At Podia, we ended 2018 at 10 people. By the end of April 2019, we were 17. Very quickly, as we were hiring more people, it became very apparent that we would need to update our processes.

In principle, I hate processes. I think most of the time they just get in the way of doing real work and add unnecessary steps from whatever you’re trying to do. Having to double-check that you’re following company procedure or logging into yet another application to perform a task is frustrating and brain draining to me.

But, the reality is, knowledge sharing and the general understanding of how things work at your company tend to break down as you grow.

As our company grew, we found this to be true for us, so we added a few new processes to help:

1. Hiring process

Before 2019, we were only hiring one person at a time, so managing the process was fairly straightforward. We had a job posting on our website, a link to a Typeform to submit the application, and we used Dropbox Paper to track candidates and share feedback between the people in charge of hiring.

In 2019, we started hiring for 3 positions at once (Creative Support Agent, Developer, and Creative Content Marketer) and trying to manage all of that with how we had things set up broke down, and quickly. The bottle neck was reviewing applications and taking feedback, so we moved to a “proper” Application Tracking System to smooth out our process.

2. File sharing and document sharing

As more people joined the team, it became unwieldy without proper permission settings, so we finally bit the bullet and upgraded our Dropbox setup from shared Personal folders to Dropbox Teams. The benefit is two-fold: it helps us now and protects us down the road when people eventually leave the team (though we’ve been very lucky to date 🤞).

Before, we’d just share a document with the relevant people as needed, but people having to request access to documents was a pain. This way, everything is super well-organized in our Dropbox account and we have it segmented by department.

One thing I kind of lament is the fact that Dropbox Teams is pretty expensive at $20/user/month. That adds up with 17 people where we’re now paying $340/month. 🤷‍♂️

3. 1-on-1s

We’ve never had a very formal process to our 1-on-1s. As a small team under 10, we were able to keep fairly up-to-date and engaged with people through Slack and our weekly calls. I’d do 1-on-1s every few months as things became quieter.

Now, as we’ve grown, we’re looking into 1-on-1 apps as a way to formalize the process and I also think we need to increase the frequency of 1-on-1s. At this time, I’m not in favor of weekly or even bi-weekly 1-on-1s, so we’ll likely consider monthly or every six weeks to test that out.

4. Company knowledge board

While we had just started using a company knowledge board to gather and document all of our internal notes, docs, processes, etc., as new people joined the team, it became very apparent that we’d need to do a better job of updating it.

This is one of the processes I think we’ve benefited the most from. For example, as new Customer Support Agents have joined, they’ve been able to see how we do things, answers to common questions, and guides on all sorts of things. Same goes with the Development, Design, and Marketing team.

And everyone benefits from our newly created “HR” folder that has everything from the payment schedule to our Family Leave Policy (also new).

5. Product management

Since hiring two new developers in 2019 — we’re now at seven — we’ve also spent time cleaning up the way we use Trello. Previously, we had two boards: one for things we were currently working on, and one for our backlog of do’s that included bugs and tasks.

Since then, we’ve added a third for bugs and other tasks and removed those from our backlog. Now, our customer support folks can add any reported bugs directly into the “Bugs and Tasks” board.

This helps keep things more organized. It may seem obvious in retrospect, but when you’re fewer people, it’s often not necessary to separate things so much.

What hasn’t changed?

Just about everything else I can think of hasn’t changed. For me, it’s important to not make too many changes too quickly. Change is good, adapting to having more people is important, but I don’t want to rock the boat and mess up everything that’s been working so well up until now.

Before Podia, the largest team I’ve led was thirteen people, so this is definitely different, but as you often hear from experienced founders who have grown larger teams, it doesn’t really get harder as long as you’re working with great people and you stay organized.

I’m excited to see how things continue to change as we grow in size.

Have you ever vacationed with your entire family in a single house? I’ve always told Chris that I think the best time to spend with extended family would be in a neutral setting at a neutral time (no holidays please). This idea became a reality when my mom surprised us with an amazing gift.

My mom and aunts recently sold my grandparents’ house. With my mom’s portion of the sale she decided to take her family on a vacation. We joined my parents, two sisters and their husbands and kiddos in a beautiful three story home with a pool right on Bradenton Beach, FL. My Nana loved nothing more than being with all of her family so it was a wonderful way to honor her and my grandpa.

Anna Maria Island, Florida

Our days in Florida were slow and relaxing. Mornings were filled with coffee, cartoons, and taking in the view of the waves. The rest of the day was spent between the pool, beach, and foosball table! Lunches were simple sandwiches and fresh fruit. My brother-in-law rocked the grill at dinner time. And as the sun was about to set we would head to the beach to absorb the last of the sun’s rays.

We rarely left the property - a few trips to the beach wear and grocery stores filled our needs. Halfway through the week we had a girlie with ear pain at 1AM. We didn’t realize that my dad (with the dog) and sister (with the baby) were up as well. Had we known, Chris could have brought the dog and our nephew in the car when he made his late night run to Walgreens.

Sharing this vacation with my family allowed all of our relationships grow. We all helped each other out. My sisters would take N to the beach when the twins wanted to stay in the pool. I grabbed the baby when he woke up from his nap so my sister could stay on the beach a bit longer. Chris taught our two year old nephew the potato fries fist bump. The girls cuddled on the couch with my niece when they watched movies. And on a few nights the adults would stay up with a glass of wine and chat!

Before the week was over my sisters and I agreed that we would love to vacation like this again! It was the most relaxing, fun time we’ve spent with family. And while this trip was free thanks to my parents, we would gladly split the cost in the future because a week in paradise with my family was priceless.

Here’s a scenario I bet you’ve encountered:

You’re on your way home. It’s a familiar route. You’ve done this trip hundreds or thousands of times.

Your mind drifts to other parts of your day. You think about the grocery list, the latest challenge with work or the kids.

The next thing you know, you’re home.

You don’t remember the commute. You don’t remember the turns, the signs, or the stops. You know they happened and you feel like you were reasonably safe, but you must admit that you were, in essence, on autopilot.

Why do we end up on autopilot? Certainly getting home safely is important to us. The last thing any of us wants is to get in a car accident or to hit a pedestrian.

Here’s my theory - subconsciously, we’re making a decision to optimize. We know we only have so many minutes in the day. We can’t avoid the commute, so we choose to optimize our time by balancing a “sufficient” amount of attention to the road with the rest on other priorities.

If we can give enough attention to driving, isn’t it the best of both worlds to be able to mentally prepare for other parts of our day as well?

Optimizing is a driving force in our day. We optimize our time. We optimize our money. We optimize our skills, our talents, and our relationships.

When Optimization Goes Wrong

But optimization has a dark side. When we let our optimization be subconscious (instead of conscious), we run the risk of optimizing for the wrong things and getting further away from the life we really want.

Optimizing your time on the road might be worth the safety tradeoff if you’re spending that time figuring out a cure to a debilitating disease. But is it worth getting into an accident because you were trying to decide whether your Instagram photo of tonight’s tacos would look better with white or orange cheddar?

You see, optimizing on autopilot is risky; especially when you’ve got celebrities, carefully curated social media profiles, and advertising telling you what you’re “supposed” to value.

When you start combining subconscious optimizing with “adopted” values from others, you can quickly find your life spinning in the wrong direction.

Modern Society’s Preferred Optimizations

So what do those celebs, influencers, and marketers tell you to optimize for?

Two big ones come to mind, both of which are recipes for failure.

First, they tell you to optimize for your “image”. You’re told to optimize for how others perceive you. Get this car and people will think X. Wear these clothes and you’ll give the appearance that you’re Y.

But if you optimize for your image, you’re optimizing on other peoples’ perceptions instead of your own. You’re inherently placing your personal value in what other people think of you, which is something you should never optimize for.

Your worth isn’t defined by what other people think. It’s not even defined by what you think. God loves you and no matter how poor your image (self or otherwise) is. God determined your worth a long time ago and no one can take that away.

Second, society will tell you to optimize for convenience.

Between fast food, internet shopping with 2-day delivery, on-demand streaming, and instant answers from your phone (or a digital assistant sitting in your living room), we’ve been trained to think that convenience is king.

But is our ultimate goal on this planet to “get things easily?” Is that what you want on your tombstone?

Here Lies Chris
Loving husband and father
Found innovative ways to avoid lifting a finger
Rest in peace

Come on! God made you for bigger and better things than finding the easiest and fastest way to satisfy your compulsions.

I had a beer with one of our readers the other week (BTW, this is something I’m highly for and would love to do with any of you that are swinging by Madison, WI) and he shared a great example of how he and his family flipped convenience on its head and found a much better thing to optimize for.

Here’s the rundown:

Their family has three kids (one college, one high school, one middle school) and two working parents. Their college-aged son is home for the summer and working a second-shift internship on the other side of town. With only 2 cars, transportation can get a little bit tricky.

The convenient solution would be to buy another car - even a junker - to help ensure that transportation is easy for everyone. But this family knows that convenient doesn’t necessarily mean best, so they came up with another approach.

Every morning, the dad drives to work. When the son needs to head to work in the afternoon, he rides his bike to his dad’s office. When he gets there, he drops off the bike and takes the car the rest of the way to his second-shift job. When the dad finishes work, he rides the bike home. When the son finishes work (late at night), he drives the whole way back.

Is this convenient? Definitely no. Biking is exercise and that’s hard work. But it’s also good for you. Rain and temperature could make for some pretty rough riding conditions. But those conditions aren’t impossible to tackle.

It’s not convenient, but it does align with this family’s values. They didn’t want to spend the extra money on a car, gas, and insurance. They didn’t want to add more pollution to the air or another set of rusted out parts in the landfill. So they got creative and found a better solution to the problem for their family.

Optimize for Your Values

I love that story - not because that situation and solution precisely matches us, but because it precisely matches them. This reader’s family thought hard about what was important to them and optimized on their values.

Over the last several years, we’ve worked to do the same in our own lives. Here’s a small example:

In our old house, we had four bedrooms. With three kids, that gave us precisely enough space to allow each child to have their own bedroom as they got older.

But as we build the little white shack, we are building with a floorplan that has just two bedrooms and two bathrooms. All three of our girls will share a single bedroom and a single bathroom.

Keep in mind, we’re going to have three teenage girls in our household in the not-so-distant future, so this definitely doesn’t sound convenient from most perspectives.

But convenient isn’t what we want here. We don’t want a situation where our daughters all shut themselves off in separate parts of the house. We don’t want our house to just be a place we all happen to live; we want to be present and supportive in one another’s days every day.

And we don’t want to let convenience drive our finances. More bedrooms and bathrooms mean a bigger mortgage, higher property taxes, and higher operating cost. That expense comes at the cost of other things we’d rather spend our money on - like charity and family travel.

Will sharing a room cause some extra sibling fighting? Maybe. Will there be times that they scream and tell us we’re ruining their lives for not giving them their own room? Probably. But will they be forced to confront issues, work through conflict, and connect as a family? Definitely.

This piece of our floorplan may sound massively inconvenient to some. But for us, it’s a reflection of the values we think are right for our family. And that’s the perfect thing to optimize for.

What are you optimizing for? How does your life reflect your values (or not)? What optimizations are you second-guessing?

This article is inspired by a tweet I made back on July 16th. Gregg Blanchard on Twitter asked if I could turn the tweet into a post and elaborate more on each stage of our process at Podia, so that's what I've done. Thanks for the inspiration, Gregg!

Yearly roadmap

Between Christmas and New Years, I take a little downtime, but I also spend it writing up a Yearly Product Roadmap for Podia to present to the team during the first week back.

Every Yearly Product Roadmap starts with a brief history of what we did during that year. For us, it goes all the way back to 2014.

After the brief history (which only gets one additional line every year, but does provide context as to where we came from), I write out a reflection on the product work from the previous year.

While every year has a loose theme, I always cover the same topics: whether or not we hit our goals, if the goals shifted throughout the year because we learned new things, and what, if anything, we thought we were going to do, but didn't.

Then I write a bit about our KPIs and how well we performed for the year and wrap it up with a few FAQs.

After concluding the review of the past year, I start to write about what we want to do for the next year. As I mentioned above, every year has a loose theme, which is usually tied back to the major product ideas that we want to work on for the upcoming year.

After writing about the theme and the major product ideas, I write out the high-level new features and current product improvements that we want to do in a table and bucket them into themes.

From there, I take every high level feature and break it down one or two layers deeper to give more context as to how we might address it.

Lastly, I'll assign a specific “to do” to each developer and designer for them to focus on at the start of the year.

Quarterly roadmap

I don't create a Q1 Roadmap, because we just start by working off the Yearly Product Roadmap.

By Q2, we've learned more in Q1 than I knew back in December when planning for the year, so the Q2 Roadmap will have new things on it and some old things will be removed.

These Quarterly Roadmaps start off by reviewing the previous quarter by outlining what we released, what's in progress, and what we still want to do or not do.

From there, every feature is listed out with a few paragraphs on each with a high-level overview; the goal here is to give context around why we're building each one.

Accompanying the list of features is a table that shows the “Status” for every feature for the quarter, links to the specs, links to Trello, links to Figma, and who is working on it.

Some of the features in the table won't have anything listed out until it's time to start those features.

We don't write the specs until a few days or a week before we're going to start on a new feature because we want it to be fresh; we don't write specs for features we never build because what's the point in that?

Strategy doc

The strategy doc is short, concise, and it outlines the feature that we're planning to build. I write these to have a lot of context as to what we're building and why, what I think it should be, some example screenshots of where it could go, and what's unknown/still needs to be figured out.

These aren't supposed to include the entire spec, because for that, I want to spend time with a designer and/or developer to work it out exactly.

Specs collaboration with me/designer/dev

Once the strategy doc is done, and the time is right, I'll jump on a video call with a developer or designer to discuss the spec. We'll go over the strategy doc and talk about the specifics as to how we might implement this.

Design

If we need designs, the designer will go off and start designing it; we use Figma. Once there's a design to review, we'll start leaving comments and talking through everything in Figma.

Somewhere in the design process, we'll loop in a developer to review the designs to make sure we're all on the same page in terms of how this will get implemented.

If the screens require copy, we'll loop in our copywriter to write it.

Dev

Once the developers start working on the code, they’ll keep me and the designers up-to-date on their progress in Trello and Slack. If during that process they get stuck or if they have a concern as to how something was designed, they'll voice that.

Dev/design clean up

We'll then make any changes we need to make after we see how the feature is working on our staging servers.

Most of the time, we don't really have many changes to make on staging as we've been collaborating throughout the process.

Deploy feature flag

We'll then deploy the feature to product behind a feature flag where only we as the Podia Team can see it. If it's something critical like touching the checkout process, we'll let it run for 24 hours or so before removing the feature flag.

Write announcement / write help doc

While the feature is deployed behind a feature flag, I'll write the announcement and the developer who worked on the feature will write the help doc.

Once both are drafted, our copywriter will review both and make any necessary changes before going live.

Remove feature flag

Next, we remove the flag so that everyone has access. We’ll wait an hour or so to make sure everything is working okay.

Announce 🙌

Send the announcement!

We'll either opt for an email to all of our customers (on paid accounts and people on trial accounts) or we'll just send an in-app notification; the kind of notification really depends on how important the update is to our customers.

Feedback/recap/data

Once the feature is live, we'll gather up the feedback we got from customers and post them into our #product channel in Slack and review any data we're tracking in Metabase about how the feature is performing.

That's it. I hope you find this helpful and please let me know if any questions in the comments. 🙌

Another thoughtful guest post for slow travel week! This one is from my friend Amanda.

Travel has been part of my life since I was nine years old, when my parents packed us up for a six-month motorhome trip around Europe. Thanks to Australia’s long service leave provisions, my dad could take six months off work and still get paid, so off we went. It was a low-budget trip with lots of simple meals and days spent playing in local parks, following the principles of slow travel long before anyone started to describe it that way.

To say that the travel bug bit me on that trip would be an understatement, and so much of my life—and let’s be honest, my money—has been spent on travel ever since. In my teens and early twenties, I couldn’t really explain my desire to travel more, I just knew I wanted to do it.

I grew up in Perth, Western Australia, which is a gorgeous city but is known to many as the most isolated city in the world. Even the next significant city is close to a two-day drive away. It’s improved a lot thanks to the internet age, but Perth in the past really lagged behind the rest of the world and it felt stifling growing up here; most people from my age group have moved away at least for a few years. Some come back; others never do.

It wasn’t until I finally left Perth, after several failed attempts, and moved to teach English in Japan at the age of 25, that I finally began to understand why I wanted to travel. When I’m travelling, I really and truly feel alive. Leaving behind the humdrum of daily home life and exploring cultural differences, meeting people who speak different languages, and taking in amazing landscapes and enticing cities—all of this gives me so much energy and inspiration.

But even more than making me feel properly alive, travelling has changed me and taught me so much. Most of my core values are thoughts I developed from my experiences living and travelling throughout Asia and Europe. Empathy for others—especially others who have a different background to me—is something I learnt when I had to understand why my Japanese friends were so worried about making a mistake speaking English; acknowledging and accepting different viewpoints was something I understood after chatting many times with friends in Slovakia about how their life had been different under socialism and capitalism.

Travelling also taught me confidence and the quiet ability to know that everything will work out okay, eventually. When I left Australia, I’d been suffering from bouts of severe anxiety since my late teens, and I had phobias of driving on highways, of flying, of being in elevators. But removing myself from the place where it all started, and opening myself up to these new experiences of the world, changed everything. I lived in buildings where I could only reach my apartment in an elevator, and doing that every day dissolved that phobia. I loved so much to see new countries, and flying was often the only way, so I kept doing it until I didn’t have a panic attack on take off. I still don’t love driving on highways, but I pushed myself enough that I managed to pass my German driving licence test, including a stint on the Autobahn.

I could go on, but suffice to say, when I think about what makes up my personality and outlook on the world, I know that all of it has been influenced oh-so-heavily by my travels.

And now I have a seven-year-old son and I’m back in Perth. It’s such a big responsibility, trying to shape the way a small human being thinks, but I’m trying to use what influence I have as effectively as possible. So far, I’ve raised him to love to travel, and to not really see differences but to see the similarities that we all have, because after all, we are all human. When he plays with his Lego, or his cars and trucks and planes, so often his games turn into experiences on a world-wide scale—his Lego car is driving some Lego guys to the airport to fly to Iceland and see the puffins; his trucks are carrying sumo wrestlers and taiko drums and sushi stands for a festival in Japan. It warms my heart.

As a single parent, I don’t have a huge budget, and remember, we live in Perth, the most isolated city on the planet. But travel is important, and I find ways to take my son travelling as often as possible—usually abroad once or twice a year, at least. It changes him every time.

Just before our most recent trip, to Malaysia and Singapore, he’d been getting stressed in school and was emotionally pretty worn down. By the first night of our trip, it was like a huge weight had lifted off him, and he was back being a happy-go-lucky seven-year-old. He brought that feeling back from our trip, and I saw him run so confidently into school, restored by the same inspirational feeling that travel gives me, too.

My son hasn’t even yet reached the age I was when I first travelled, and he’s been to a dozen different countries and experienced so many varied cultures and people. When I look at how much travelling has impacted my life, and to think that at his age, none of that had started, I feel proud that I’m able to give him these amazing lessons that are shaping his personality and thinking. And I look forward to travelling with him to many more places, and watching both of us continue to grow through travel.

Amanda blogs about travel at NotABallerina.com and hosts The Thoughtful Travel Podcast where she chats with fellow travel-lovers about all of the wonderful lessons travel provides.

May was not meant to be a month of silence. I did not intend to disappear. My plan with the slow technology experiment was only to take a break from social media, not the blog. I had planned to write a post about the role television plays in my life, these days. I had also planned to write a post about how I use technology, as a whole. Of course, as I continue to learn again and again, things don’t always go as planned. Life is not always in our control. In fact, I think it was Lauryn Hill who said, “We can’t plan life. All we can do is be available for it.”

And that’s exactly what I did in May. I made myself available to the two creatures who needed me more than anyone or anything else: our family dogs.

The girls, as we call them, have been part of our family since shortly after I graduated from high school. We brought Molly home in 2004, and got Lexie in 2005. There is no doubt we spoiled them, the way many small dog owners do (and sometimes have to). But they loved the same things as every other dog: going on walks (especially at the beach), eating food and hanging out with their pack. And they each came with their own unique personality. Lexie is a brat who plays by her own rules, and Molly quickly became her protector.

In April, Molly started showing signs she was aging. She ate a little slower, took the stairs a little slower, walked a little slower. We had one scare with her in early May, where we had to leave her in the animal hospital overnight. She quickly recovered, though, and came home the next day. Unfortunately, just 2.5 weeks later, we had to bring her back in. Again, I thought we were going to bring her home the next day, but things don’t always go as planned. Her test results showed us we had to let her go. We said goodbye to Molly (age 13) on May 22nd.

Since then, I have spent almost every minute of every day with Lexie. She’s been adjusting to life without Molly fairly well (probably because I rarely leave her side). However, she started showing her own signs of aging a few weeks ago. While Molly was slowing down, Lexie started doing circles; and walking around like she was drunk; and even bumping into things. It was easy to assume she was just going blind—until she had two seizures. With all of that combined, our vet says it’s likely she has a brain tumor. We got this news on May 26th.

It’s fair to say I’ve been on an emotional roller coaster, this past week. The pain comes in waves. Lexie and I will have a great day, then I’ll crawl into bed and be so uncomfortable in the silence that I burst into tears. Sometimes, it’s just the little things: doing a routine that would have normally involved Molly and remembering she’s not here anymore. I’ve even missed hearing her bark at the mailman. To counter this, there have also been a lot of smiles and laughs in our family, as we share our favourite things about her. Molly was truly loved.

If Lexie does have a brain tumor, there’s no way to tell how long she will be here with us. My heart is broken at the thought of having to say goodbye to her too. So far, two things have helped me not have a breakdown about it: 1) knowing she’s not in pain, and 2) knowing she is blissfully unaware of her condition. That second point is something I think about many times each day, and comes with even more lessons of its own.

While I’ve been trying to figure out what slow living looks like, the girls have been exemplifying it their whole lives. And while they have needed me this month, Molly and Lexie have taught me lessons I will carry with me for a lifetime. <3

• Live in the moment. Dogs have no concept of time. They live one day at a time, and enjoy each moment as it comes. Whether they are laying in the sun, playing with a toy or going for a walk, they are simply happy to be alive – and to be spending that moment with someone in their pack.
• It’s ok to cry. That’s not to say they have no emotions. Molly was one of the most emotional dogs I’ve ever met, and wore her heart on her sleeve. But she didn’t sit around worrying all day. She simply had emotional reactions in the moments they were needed (like when something was wrong with Lexie).
• Make sure your basic needs are met. Dogs only have a few basic needs: food and water, a place to sleep and access to a patch of grass. They don’t care what colour their leash is, how cute their toys and beds are, or anything else. They just need food, water, exercise and sleep. And a human. :)
• Be grateful your basic needs are met. One of the best things about living in the moment is that dogs also have no concept of wanting more. They don’t care about getting the newest or best of anything. They are simply grateful to eat their food, lap up their water, soak up the sun and get some attention.
• Give people your full attention. Speaking of attention, dogs are the one animal that give humans all of theirs. They greet you with pure love and joy. When you’re together, they look at you – not at their cell phones. And for as long as you are willing to give them your attention, they will give theirs to you.
• Nature is therapy. I have never met a dog who didn’t jump at the words, “Do you want to go for a walk?” They don’t care about climbing mountains or running personal bests. And they really don’t care about the pictures you can take and share on social media. Dogs are simply excited to get some fresh air and spend more time with their pack. It also helps them release some energy and sleep better at night.
• Don’t take life too seriously. There is always a reason to play. <3

None of this is to say I’ve put it all into practice and am high on life right now. I’ve spent much of the past week in a daze. While I’m present with Lexie, I have ignored my inbox and my client work. I dragged the vacuum out last Monday, but didn’t actually vacuum the house until yesterday. I even forgot about an important interview, and wrote down the wrong date for my nephew’s birthday party. Grief messes with us. It’s human. I’m human. But my four-legged family members are doing their best to bring me down to earth and remind me to be present.

I’ll do an update on the social media detox next week, but for now I will say this: I don’t know what was shared online, but I know it wasn’t important to me. I don’t care what news I missed, which trends became fashionable or who made the top 10 list of whatever. The only thing that mattered was taking care of the girls, starting to grieve the loss of Molly and making sure Lexie was living her best days. There is nothing more important than the people and animals in our lives. Please give yours an extra hug and cuddle today. xo

UPDATE: Lexie lost her fight on May 31st. My heart is broken, but I’m so grateful I got to spend all her final days with her. The girls are together again. <3

There are a lot of posts out there that talk about why it’s important to spend time outdoors. It’s a natural remedy that offers a workout, lifts our spirits and helps us sleep better at night. It gives us the opportunity to disconnect from our constantly-connected world and take some time to be with ourselves and others. And it can come with beautiful views and show us parts of the worlds we might otherwise never see.

All of those are factors in why I love spending time outdoors, but I don’t need—and don’t want—to write a post with that same list. Yes, I’ve found that even a 30-minute mindfulness walk around your neighbourhood can be a meditative experience that provides an immense amount of relief and clarity. That’s exactly why I go for a walk every day. But that’s not why spending time outdoors matters to me.

Growing up, I wasn’t good at much. I learned how to read even before I could ride a bike (and I learned that at age 5). So I read a lot and rode my bike around the different neighbourhoods I grew up in. I also loved to swim. But I wasn’t good at anything else.

I attempted to play basketball for a couple years but was lucky if I could make 15% of my shots. I usually walked away from volleyball games with sprained fingers. I still don’t understand how I was part of a relay team in track and field but that was short-lived. Soccer and softball were laughable. And I hated literally every other sport we had to play in gym class. I wasn’t lazy. I just wasn’t good.

Something I’ve only accepted and started to work through this year is the fact that I am a recovering perfectionist. This has manifested differently in all areas of my life, but when you’re a kid and you’re not immediately good at any sport, it means you basically always feel like a failure. It was like walking around with a sandwich board hanging over me that read, “DON’T PICK ME” on the front and, “I SUCK” on the back.

So, when I was done being forced to play these games I was terrible at in gym class, I would walk away feeling like a failure and run to the worlds of the things I was good at. Reading books, riding my bike and swimming. By age 13, I was also good at partying, and being drunk and high was my favourite world of all.

The irony of being a perfectionist who is “good” at partying is that it will ultimately lead to some kind of failure. If you’re lucky, that failure will lead you back to a sober life. I got sober when I was 27 and, while my self-worth still isn’t exactly where I would like it to be, I know I’m better in this world than in the party world. I know because it’s the first world where I have truly felt like I could be myself—and I have the outdoors to thank for that.

I have always loved* being outside. As soon as I got my driver’s license, I took my little old Hyundai Excel on as many adventures as she could handle. When we needed more space, my girlfriends and I would fill up the back of my dad’s truck with gear and set out to explore Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands. We would hike, bike, swim, skimboard (and bail). We would camp in places that didn’t have much water, not shower for 4 or 5 days, and come home covered in dirt. And I loved it.

*Note: There are still things I don’t love. Like the heat. I’m as pale as a ghost and burn easily. The hot sun and I are not friends. But you learn how to manage (or avoid) these things!

Still, I never considered myself particularly outdoorsy. Then I spent two years with a guy who hated the outdoors and who I essentially melted into and shaped myself into whoever he wanted me to be. Not long after we broke up, I started going hiking and camping more regularly again, but I did it for some of the wrong reasons: to prove something, to spend time with certain people and to party. (And I’ll never forgot how proud I used to be when I could wake up without a hangover and do a sunrise hike. Pretty cool, Cait.)

I started spending time outdoors for better reasons in 2011, when I was maxed out with nearly $30,000 of debt and was also at my heaviest weight. It was a free workout, and a free activity I could do with friends where we could take in some beautiful views together. Also, the workout + the fresh air helped me sleep better at night, which was a rarity during a time when I was so stressed out by my financial situation. These were all wins.

I was still drinking at the time, but I was also doing these other things to better myself—and it was only a matter of time before the two worlds couldn’t work well together. After taking control of my finances and my health, I decided to take control of my drinking and completely opt out. It was the best decision I’ve ever made.

Living in this world and seeing it through sober eyes is such a gift, but it has also come with its own challenges. I had wrapped up so much of my identity in being “good” at partying and being the girl everyone wanted to party with. Since I let go of that girl, I’ve been left with an odd-shaped hole inside me that I still can’t seem to fill up.

Some days, I genuinely don’t understand why people would want to invite me places. And I don’t usually like to talk about this but a huge reason I don’t date is because of one particular story I tell myself: I won’t find a guy who is comfortable dating a girl who doesn’t drink. (On the surface, I know that’s not true. But there is so much power in the stories we tell ourselves that I’ve let that one stop me from even trying to find him.)

Remember when I said my self-worth still isn’t where I want it to be? That’s one example of what I’m working through—and I am working through it. Being sober means I am finally able to acknowledge and voice these things, rather than numb myself. So, I know I’m better in this world than in the party world, because it’s the first world where I have truly felt like I could be myself—and I also have the outdoors to thank for that.

The outdoors is the one place where I’ve never felt like I had to measure up to anyone else. Let’s look at hiking as an example. I love hiking. I love it because it’s not a race. It doesn’t matter how fast you complete a hike or if you even complete it at all. And it doesn’t demand you have any skills, other than wanting to go, then putting one foot in front of the other, and picking yourself up if you slip or fall.

Hiking also doesn’t demand you look a certain way. You don’t need to keep up with trends or wear name brands or be a certain height or weight. Comfort and sensibility are the only two things to consider (along with how much food and water you want to pack). And you should just start by expecting to get dirty. Use your hands to get up and sit down to rest when you need to. The rocks, trees, stumps, and your friends are happy to help.

Along the way, you can appreciate the scenery and even the work that’s gone into creating and maintaining the trails you’re on. And if you make it to the viewpoint, amazing! Soak it all in. If you’re in a time where things feel hard or the world feels like a bad place, taking in that view has a way of putting things into perspective—the most important perspective being that you didn’t need to be “good” at anything to get there.

You don’t have to be an athlete to spend time outdoors. You just have to be a human who appreciates the world and wants to see more of it.

So yes, I think it’s important to spend time outdoors. It’s a natural remedy that offers a workout, lifts our spirits and helps us sleep better at night. It gives us the opportunity to disconnect from our constantly-connected world and take some time to be with ourselves and others. And it can come with beautiful views and show us parts of the worlds we might otherwise never see. But that’s not why spending time outdoors matters to me.

I love the outdoors because it’s the one place where I can truly be myself. My beautiful, messy, happy, sad, sober, uncoordinated and hilarious self.

PS – This #atwildwoman image has been licensed from Amanda Sandlin. She also created my beautiful logo! To see more of her work, check out her shop and follow her on Instagram.

It’s not hard to find posts/entire websites that can help you launch a blog; and launch a blog that gets a lot of attention and success early on; and then use that success to turn it into a blog that not only helps people see you as an expert but also makes you a lot of money. I can’t write a blog post like that. Some of my friends can! I have friends who are really smart and know everything it takes to build a successful blog with a huge mailing list that proves you are an expert and can make you a lot of money. But I can’t.

Instead, I can write a blog post that tells you I launched an anonymous blog on October 1, 2010 to document my debt repayment journey. I can tell you I deleted the first version of that blog in early 2011, then restarted it when I was completely maxed out. I can tell you I connected with a few people and companies I loved on Twitter, and ultimately got my first two freelance writing jobs from doing so. I can tell you I wrote my blog anonymously for close to two years before I grew tired of lying to my family and friends about my “double life”. And I can tell you that, shortly after that, I got a full-time job offer from a company in Toronto.

Of course, a lot has changed since then. I moved to Toronto in 2012, then moved back to BC in 2013 and continued to work remotely for that same company. I built more relationships and got more freelance writing work, and then I quit my job in 2015 and have been self-employed ever since. Working for myself was never part of the plan. I always thought I was going to climb a corporate ladder, then maybe jump off one ladder and onto another. I never thought I would be my own boss, and I especially never thought that this blog would make being my own boss a possibility. It wasn’t part of the plan.

For the past seven years, I’ve shared all of this + the ups and downs of my life here with you. I didn’t start this blog to get attention from the press or reach any level of success, or to grow a huge audience or make a lot of money. I started it to document my debt repayment journey. The success that has come from it has been a result of consistent writing, plus a lot of careful considerations, and the intentional decision to forego all the usual advice and do things my way. It’s also a result of putting people (YOU) over profit. It’s been slow and steady, but I’ve stuck to my gut and built something that feels GOOD.

That’s the best blogging advice I can give: do what feels good.
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But for those of you who have asked for more of a step-by-step solution for growing a blog, here is the list of rules I’ve created for myself.

1. Reply to Comments

Those of you who have been reading (and commenting) for a while know this to be true. It’s the first blogging rule I made for myself: if someone takes the time to comment, I will take the time to reply. It’s not only a sign of respect, it also helps us have actual conversations (vs. one-sided responses) and has, in turn, created a real community here. As the years have gone on, I’ve changed it slightly so I usually only reply to comments that come in within the first 2-3 days of a post going live. But this same rule applies to email, too. Depending on how flooded my inbox gets, it might take a couple days or even a couple weeks to reply to them all (and it took even longer after the girls died). But I read everything and I do reply.

1b. To go along with the first rule, I’ve also always monitored comments and sent trolls to spam. It’s fine if someone has a different opinion from me or disagrees with something I say, and I’ll publish anything that’s constructive, or challenges me to think or even change my mind. But I won’t let trolls come in and dominate the conversation, and I especially won’t let people be mean to other people. If you don’t like me, save yourself the energy and just don’t read what I write, because I won’t publish your comment. This is a safe space for people to open up and have conversations, and I won’t let anyone come in and take that from us.

1c. I’ve also always been the one who responds to comments and emails personally. I know bloggers and business owners who hire virtual assistants to do this work, but that has always felt disingenuous to me and is something I can’t do. People write to you because they want you to read their words and they think you will be the one who replies. Even if it means there is a delay, it has to come from me.

2. Support Other Bloggers

A couple weeks ago, Stephanie asked if I could recommend ways for writers to “get their blogs out there”. My first response to this question is always the same: support other bloggers. And don’t just visit their sites and write short comments like “this was a great post” or “I do the same thing”. Write a comment because you care about this blogger and you want to see them succeed. Write a comment because you read someone else’s comment and you want to help them succeed. Write a comment because you want to be part of a community. And then share the post with everyone who follows you online, because you want to help this person’s message be heard.

When I first started blogging, I engaged with a lot of bloggers who were also documenting their own debt repayment stories. We cheered each other on, celebrated our successes, and helped each other with any challenges we had. It was not a strategy to get more readers or rack up pageviews. We were a community within the personal finance community, and I don’t know what they thought of me but I needed them. No one in my real life knew what my financial situation was, except for my blogging friends. I was more honest with them than I was with my own family. So, I always treated them like friends because that’s exactly what they were (and are).

When I finished paying off my debt, I gave a huge amount of credit to my fellow bloggers because I truly felt that I couldn’t have done it so quickly without their support—and I’ve always wanted to give that same support back to others. For years, that support took shape in the form of comments I would leave on people’s posts. I would comment because I read a post and thought OMG I NEEDED TO READ THIS and it felt really good to connect with like-minded people. And I would comment to thank someone for sharing their story, or for being honest and vulnerable, or for writing something that made me feel a little less alone in this world.

Again, as the years have gone on, I’ve had less time to comment on posts but I’ve found other ways to support bloggers. For starters, I help curate all the personal finance content you read on Rockstar Finance, which means I skim hundreds of blog posts each week and share my favourites with Jay. I used to share a lot of posts on Twitter, but now I compile a list of the ones I love and put them into my newsletter. And when something really touches me, I email the blogger personally. So no, I don’t comment as much anymore, but I still find ways to say OMG I NEEDED TO READ THIS and THANK YOU and then share it with my readers.

3. Write What Feels Natural (Not What Will “Perform” Well)

One thing I see over and over again in emails from people who are considering starting blogs is that they get overwhelmed by all the steps it will take to build something “the right way”. They think they need to have the perfect name and the perfect look and a bunch of perfect blog posts, before they can go live. Trust me when I say that it doesn’t need to be perfect. For over a year, the majority of my posts were just weekly spending reports!

On top of feeling like things need to be perfect, there are also a lot of formulas out there for what could make a blog post rank high in Google or get more shares or even go viral. Here’s the only personal lesson I can share about that. Whenever I have tried to write a post that was more formulaic, I hated the process and hated what I was writing and usually deleted it. Whenever I write something that’s on my mind, the writing flows naturally and it gets a great response. These posts are honest and personal, and typically only take a couple hours to write. The result: they get more comments and emails, and support from friends around the world. Who the heck cares about ranking high in Google? I could never ask for more than that. <3

Oh, and my advice for anyone who is thinking of starting a blog: write a handful of blog posts first. Write them on your computer or in a Google doc or by hand or whatever you like. Just write the first few posts that come to mind and see if you actually enjoy the process. At the end of the day, if you want to maintain a blog, you just have to enjoy writing stuff and putting it out into the world. If you like those first few posts, come up with some ideas for your next ones and then start getting the technical stuff setup. But always start with the writing. Everything else will come together, after that.

4. Don’t Worry About the Numbers

There are a lot of numbers you could consider, as a blogger: your pageviews, your unique visitors, the number of comments you get on posts, the number of times your posts get shared, the number of people on your mailing list, all the followers you have on social media, and so on. And there are a lot of ways you can boost each of those numbers. But, to go along with the idea that you don’t need to force yourself to write content that will “perform” well, you also don’t need to do other things strictly so it will boost your numbers. You can, if you want to. But you don’t need to—and here’s why I don’t.

I didn’t start my blog with the intention that I would ever make money from it. And, unless you’re trying to make a lot of money from ads or affiliate links on your site, these numbers are just a vanity metric. Nobody cares if you have 1,000 followers on Twitter or 10,000, except for you. It doesn’t mean anything. And for that reason, I won’t play games online that do things to dramatically increase the number of readers or followers I have. Continuing with the example of Twitter and even Instagram, some bloggers follow tons of accounts in the hopes that many of those accounts will follow them back. I’m not kidding. This is a thing. It is a vanity metric, and it is also a false way of determining someone’s potential “reach”. (That’s a note to companies who pay “influencers”.)

Instead of worrying about increasing your numbers, focus on engaging with the readers and followers you have right now. This goes back to my first rule: reply to comments and emails. Also reply to people on social media. There are people right here and now who are interested in what you are saying. Say hi to them! Answer their questions. Help them in any way you can. They are human beings, not numbers. And if you become focused on getting the next 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 followers, you will look past the ones you already have—and those are the ones who matter most. So don’t worry about the numbers, and instead put your energy into fostering relationships with the people who are here and now.

For bloggers who are curious how this rule affects your numbers, I opened up my Google Analytics, mailing list, social media accounts, etc. and looked at how it affects mine. As far as blog traffic goes, I’m on track to have the same number of pageviews I’ve had for the past two years (so now three years in a row). I finished 2016 with about 20,000 followers across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and currently have about 25,000 (+5,000 in 9.5 months). And I went from having 6,300 people on my mailing list at the end of 2016 to 9,600 right now (+3,300 in 9.5 months). With so many people out there writing about how you can grow a blog quickly, these aren’t exactly numbers to write home about.

You know what two numbers I find interesting, though? My bounce rate was just 7.09% in 2016, and the open rate on my mailing list is 50.92% so far in 2017. People are engaged. And the community we’ve built together here means more than any number could.

5. Put People Over Profit*

I’m adding an asterisk to this point because I need to start by saying that this all depends on the reason you are launching your blog in the first place. If your goal is to make money, great! You probably don’t need to read this point. But if money isn’t your goal, that’s ok too. That also doesn’t mean you’ll never make a dime from your blog; it just gives you more control over how you want to earn that money one day. Here’s my story.

At some point, every blogger starts receiving emails from random companies all over the world who ask if you accept sponsored content (they will pay you to write a post about their product) or paid links (they will pay you to add links to random words in old blog posts). There is a lot of money to be made in this world. I have friends who make anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000/month in sponsored content alone. Add banner ads or sidebar ads to that and they are laughing—at me. I say “at me” because I have turned every single one of these offers down and earned exactly $0 from advertising on my blog. In fact, I even have a line on my contact form that tells people I don’t reply to these offers. I delete the emails.

There are so many reasons I don’t advertise on my blog, and they all come back to putting myself in the shoes of a reader. I hate going to sites and being bombarded with ads, so I don’t want anyone to have that experience when visiting mine. That’s also the same reason I’ve never added (and will never add) a pop-up to my site. Seeing those on other sites almost always makes me click “X” in my browser and then never visit them again. I don’t care about having a bigger mailing list. I care about my readers and the experience they have on my site—the experience that helps us build and foster a community. And let’s also remember that I am in the space of telling people to STOP BUYING THINGS THEY DON’T NEED. Can you imagine if I placed a banner ad at the top of that message?

At the end of the day, I won’t advertise on my blog because it just doesn’t feel good to me. I know this rule has probably cost me tens of thousands of dollars. My old boss once told me I could earn a minimum of $3,000/month from banner ads alone based on my traffic. But I don’t care and I won’t change my stance on this. It doesn’t feel good to me, and I’ve always told myself I could earn extra money in other ways—ways that do feel good to me. For years, that took shape in the form of freelance writing and even a few public speaking events. Yes, that means I actually had to work for the money (vs. earn passive income from my blog) but those opportunities came from having my blog and they felt good. Looking back, I can see they also helped me get my name out there in ways that posting sponsored content never could.

That’s not to say I’ve never made money from my blog. Going back to the first paragraph in this point, it just gave me more control over how I wanted to earn the money. In 2015, I decided the one way I would be comfortable making money from my blog would be by creating a useful tool and selling it. Since April 2015, I have profited exactly $26,807.34 from something I made for you: Mindful Budgeting. The print templates that I originally charged $20 for but are now free, and the physical 2016 and 2017 planners. I made those for you, and built a community around it for you, and have earned an average of $893.58/month for doing so (minus the 5% of sales I give to charity). It’s a tool that I know has helped people, and I made it myself vs. had a company pay me to tell you about it. That feels good to me. It’s not a product everyone needs and I’ll likely never earn a full-time income from it, but that’s ok. It feels good to me.

6. Always Be Gracious + Grateful

This last rule is one that is mixed into all the others. The kind way of saying it is: you should always be gracious with people + grateful for the opportunities that come your way. The simple but more brash way of saying it is: don’t be a jerk. One of the most interesting things I have observed as some blogs have grown is that egos grow right alongside them. I will never understand this. Of course, I think we are allowed to be proud of our work, and be proud of the blogs and businesses we’ve built. But at the end of the day, we aren’t saving lives. We are just people—humans who are trying to make it in this world, just like everyone else. And if we aren’t kind to the people around us, why would anyone want to read what we have to say or even work with us?

It starts by being gracious with your readers. If no one read your blog, you wouldn’t be where you are. Then, be grateful for every opportunity that comes your way—even the ones you don’t take. Whenever someone in the media contacts me for an interview, I genuinely still think to myself: really? Me? That’s so cool!!! The same goes for freelance writing and public speaking opportunities. And you can’t even imagine how literally every step of the book publishing process has made me feel. I’m constantly pinching myself asking if this is real life.

This all goes back to the golden rule you’re taught as a kid: treat others how you want to be treated. I don’t think the world owes me anything. And I don’t do things because I’m looking for something in return. In fact, I think blogging with zero expectations of what kind of response you’ll get from others is what helps you stay humble and so appreciative of whatever does come your way. As for me, I’m just over here documenting my life and all the experiments I’ve done in the past seven years, and feeling extremely grateful for everyone who has been interested enough to read, say hi and share it with others.

Before I wrap up this post, I want to add that I didn’t write this list of rules before I started my blog. It is something that has slowly developed over time, as every new interaction, opportunity and period of growth has occurred. And it took this shape because I always had my readers in mind. Some of these rules were made only after playing around with certain things the “experts” say we should do and quickly realizing it didn’t feel good to me. So yes, I have experimented with their ideas, and I think it’s perfectly ok for people to follow all of the advice and/or do things in whatever way feels good to them. It just doesn’t feel good to me.

I always knew there had to be another way, and there is—it’s called “your way” and you make all the rules. Mine will result in slower growth and will probably make you less money. But it puts people first and helps you stay humble and grateful for whatever comes from it. And in my experience, looking back now, I know that some really amazing things can come from it.

Do you have any other questions about blogging that I didn’t answer here? I’m happy to answer them (or share links to sites that can)!

My first trip to New York City was a blur. It was December 2012 and I had recently decided to give up on the idea that sobriety was right for me. Sobriety was not right for me. I wanted to drink. We spent our nights bar hopping and, I, getting blackout drunk, and we spent our days rushing all over the city with a hangover. Repeat, repeat, repeat, for three days. We saw a lot of sights (you can see the pictures: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 Part 1 and Part 2) and did a lot of drinking. But without those pictures and the few drunk moments that still make me feel icky, I would tell you the one memory that stands out the most from that trip is how much my feet hurt.

It might seem like I travel a lot, but the truth is I feel like a bit of a late bloomer. While many of my friends went to Europe and Southeast Asia after high school and college, I didn’t go anywhere except for a trip to Vegas in my mid-20s and that trip to NYC when I was 27. I suppose there was also one trip to Toronto in my mid-20s, and partway through we took the train to Montreal and then visited friends at the Royal Military College in Kingston. But again, I was blackout drunk for most of that trip. (I don’t even remember what RMC looked like.) And again, one of the memories that stands out from all of those trips is how much my feet hurt.

I used to do the same thing Holly did in many of her early trips: tried to see as much as I could. The first trip to NYC is a perfect example. I listed all of the things I wanted to do and see, figured out which neighbourhoods they were in, and then mapped out our days in a way that we might actually be able to cross most things off the list. And we did! The pictures prove we did and saw all of the things. But the pictures don’t show how much my feet hurt at night, how I had to soak them in hot water before going to bed, and how much I cringed at the thought of having to put my shoes back on the next day. I didn’t want to walk another step.

That wasn’t what I wanted to remember from my trips. I wanted to remember the conversations we shared over coffee and meals; the taste of those coffee and meals; and the names of the cafes and restaurants I loved so much that I would hope to visit again. I wanted to remember how good it felt to get to know a city so well in just a few days that I could find my way around without directions; and how cool it felt to be able to give someone else directions, when they asked. I wanted to remember what the sky looked like when the sun went down over each landscape. I wanted to remember being there—really being there.

Fortunately, it only took a few trips for me to learn this lesson—and to learn how nice it could be to travel at a slower pace. I have the memories of my sore feet to thank for that, but I can also thank my blogging friends. It wasn’t until I started travelling to their hometowns to visit them that I realized I didn’t have to rush around to see everything each city had to offer. All I wanted to do was spend time with them. That’s why I was there. And whenever I travel somewhere now, I ask myself that same question: why am I going here? The answer helps me set an intention for the trip, rather than make a strict plan.

When I used to make travel plans, I felt busy and anxious. I also never felt like I got enough time anywhere I went—probably because I didn’t. I was so focused on getting from Point A to Point B that I didn’t soak in the journey it took to get there. I couldn’t remember the streets I had walked or neighbourhoods I was in, and I definitely didn’t remember the conversations we had. I just knew I had a couple hours to spend in every point I’d marked on the map, so I squeezed in as much as I could at each stop and then moved onto the next one. This always ended with me going home (to my hotel or a friend’s place) feeling like I’d run a marathon. (And did I mention the sore feet?)

The first time I decided to set an intention vs. make any formal plans for a trip was when I went to Denver in October 2014. My intention was to finally meet my internet BFF Clare, and to soak up any time I could spend with her. You’ll read a bit more about that in the book, but that was my only goal for the trip—which made everything else that happened feel like huge bonuses. Would I like to go to Red Rocks with another friend? Yes! Go on a spontaneous hike? Yes, please! Have lunch in a part of the city I’d never thought of going to? Yes, again! Because I didn’t have a calendar full of events, I was able to say yes to whatever came my way, and it felt good.

Not only did it feel good to be spontaneous, it feel good to let go of any expectations I had about what that trip might look like. And if I were to give anyone travel advice now, it would always be that: don’t expect anything. Just be open and be happy with whatever happens. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t plan ANYTHING. I actually love the questions Holly included at the bottom of her post, and think of many of those myself. There’s usually 1-2 attractions I’d like to see, some friends I want to spend time with, etc. So I make sure I do those things. But I also leave a lot of room open in my calendar, so I’m not rushing from one to the other.

The result is always a trip I actually remember every detail of. I remember the conversations we shared over coffee and meals; the taste of those coffee and meals; and the names of the cafes and restaurants I loved so much that I hope to visit again. I remember how good it felt to get to know a city so well in just a few days that I could find my way around without directions; and how cool it felt to be able to give someone else directions, when they asked. I remember what the sky looked like when the sun went down over the landscape. I remember being there—really being there.

And that’s true of every trip I’ve been on since October 2014. I set an intention, leave my calendar fairly open, and am open to every opportunity that comes my way. And I come home remembering every detail and feeling totally content with how it went. Nothing is a blur. In fact, I can probably describe how I experienced a city through all five senses: what it looked like, how it smelled, what the food/drinks tasted like, what the sounds were and how it felt to be there. I might not “do it all” or “see everything” but that’s ok. I remember what I did do. Nothing is a blur. And the bonus: my feet never hurt.

The reason I’m sharing this story now is because I am in the middle of a month full of travel—and even though I’m moving at somewhat of a quick pace (four cities in one month), I’m trying to take it slow, set an intention for each trip and enjoy my time in each place. Here’s what it looks like:

Experiment #9: Slow Travel

• spend a week in NYC (Nov 3-10)
• spend a week in Toronto (Nov 11-18)
• spend a week at home (Nov 1-2, 19-23)
• spend a week or so in Victoria (Nov 24-Dec 3?)
• enjoy downtime in every city :)

I’m happy to report there was a lot of downtime in NYC. I didn’t see many sights, other than what anyone sees when they walk around the East Village and Midtown and Central Park. But I went to one play (Tiny Beautiful Things – if you’re in NYC, please check it out). I also spent quality time with my friend Shannon, shared a few delicious coffees and meals with friends, and even met up with a friend from Vancouver who also happened to be there at the same time. And I narrated my audiobook. (!!!) That’s why I was there, and it was an incredible experience I’m so grateful to have had. Everything else was a bonus.

Looking ahead to next year, people keep asking why I want to go to the UK and what I plan on doing when I get there. Truthfully, I have no plans. I just want to go. I want to book a one-way ticket and have enough money that I can afford to stay for as many weeks or months as I want to. I just want to go. That is the intention. And by going with no expectations or plans, there is no real chance of being disappointed. Everything will be a bonus. :)

Hi friends! It’s been almost a full year since I stopped blogging. In that time, I’ve thought a lot about what I want to do with the archives—and, ultimately (after asking myself what 34-year-old Cait wants), I’ve decided to delete them.

Last week, I went through 350+ posts, copied the content, and started hitting delete. (Fun fact: I published more than 260,000 words on this blog! And wrote tens of thousands more that I never shared. It’s safe to say I found my voice here.) Throughout the process, I noticed there were a few I wasn’t ready to let go of: the posts that were the most enjoyable to write, or the most honest to share, or that show who I am today. In old school-Rockstar Finance style, I picked out my favourite quote from each one and will leave them here for now. Enjoy <3

First, Let’s Talk About Money

Choose Your Own Financial Adventure – “Whatever you do, don’t do nothing. Be an active participant in your life—financial or otherwise—and choose the adventure you’d want to write home about.”

You Weren’t Born to Pay Off Debt and Die – “You might get 85 years on this planet. Don’t spend 65 paying off a lifestyle you can’t afford.”

On Being a Mindful Consumer

What Consumes Your Mind Controls Your Life (and Finances) – “The social media accounts you follow can take a serious toll on your finances.”

What It’s Like to Shop After Not Shopping for Two Years – “If I could sum up what the shopping ban did for my actual shopping habits, I would say that’s it: it taught me how to take the emotion out of it, so shopping is strictly a transaction now (as it should be).”

The Personal Stuff

I Got Sober at 27 (and I Didn’t Quit to Save Money) – “My Internet BFF Clare said it best: Not drinking is serious business. … But I can confidently say that I know I’ll be sober forever—because I need to be, in order to live my happiest, healthiest life.”

The Best Gift My Emergency Fund Has Ever Given Me – “My emergency fund gave me the best gift of all: the ability to invest in my mental health. It gave me the freedom to scale back on work. It gave me more time and energy to focus on myself. And it put my life back into my own hands.”

Why Spending Time Outdoors Matters to Me – “I love the outdoors because it’s the one place where I can truly be myself. My beautiful, messy, happy, sad, sober, uncoordinated and hilarious self.” (Featuring an #atwildwoman by my friend Amanda!)

What My Dogs Taught Me About Slow Living – “While I’ve been trying to figure out what slow living looks like, the girls have been exemplifying it their whole lives. And while they have needed me this month, Molly and Lexie have taught me lessons I will carry with me for a lifetime.”

And Finally, the Work :)

How I Slowly Grew My Blog My Own Way – “I always knew there had to be another way, and there is—it’s called “your way” and you make all the rules. Mine will result in slower growth and will probably make you less money. But it puts people first and helps you stay humble and grateful for whatever comes from it. And in my experience, looking back now, I know that some really amazing things can come from it.”

Why I’m Retiring from Personal Blogging – “I don’t want to be an expert. I just want to be a human.”

The post My Top 10 Favourite Posts first appeared on Cait Flanders.

I've been a guest on a few podcasts recently and one of the things that keeps coming up are the changes a company goes through when growing from 10 to 20 people — which is exactly what happened at Podia during 2019 (well, 9 to 19 people to be exact 😉 ).

I’d like to share a few of the things that happened during this time and what you can expect if you’re experiencing similar growth.

You're going to need to give things up

Throughout my career as an entrepreneur, I've gotten my hands dirty in every area of the business: product, marketing, support, community, success, and so on, but at 19 people, I just haven't had the time to be everywhere at all times.

I have to pick and choose what I do and what I don't do. I've chosen to continue to lead product, but I've given up almost all of my responsibilities in regard to marketing and support.

Part of that change is due to the fact that we've hired great people to fill those roles, including a Chief Marketing Officer who runs our 7-person marketing team and a Lead Support person who runs our 4-person support team.

At our size, it just makes sense for me to give up control over things that I can't spend a lot of time on — such as marketing and support — and give those responsibilities to people who are focused on doing them and doing them well.

Management is a necessity

When we were under 9 people, we skated by for quite some time with no real managers. In fact for a long time, it was just me running all departments, but as we began to grow, that broke down quickly.

Our individual departments got bigger. There were questions that needed answers more quickly. New hiring responsibilities. Individuals on a team needed a leader to help guide them. Strategy needed to be set for each department.

We needed to organize. We needed a leader to run the various departments. Things were breaking down without them. Who is responsible? Who owns the success here? Who owns the failure?

At 9 people, everyone could manage themselves and their own projects without stepping on anyone's toes, but as the product got bigger and as we got more customers, we needed to better coordinate across the company and the various departments.

We now have three managers (marketing, support, and development) who each run their own teams and their own 1:1s and are responsible for their “area” of the company.

We've always been an extremely productive company, but adding a management layer has allowed us to continue to be extremely productive as we've grown. A lot of companies get bogged down as they grow, but we haven't.

Company policies are a necessity

We've gone from informal, never written down HR policies to a dozen thoughtfully crafted, Podia-specific policies we now post in our new company wiki.

This lets everyone in the company be on the same page about how we do things from compensation philosophy to what kind of side projects are acceptable.

Policies written too early often won't match the vibe of the company you're trying to build, so waiting until things "break" is a great forcing function to know what's important and what isn't. I'm really happy we waited until we passed ten people before writing all of these down, but I'm glad we didn't wait any longer than that.

Knowledge sharing is harder

With more people working at Podia, it's harder to keep everyone up-to-date with everything that's going on.

We continue to have our Monday meeting that gives almost everyone a chance to talk about what they're working on for the week, but it's definitely more difficult for everyone to have a deep understanding of all that's happening. It's even difficult for me at times as the CEO.

It's also more difficult for individual departments as they grow. We now have 6 product developers — if you include our CTO — and they're often working on different projects. It's common that all product developers won't know every part of our codebase as well as they might have when our team was only two or three people.

Continuing to learn and grow is key

As a founder — and as a company — you need to continue to learn and grow every day. The skills you had at ten people are not going to be the same skills you need at twenty people.

You'll need to learn, listen, read, and adapt to the new situations that are thrown your way or else you're going to be behind.

I've been thankful to have a CEO coach this year who has helped me talk through lots of different situations we've had as a company throughout the past nine months, but if you can't afford a CEO coach, find CEOs who are at your stage or one or two stages above you and talk to them about how they got to where they are and what advice they can give you as a founder.

Learning shouldn't stop when you graduate (or don't graduate) college. You need to continue to exercise your brain and take in as much information as you can as your company continues to grow.

More people challenges

As you grow from 9 to 19 people as we did, you'll find that there are new people challenges. I think it's mostly because there are just more people on the team with different personalities, needs, and wants, but it's also because there's a new guard vs. an old guard mentality that you need to work through.

The early folks will always be the early folks, and you need to make sure you're integrating the new people as best you can.

Along with that, more people = more room for things to go wrong. You have to keep track of everyone's likes, dislikes, how they prefer to communicate, what's the best tone to take with them, and many other things.

People will continue to be the hardest part of the job for any CEO, but it definitely only gets harder as you grow.

That's why having great managers is so key when you grow. See above.

Plan, plan, plan

Lastly, with a growing team, it’s important to keep everyone on the same page, which can be accomplished by being really thorough with your company's plans. Whether that's the broader company strategy, the product strategy, the marketing strategy, or whatever, it's important to lay things out in a clear and concise way so that everyone understands what's happening.

While you could get away with not writing down a lot things when you were small, you need a "source of truth" for everyone to be able to refer to as you grow. You won't be able to have individual conversations with everyone as you grow, so having a really well-thought-out plan can do the talking for you.

There is this constant pressure in life to change how things are so that they’ll be how they can be. Looking back on the last decade of my life, I wouldn’t say I exactly had a plan, but I never went long without a side project or some adventure. I’m not sure if the drive to always have a side-hustle came from my discontent with how things are and a desire to build a different existence, or simply my broad diversity of interests.

Either way, I’ve never felt content just doing one thing. Mastery really was never a consideration for me, at least until recently–I have always been incredibly engaged until the moment the learning curve starts to taper. Once I have a foundational understanding of something, I’m pretty much ready to move on.

These days I find myself thinking more about how a two-pronged needle doesn’t pass through fabric. One hundred shallow wells will produce no water, yet a single deep one is much more likely.

Removing distractions and focusing on our goals is a beautiful thing and it allows us to make some serious progress towards the life we want. But that isn’t to say that it should be rushed–allow the time that it takes. Most things in life could be considered a practice, a daily one at that, one that we simply get better at slowly as time goes on. This is what most paths to mastery look like, slow, steady, intentional practice and honing of craft.

These things don’t have to be rushed, we don’t have to scramble to get to a place where we aren’t already. Perhaps much of contentment comes from appreciating and simply existing where we are while honing our practice for continual improvement. Finding that balance between pushing forward and sitting still.

Somewhere in there, lies the secret to happiness and contentment, that balance between personal growth and achievement, and seeking bliss within our current beings. So instead of rushing forward, perhaps we may allow the time that it takes and enjoy the journey along the way.

I remember when I decided that I wanted to be an entrepreneur–it was the day I realized that no job I could ever get would keep me engaged in a meaningful way. Unless, I suppose, I was able to work at a company that offered unlimited flexibility and creative control.

In my early 20’s it always happened around my six month mark, when I’d start to feel the boredom strike. If the job was simple enough and I couldn’t find any particular ways to improve the processes involved, it felt very empty to me. In my younger days, that meant disengaging with the job and eventually, just not doing the job very well.

Starting a business changed all of that–all of a sudden there was no end in sight, no limit on the processes that I had to master. The work was never done and there was always some aspect of learning curve to tackle. It opened up an entirely new world of what work could look like for me.

Up until that point, I had learned that the way I did things, often quite differently, was completely wrong. School taught me this–I found myself only ever wanting to fit in, to look the same as the people around me, and just do what I was told. Because I wanted to fit in, I’d just sort of follow along with the way my teachers told me to think, accepting that it was the right way to do things.

You may be familiar with the below cartoon–in this case, I felt like the elephant.

College helped further affirm that I wasn’t very good at climbing trees. I remember sitting in lecture halls during my freshman year wondering how any of it was going to work–things just weren’t clicking for me.

Entrepreneurship is a mold-breaking opportunity–it widened the playing field to where I saw that the tree I was continually asked to climb was just one small part of life as a whole. It was just one test of a particular type of intelligence, one that largely reflected learning how to follow directions really well.

In business, you have to do the opposite.

If you do the exact same thing as everyone else in your field, you have no competitive advantage. When it comes to marketing a business, blending in is the absolute last thing you want to do. In almost every area of life oddities are rewarded–they’re what makes us stand out from the rest and allows us to be chosen over others.

Those oddities may provide a strategic advantage over our peers, even though it may be initially perceived as a flaw.

The Struggles Are Amplified

The hardest thing about being an entrepreneur is that the things you struggle with are amplified. If you thrive within a structured environment, you’ll be required to create your own that meets your needs. There is no longer anyone to tell you that you’ve done a good job for the day, you can head home content with your work complete. There’s no one to decide how productive you are, no quarterly review to determine your eligibility for a raise.

There is only your effort, your goals, and your definition of what a successful day looks like. How much is enough? When can we be done for the day? If you struggle with figuring these things out in a day job, taking the leap will blow these struggles wide open.

If You Want Something Different

If the structure that society has set up for gainful employment isn’t working for you, if you want something different, you should build something. Something you care about, something you’d like to see in the world if it doesn’t yet exist. If the “correct” way to do something isn’t the way you’d do it, but you got the answer wrong on the test anyway, try making your own test instead.

You don’t have to quit or take the salto mortale right away, but start building something and see where it goes. It takes a very long time to undo the damage done to our psyches throughout our lifetime. I’m only just beginning to learn that I can challenge authority when I don’t believe something is right. Just because someone says that’s the way it is, doesn’t mean that’s actually the case.

Do what feels good, do what feels right.

Avoiding burnout on a project is a very real issue that must be dealt with in a variety of ways. In the last three years of writing my blog Break the Twitch, I’ve hit burnout a few times but most recently, I have only been writing once or twice per month for the site in the early months of 2017.

It doesn’t feel good to produce such a small amount of stuff for a project I believe in so much. There is a lot of negative self-talk that goes along with that as well–it’s easy to beat ourselves up over a lack of production. But inspiration ebbs and flows–we’re not robots and we simply can’t do the same thing over and over without stopping.

That is a recipe for disaster, we’re just not built to operate that way.

After a few months of writing but not putting out much content, I started working on a side project with Amy called Minimalism Books–a simple little microsite that lists my favorite books about minimalism. I figured it could be helpful for people that are searching for that particular term.

Amy and I spent about 8 hours over two days building out the site and I felt a surge of inspiration and fulfillment with working on it. In a way, completing that little project helped jump-start me on writing again, as I’m doing here right now.

My daily writing requirement has jumped from 250 words per day up to 500, which is substantially harder. Not just 2x harder, but actually several times harder–not because of the word count, but because of the expectation when you start.

Resistance wise, it’s much easier to sit down with the expectation of only having to write 250 words. Typing starts more fluidly, knowing that it’s only about half as much as this article ended up being. It isn’t some big project, some instead a small step to accomplish your goal each day.

As I sit down to write 500 words for today, I feel a heavier weight on the first words as I begin. This article better not suck, as it has to make it to 500 words instead of just 250 today.

Going in with the expectation of having to hit a certain milestone, a certain quality mark, is exactly what prevents us from doing our best work to begin with. When we can simply let the words flow, unedited, we have much more to work with.

I often compare this to the idea of trying to sculpt a bust out of clay without taking the clay out of the container. The container of clay represents a blank page with no words on it–there’s nothing to work with, nothing to edit, to mold and shape into what will become your work of art.

Writing unedited, allowing the words to flow is like scooping the unformed clay out of the bucket and putting it onto the table. The unshapely ball that somewhat resembles a head and face slowly get worked into what looks slightly more like a human face.

We know where to take it if we have clay on the table–take what doesn’t look like a nose and shape it into what does. It turns all of that potential creative energy into kinetic creative energy.

So find the number that allows you to get past your tipping point, where the weight of an idea will carry itself once you lift it high enough into the air, and then do that almost every day.

I’ve been sitting in a cafe looking out onto a downtown Chicago street, watching people pass by and trying to think what to write about for the last hour and a half. As I watch hundreds of people walk by, I can’t help but notice something–almost everybody looks similar, within their chosen “performance of self” categories as they do in Minneapolis.

I’ve noticed the same thing during recent trips to Los Angeles and New York.

Now, I’m certainly no sartorialist myself, but I can’t help but think about why this might be. With the age of the internet and mobile devices, specifically apps like Instagram, we’re seeing a broader perspective than we ever have before. We’re getting a direct feed from people all over the world as to what they think is cool and interesting.

Location is no longer a consideration when it comes to fashion, as you could see a really interesting outfit worn by a guy in Japan while scrolling through Instagram on your lunch break. If it is deemed worthy by Instagram’s algorithms, then tens of thousands of people will see that same image all over the world.

While inspiration likely previously came from traveling, or perhaps just walking down your own block and seeing what your friends were wearing, we’ve centralized a place where the coolest trends can exist. Where around the world, if something is cool, it can instantly be picked up in New York, Los Angeles, or wherever.

It seems to me that this would kill the phenomenon of regionalized style–Los Angeles having a “look” that is different from New York, or even Japan.

But as our feeds become filled with references from around the world, we become influenced by all of the same things. It becomes like one giant neighborhood where people get to experience and see what they like and want to imitate.

I would imagine that this substantially reduces the number of different styles in different regional areas as everyone has access to every different region now, and instead of dressing a certain way because our friends, neighbors, or community dresses that way, we can reflect what we see at much higher level.

In terms of business, I find this interesting because it provides a marketplace where companies could potentially tap into a global market instead of being more of a niche market–the trends will change as time goes along, just as fashion always has. But now the market for that type of fashion is massive, created by the centralized model of Instagram.

This also means that in terms of a broader market, more companies have to compete within the broader categories, looking for ways to stand out from other labels, etc. I find this particularly interesting with the trend towards no/low branding on apparel. The giant Abercrombie logo on t-shirts is generally found to be tacky now and most modern clothing only subtly features branding of that type.

Perhaps a small pelican logo or something like that. In a way, this might drive fast fashion, cheaply made clothing that costs less than competitors, as people try to find a way to stand out while still buying clothing that generally looks like this centralized, world-wide style.

I have to question whether this will have the same affect on culture in general, I imagine that it will. As we’re all able to see and access aspects of world culture through our phones, we naturally will adapt certain aspects of those cultures.

In 100 years will this mean that we are a global culture, as we become more connected across the continents and eventually unify as a single species? I’m not sure, but I can tell you that there are a whole lot of people that look a lot alike walking past this window I’m looking out of.

Success, or at least the way we perceive it, is quite a tricky phenomenon these days. Media consumption is part of daily life for most of us, whether it’s through a television, smartphone, tablet, or at a gas pump. It seems like everyday there is a new pop star or starlet gracing these screens, with their screaming fans in tow.

It’s really easy to think that these people came out of nowhere, rocketed to stardom, and were made into an overnight success.

But this situation rarely exists, for a multitude of reasons–but yes–every now and then someone that hasn’t done much does get famous overnight, but that’s usually about as long as it lasts.

There are several thoughts I have around this and what is actually happening when it comes to fame and fortune.

Fame that is quickly attained most often disappears equally fast.

Imagine you go from living a relatively normal life to suddenly having the attention of millions of people. Getting a lot of attention for a moment isn’t actually all that hard–it’s keeping it that’s the trick. It’s nearly impossible to maintain a momentum you never had to begin with.

People often wish for big jumps in “success” but aren’t ready for it.

For example, if you are terrible at managing your money while making $50,000 per year, why on earth would you think that life would get easier making $500,000? It’s likely that you’ll simply buy things that are 10x as expensive and make 10x more expensive of mistakes. Much of life is setup to foster mistakes and learning experiences as we grow into higher incomes, allowing us to make mistakes.

The same goes for things like an email list–if you have 100 people on your list and it makes you anxious to have a few people unsubscribe every time you send out an email, but wish you were able to suddenly get 100,000 people on your email list, what do you think would actually happen? It’s likely that you’d be so anxious about losing potentially thousands of people that you’d never even send an email out. The big numbers don’t come until we’re truly ready for it.

Lots of people had leaked sex tapes–but Kim Kardashian turned hers into a global empire over the following years. Very few people can do what she did, whether it was through the people she surrounded herself with or under her own merit. I’d say it’s a sign of great business sense to surround yourself with capable people, rather than just try to be capable yourself.

It is daily practice and growth that prepares us for lasting success.

Opportunities are often not easy to come by, but they are there. The key, is being able to deliver as soon as the opportunity presents itself. Having the tools to be able to say, “Yes” and then figure it out later based on your knowledge of past experiences. It is this ability that allows you to excel to higher levels than you’ve ever been at before.

If you’re not practiced, or if you haven’t put in your hours, you likely won’t be able to deliver when those opportunities arise. It’s as simple as that. A slow burning rise will last much longer than one that happens seemingly overnight.

While attending World Domination Summit today, Scott Harrison, the ceo and founder of charity: water, said this quote. Originally stated by Avot de Rabbi Natan, it struck me as an important message across the board.

In his context, he was talking about doing charity work that works on a problem that may never be fully eradicated. If he’s able to bring water to every person on earth, there will always be another problem to solve after that.

“Once everyone has fresh drinking water, it’s not like I’m going to go get a job at a bank.” – Scott Harrison

I think too often we focus on the next stage of life or imagining ourselves after the work is done. Seeing ourselves as having been changed or somehow different once we’ve reached the end of the work. Our life’s work really has no end, at least until we die. That’s the only true end I know.

While we’ll complete various things over our lifetimes, really the growth can continue onward forever.

In addition, I think there is a general fear around attempting to tackle a problem with no end. We want to strive for completion, for impact, and to finish the work that we do in a substantial way.

The truth is, the most impactful work likely has no end. According to Scott, 662 million people in the world don’t have access to clean drinking water. Over the last 10 years, his organization has helped about 7 million people gain access to fresh water through community wells and other strategies.

So in 10 years, his organization has raised over a quarter of a billion dollars and helped 1/100th of the people in need across the globe. It seems like such a small dent, but the impact is significant for so many people.

This situation reminds me of the story of the young boy walking down the beach, digging up starfish as he went. There were thousands of them, stranded all over the beach but he’d pick up one at a time and throw them back into the water.

Eventually, someone noticed what the boy was doing, looked over, and said, “Don’t you realize that you can’t help all of these starfish? You’re not really making much difference, there are thousands of them stranded here!” and as the boy throws yet another starfish into the ocean he responds, “It made a difference to that one.”

This is why we need people to step up and do work that potentially has no end, as intimidating as it can be. We can make a difference in the lives of individuals across the globe by doing important work.

I’m feeling particularly inspired, seeing the link between The Hope Effect and Charity:Water and the opportunity to create change through those organizations. As Break the Twitch grows, I’d like to explore my own giving opportunities to see what causes I want to work on bettering the world with.

I would greatly regret living my life without seizing the opportunity to make a meaningful impact when I’ve been given so much in this life already.

After the recent explosive growth in cryptocurrency, I can’t help but reflect back on my experience mining altcoins back in 2013. Bitcoin had become somewhat well known and was floating in the $500-$1,200 range and many alternate coins (altcoins for short) started popping up all over the place.

The concept seemed interesting, so I built a few computers that were designed to “mine” some of those currencies started learning as much as I could.

I sold much of the currency that I acquired through mining to cashflow the operation. It ended up being several bitcoins worth of currency at the time, but was sold off mostly in the $600-700 range in 2013. At a certain point, the mining I was doing was no longer profitable, as my computers used more energy than new technology that was constantly being developed.

So we turned off the machines and on one of my computers kept some bitcoin and dogecoin (one of the currencies we mined at the time).

Four years later, we see bitcoin rocketing from $1,300/BTC to over $17,000. I can’t help but think about what I might have done differently knowing bitcoin’s potential for growth. Realistically, there are three steps to any hugely profitable investment:

1 / Have A Great Idea or Think of Something Interesting

To start out, you have to have the idea that others might not have yet. A piece of information, some intel, or perhaps just a thought while comes to you while showering that makes you think getting into something might be a good idea.

Once you have the idea, you can research it a bit, find out as much as possible and then move on to the next step.

2 / Execute On Great Idea

This is a critical stage of the process, where you actually have to execute the great idea. 99.9% of people fail here when it comes to investing—they never take action on an interesting idea they had. Perhaps they don’t have the funds to invest or fear losing money on such a thing.

In this step, you have to actually buy the stock/coin, make the bet, or figure out a way to leverage a potential outcome over a period of time. Doing this, moves you on to the final step.

3 / Have Patience

This step is the difference between making 10% on a decent trade or investment and making 2,500%—having patience enough to let your idea fully play out and see where it could take you.

A big part of this is being financially stable enough to not need the money you may make in the short term and to just keep on holding. Part of the reason I kept my own bitcoin for so long was that it was inaccessible—on a computer in the basement, disconnected, for almost four years.

When bitcoin started rising rapidly, I figured I should at least figure out how to control the money I had stored.

If the idea was great, and you executed on it, and you have patience enough to wait for it to potentially come true, you will be a successful investor.

If you only have two of these things, it’s likely that you won’t get very far at all.

The most important thing I’ve learned about reaching goals in life is just how unimportant the actual goal is.

It represents something we want to achieve, something we don’t have, or a milestone we’d like to hit. But it says nothing about the underlying lifestyle changes that would make that goal achievable. And once we hit it? What then?

Sure, there are goals that are one time things. A sprint to get a project done, graduate from university, finals week, things like that. But for things like health, eating well, mastering a craft, the moment we stop practicing the things that got us there, we begin to lose them.

The process of getting there is 99% of the point—the process is how we live our lives day in and day out. The process is the goal.

So why wait until we accomplish what we set out to do to enjoy it? To celebrate it? A life that only celebrates the achievement of a goal is a life with little celebration.

We spend so much of our lives skimming across the surface of the water that we forget that the best things are often below us.

Slow down, take a breath, and dive.