52 Good Things from 2023
The 17th year of my annual gratitude practice, now spanning 886 good things.
When I first buckled down to finish this, the first line in the draft read: “For the first time in a long time, I’m posting this (almost) promptly!”
Oops. That was eleven months ago. This is very late, as they often are.
I started writing annual gratitude lists in 2007 as an antidote to anxiety. I’d started a company and was having a rough time of it. So I figured if I could find at least 52 high points from the year then I could beat back fear that I was making a huge career mistake.
It turns out that fear is just my personality. On a given day I’m so wrapped up in what’s in the way of my goals that I miss what’s gone well. So this practice creates a cognitive dissonance where the good counterbalances my normal day to day concern.
The 2023 year started with a massive plumbing leak that poured water from our second floor bathroom, through our pantry, and down to the basement. I caught it because we have both a water sensor and a webcam in the basement and so I got the experience of getting to watch water pour through our basement ceiling while lying in a bed that was several hours away. Yet, the year was, on balance, fantastic. That’s been true 17 years in a row now and each time it’s been a surprise to me until I saw the list.
Here are my prior lists: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2016–19, 2013–15, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007.
Visitors
The theme of the year was either the flooding, getting Medium headed in the right direction, or family. I’m going to go with family. We visited or were visited by a lot of people this year and had almost two months hosting or staying with family. It was nice (I like my family, and Sarah’s family too).
- On the friend front, we hosted the Savage Parks (good friends of mine from college) and then J&R, one of Sarah’s oldest friends (and best cook).
- Oldest nephew was actually out twice, once with his whole family for a NYC visit and then again for a week just with us. Gave him some epic east coast food, including Katz’ & Pepe’s.
- Oldest niece stayed with us for a week with her best friend. They were equally focused on the pool and Taylor Swift.
- Second oldest nephew also spent a week with us. Highlight for me was go karts.
- Some of this hosting was to take some pressure off Boston family who were having a worse-than-our-flood time of it.
- Speaking of our flood, we finally found a construction guy we like. He’s named Guy and he visited us on schedule until the work was done.
- We hosted family for Thanksgiving and, I think, are getting better at it. The key is just to let fewer people into the kitchen, otherwise all you do is answer questions about where things live or go.
- Scotchrepreneur Reunion in Austin. For a couple years, one of my regular highlights was a meeting of entrepreneurs where we took turns sharing our biggest problem and getting help from the group, all while sharing a very high end bottle of Scotch (hence the name). Well, the group broke apart during the pandemic and so this small reunion was nostalgic.
- Last hike w/ Moose. This is a grim one, but we lost a young cousin to a terminal brain cancer. But she was a special one in the way that sometimes a terminal illness brings out a special grace. She had it. And the last walk with her was so nice.
- Not sure where to put this, but my mom had one of her paintings chosen as the design on the label for a limited edition wine. We have the now empty bottle on display in our living room. She is a retired very good teacher (I’ve written about her here) and now full time making art and submitting it to shows around the northeast.
- Also, shout out to Geico home insurance. There were two reasons we were able to do so much hosting after a massive flood. Our guy Guy delivered on the fix up and Geico delivered on the insurance payment. I’ve gone literally decades without making an insurance claim but then when I needed them they were there.
Work
Medium launched The Boost, which actually was a plan that I pitched in my job application, and then hit a massive growth inflection point in August.
12. My first two years at this job were a lot of triage and righting of wrongs. But the Boost was the big innovation. We are the only major social media platform that adds a curatorial signal to our recommendations and that transformed us from clickbait to something much deeper. Here’s the announcement.
13. I took the job because I love the product, which is captured in this post writing up a Saturday morning reading at the coffee shop and having a peak experience where Medium delivered above and beyond what I might have hoped from my other reading options (NYTimes, Kindle, Twitter).
14. Wrote this explainer on why all creators should opt-out of letting AI companies train on their content until there is a standard for consent, credit, and compensation. It held up well and I think helped frame some of the critique of these companies.
15. Austin Offsite. The whole company meets twice a year to work on the things that we are hard to figure out in remote meetings.
16. Breakfast tacos and the Iced Turbo at Jo’s Coffee. This bothers my Austin friends who swear that there are much better breakfast tacos. But the the pairing of tacos with a large, sugary, coffee drink (the Iced Turbo!) put this location over the top for me.
17. The final day in Austin. The majority of the offsite was spent working out the why and the what. But then on the last day, I gave the call that we needed to do two things and then I watched as the team broke those two things down into (what looked like) two hundred steps. For example, the first Medium Day was planned there. I’m left on the sidelines during those planning moments and was just standing in awe of what two sentences from a CEO turn into in practice. Probably my favorite moment as CEO here, but also the one that makes me think most about responsibility.
18. +57k net new members. Most things in business fail. Very occasionally they work better than you hope. August was our first big growth month which we treated as “too good to be true” until we followed it up with two more months that were similar.
19. Sarah’s Save at Medium Day. I would rather write than present. But my partner has a deep background running conferences that also involves triaging struggling speakers. Medium Day was the largest audience I’ve ever spoken to live and Sarah is the person who came in at the last minute to make the talk work.
20. Performance reviews. I hadn’t been involved in performance reviews since 2004 and was actually excited to get one for myself. An external advisor to me, a former Apple, Twitch, and media exec, read and summarized my reviews as “You came in with strong opinions strongly held and everyone sees that that worked. But now they are wondering if their ideas matter.” (Yeah! Otherwise, how will I ever take a vacation?)
Mentions
Hey, sometimes I am in it for attention.
21. Bloomberg covered us. Medium’s support for Mastodon was the first positive press we got during my tenure. Nice to show proof of life and that we were willing to innovate.
22. Guest on 2 Pages with Michael Bungay Stanier. I don’t get to do much in the coaching/self-improvement world anymore so this interview represents a lot of lingering ideas from my prior life. My fav, still, is that deliberate practice should be rebranded as advantaged training. Does how you practice give you an advantage over how the competition practices?
23. My Interstitial Journaling concept got written up by The Bullet Journal folks. Pretty cool to make a contribution to the corpus of journaling practices.
24. Called shot in TechCrunch. Got to “Babe Ruth” something that nobody was expecting of Medium: 1M members and profitability. I feel like luck factors into a lot of things, but these two accomplishments always seemed like sure things to me.
Travel & Hiking
25. Turks & Caicos. Second year in a row to the Caribbean. Yeah, it was nice.
26. Yosemite Valley. This was my annual outdoors trip with college friends and their significant others. This time we organized around day hikes and trips: Mono Lake, Upper Yosemite Falls, Clouds Rest.
27. Zion & North Rim of the Grand Canyon. I’m souring on RV trips and considering just a rental car and motels. This was a successful test in that direction.
28. Blodget Trail in Montana. We did this as an extended family hike when we were out there for a wedding.
29. Delaware road trip. Sarah and I meant to do a road trip to Montreal but canceled for reasons of weather and did Wilmington instead. I know this doesn’t sound equivalent, but it was actually really awesome.
30. Skywalker Ranch. Sometimes my job gives me access to super swank perks. That’s what this was, a three day event put on by one of our investors.
Culture
31. Saw our friend Eran Bugge’s last dance at Lincoln Center. She retired from the Paul Taylor Dance Company.
32. The African American Museum in DC. This was part of our Fall offsite in DC.
33. Glenstone. This is a reservation-required privately owned museum in Maryland that was worth it for the architecture alone.
34. Guggenheim. Saw the Gego and Alex Katz exhibits. This is my favorite museum experience because you get to do a deep dive on an individual artist’s career and, because of how the museum is laid out, you get to see each piece from multiple angles.
35. Monday Night Magic. This was a surprise that Sarah took me too, walking through an old Italian restaurant, then up some stairs to a private dining area, and into a room filled with amateur magicians who were there to dine and be amazed by professional close up magic. This felt a bit like going to standup and watching professional magicians work out their act and their patter.
36. Rockettes. This was throwback culture. There are maybe three things that are recent but the rest seemed to be identical to what they first performed at Radio City in 1932.
Sports
37. US Open. Saw Coco Gauff with Sarah and my Mom.
38. Roller Derby. Saw the city championships for Gotham. They are a top ten team in the world.
39. Dog day at the Thunder. Took our dog, Eloise, to minor league baseball.
40. Warriors vs. Pistons. This was so close to being the best regular season game we’ve ever been to. It ended with last second threes for both teams but, unfortunately, a loss at the buzzer for the Warriors. Plus we got gifted fifth row tickets which is the last row that is still on the court. NBA players are so much bigger when you are this close to them.
Hobbies
41. Cigars. Sure, this might/will bite my health down the road. But I got really into cigars this year and had a blast.
42. Ministered my cousin’s wedding. This was my 7th time as a wedding minister. My youngest sister has also done two and together we have a perfect track record with zero divorces. We are unofficially a family business operating as “100% Successful Wedding Ministry” and our tagline is “For when you want to get married and stay married.”
Health
43. Bike (mostly Zwift): 119 rides, 1339 miles, 68 hours.
44. First colonoscopy. Look, this is blogging. If you are reading someone’s personal blog post then you might run into details like this. Yes, the prep is as bad as they say. But I’m all clear.
45. New tooth. I’m congenitally missing an important tooth and for years had a janky bridge covering the gap. But my new dentist is an fake-tooth-artist, and the new bridge is much more plausible.
46. Hernia. I had it for years. This is the year I fixed it. It’s minor surgery and now I have some mesh in my belly.
47. The only fun thing that I blogged was this writeup about cleaning my home gym. It was a workout.
48. Published “My Best Race Ever” which is about a time in my life when I was very healthy and is, I think, the first time the CEO of Medium has ever submitted a story to a community publication and had that story been accepted.
TV, Books, Movies, Music.
49. Favorite TV: The Last of Us, The Bear S2, Deadloch, Couples Therapy.
Favorite Episodes of TV: Forks from The Bear and Ep 3 of The Last of Us. So good.
50. Favorite Movies (in order): Barbie, RRR, Godzilla Minus One, Oppenheimer, Fletch Confess (keep making them Jon Hamm!).
51. Favorite (only) documentary: Yogi Berra. Really connected with Sarah’s dad over this one.
52. Favorite Stephen King book: The Institute. I’m not a great reader of books, partly because my brain is mush and partly because I read so much Medium. I know when a I pick up a Stephen King book that I’ll get through it easily. This was good, although embarassingly I forgot I read it and took it on a vacation the next year hoping to read it.
Bonus
She already got one big shot out above for her help at Medium Day, but basically the life I live and these nearly thousand gratitudes are because of an amazing partnership with Sarah. She finished the year off as an executive at a startup while putting together the foundations of a novel. We’ve been together 19 years, and for every single day of the last 18 of them we’ve shared with each other two good things from our day. So I know there were actually 1460 things that we were grateful for in 2023 but we just didn’t write them down.
