you do it for and why it would matter to…
This is a nascent thought that Terrie put in my head. It’s a scale that was proposed in permaculture and then adapted for Early Retirement Extreme (ERE).
The levels attempt to capture that in a deep field, “people would have varying levels of understanding according to their level of mastery. While people at adjacent levels are able to judge relative competence, there is also a fog of comprehension effect where people separated by multiple levels have difficulty relating to each other.”
I don’t understand either of those communities well enough to describe their scales for you. So I’ll just drop…
Always exercising my muscles for building things.
I took the opportunity of Medium re-opening access to custom domains to bring iheartquotes.com back. Click that link and follow the publication and good things will happen to you. Guaranteed.
Originally IHeartQuotes had been a very important side project for me, maybe the most important. I’d never built and launched anything of my own, so I challenged myself to launch something in 48 hours. I put a small database of quotes online, picked a name, got a domain, put some Rails code around it for displaying and rating the quotes and voila! I had a side project.
Then, months or…
Or can you?
Nobody respectable calls themselves a polymath, which is too bad because there’s a real passion for life behind that word.
The unfortunate vibe around the word polymath is that it’s a thirst for status and implies almost that there are required skills: must be able to give a recital with either piano or violin and read Latin & Greek.
But why those sorts of requirements? I was in my company Slack accusing Better Humans’ editor, Terrie, of being a polymath. She does a great job of editing and managing that pub, but also is an excellent performance bubbler (it’s a…
They are an email marketing company, geared toward creators, convertkit.com.
Originally they were on my radar because friends who were better at promoting their product launches used them.
Then they…
The 14th year of my annual gratitude practice, now spanning 730 good things.
What a year for gratitude! 2020 was the COVID year. (Or was it the first of the two COVID years, plural?) In any case, there were headwinds!
And yet, I have plenty of gratitude. I mean, obviously, it was a horrific year. But I’m taking a Stoic approach — control what I can control.
When I started this gratitude practice in 2007, I was stressed, trying to figure out how to be an entrepreneur and not at all confident that I was on a path that would work out. So I started trying to balance that stress and worry by…
This is less announcement and more just a musing on product design.
A thing that I believe is that “business model is destiny” and that’s coming out in the way we’ve been building business training. The way we train coaches is pre-ordained by our business model.
We make our profit matching clients to coaches. We charge coaches a lot when we do that— 50% revenue shares. And it’s easier to do this with reliable, professional coaches who stick around, build up a reputation, take their skills seriously, etc. Our incentives are to attract or train, and then retain, that type…
