Greetings from the mountains
I’m on vacation this week. My gaze is infinite. So don’t expect much in the way of wisdom.
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Public spaces, personal spaces, and civility
I’ve been studying social media for 20 years now. It’s become an increasingly tendentious and fraught space. People feel they can say or write anything they want, including falsehoods and insults. Their justification: “free speech.” It’s true: you can say pretty much anything you want online, short of libel. But not every space belongs to…
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What it means to be a writer
If someone asks me what I do for a living, I tell them I’m a writer. It took a long time to get here. Very few people can actually make their living as a writer. Most writers do something else to support themselves. Despite the fact that I’m was trained as a mathematician, my first…
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Freelance editorial strategy
For freelancers like me, chasing every potential lead is counterproductive. It results in three kinds of problems: (Pro tip: problem number three is the biggest risk with the greatest downsides.) That covers the problems. The flip side is the opportunities. I would prefer to spend my time projects that: I try not to let the…
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What makes me happy
People who work tend to drift into work they tolerate. They miss the chance to deliberately expand the parts of work that they love. Do an audit at least once a year of what parts of your work you find rewarding. That way, you can continue to shift your work in the directions that will…
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The inadequacy of Grammarly’s apology
If you hijacked the names and content of experts to boost your own product and then realized that perhaps you’d made a mistake, how would you apologize? Here’s what Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Grammarly parent company Superhuman, posted on LinkedIn, once he realized that his product impersonating experts without their permission was a mistake: Back…
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A smile, always
One summer about 13 years ago, I decided to test myself. My family was scheduled to drop off my youngest offspring at Wildwood, a nature camp run by Massachusetts Audubon, located in Rindge, New Hampshire. Getting there from my home in the Boston suburb of Arlington, Massachusetts would mean a beautiful 65-mile drive through hills,…
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100% referrals. 0% marketing.
I’ve just reviewed my freelance business for 2025 and 2026. I’ve reached a milestone. Every dollar I made came from prior relationships. None of it came from outbound marketing or cold leads. Here’s where my clients came from. I do no outbound email marketing and no advertising. I do effectively no public speaking. I buy…
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Forrester forever
Ten years after leaving Forrester Research, I got a chance to reflect on what it did for my career at the Forrester reunion, which took place yesterday evening. The reunion took place in Boston and was organized by several Forrester alumni who left the company years ago. George Colony, Forrester founder and CEO, also participated….
