#13 YEAR IN RE-YOU

Okay, for anyone curious: the simplest way to build recap emails is look at your annual metrics with a focus on CTR, instead of open-rate. (Publera is a newsletter operator for several clients and partners).

Look for the 5-20 links that got the most clicks, and make those your year in review—not the emails that were the most opened or shared. Next, GPT some categories for the links, and feed (only the last 3 months of) your content to a new GPT for tone and voice.

Prompt out the email you want. Give it a human edit, and ¡Voila!  2024 is but a memory.

I should mention that process won’t work for this newsletter, because Say Something is not optimized for clicks. Which begs the biggest question any of us can answer while planning a new year:

What are you optimizing for?

I've found most leaders are worse at answering this than they think. 

The reason is simple. We tend to mix up what we WANT to optimize for (priorities), with what we DID optimize for (performance). 

In other words, we usually think about our priorities by imagining forward instead of looking backward. But how could a priority ever be achieved without an improvement of some kind in performance??

Hence, yer own personal year in review. Only hindsight can see the distance between intentions and outcomes.

So here are the best ways I've seen to make sense of any year behind us.

1. Projects.

Basic idea: Identify the ONE most important thing that got done in each month of last year. 

This is a great game! Especially if your team has competing interests (e.g., politics), and you make them give a shared answer.

A big reveal will usually be how truly slow progress is. You’re busy every day, but you might be lucky to have even one real win a month.

You might also learn a big win was administrative, like a new process that’s paid dividends. Or, a NON-outcome, like bailing from a deal you now see saved your bum.  Try it and see what pops.

The 2 best variations I’ve seen of this practice are: 

A. View it quarterly instead of monthly. This forces you to contemplate exactly what drives your progress. Then DO it quarterly. An ongoing review like this is useful because it’s so simple. The important part is it forces honesty. 

B. No one is allowed to submit their 2025 plan until they've done this review of 2024. It’s amazing what quality plans a team can make with this fresh in their minds.

2. People. 

Who really influenced, inspired, or helped you this year?  Who was an agent of progress or change?  Your list can include books, influencers, historical figures, as well as friends, family, customers, employees, and more. Anyone.

What do you do with the list?  Nothing!

But I bet you get slightly more conscious of your time—and MUCH more mindful about who you try to increase it with.  

One who ranked near the top of my list this year was (via his book) Guy Spier.  Investor memoirs are not rare, but they are rarely interesting.

I enjoyed his frank and easygoing tone, plus his comfort with mistakes and a misguided youth (most of us had one, the best of us know how).  In turn, his style of analysis has influenced me a lot this year. Thanks, Guy! (He does not read this or know I exist).

3. Customers.

Who were your best customers last year? And who were your worst?  

What matters is the debate over HOW you measure it.

If you can lead even an hour discussion on this, identifying your top 10% and bottom 10% of customers, I’m certain you’ll end up changing at least one major part of your operations. 

Even bolder: suck it up and fire the bottom 10%. I've seen this done to massive effect, and last year at this time did the exercise for Publera. It's hard. 

We made ourselves obsolete or expensive to several clients who were no longer a good fit. Then, I targeted another net reduction for this year but ended up with new clients.

They have products I love and problems that fire my favorite neurons. And that’s the magic of this exercise.

If I hadn't started the painful process of trimming our book a year ago, I would’ve never made space for evolving it. 

4. Lesson(s). 

What's the biggest thing you learned this year?  

Don’t be deep. Sure, life is beautiful and time is precious, I get that. I just had 2 daughters in 2 years. One hums Tchaikovsky in the bathtub, and the other farts mustard while smiling her face off. The lessons are profound, and constant.

But I'm talking about stuff you learned the hard way this year. Ouchie lessons or nuclear ones. Or sometimes, the good old fashioned "OOOOOHH’s," where you realize a personal flaw that apparently everyone else already knew about you.

When you hear people say "youth is wasted on the young," this capacity to self-reflect for your own use is the only thing they are talking about.  

So you have my permission to botox, TikTok, and dress yourself as young as you want. But, please, I am begging you:

Do not waste your advancing age avoiding wisdom. 

Which leads me to my last point.

That's right, you're older than you were yesterday, which was last year. Suck it up, Oak tree!  

The question is what're you going to do with this older version of yourself?

I humbly recommend, dear C-something: just mold the world, your people, and their processes to fit the version of yourself you see truer every day.  

Is that selfish? Probably! But you’re the one who subbed to a newsletter called “C-Something.”

Plus, we can assume your job has an impact bigger than you. And let's just say you know thyself?

Well, now you know thy 1 year better.

Use it. 

Here's some badass shit remarkable wisdom I heard from a C-something years ago and still think about.

A committee of the board, the CEO, COO, and lead investor are having a crisis. It's a personnel problem, not pretty, and I'm only in the room to eventually write whatever godforsaken solution they think of.

Meanwhile, everyone seems to escalate the tension, as if only to communicate how stressed they are. Except the CHRO is completely unfazed. 

She listens, offers helpful context, dialogue. But curiously, no solution. She calmly brings everyone to earth like I'm watching Alexander tame Bucephalus in 340BC (a classic classics reference). 

Finally, the room has a quiet pause.

"Listen," she patiently says, "I need to remind you that my job is to NOT lose sleep over problems like this. So I don't want you to either. We'll have a solution by morning." 

And she obviously did! It was smart, clear-headed, effective. Dare I say elegant.

In any case, this is a powerful mindset to cultivate. What're you being paid to NOT stress out about?  

The number of things you DON'T stress about should go up every year. (You did get wiser and more experienced, didn’t you?)

So, as you consider a new year's resolution this morning, consider one for me. What's some stress that you're just gonna be grown out of this year? 

Name it. Stick to it. DM it to me if you want (I’m curious).

One of the other names I considered for this C-Something project was “Low Stress Leader,” which I still might use. And if I ever do, I'll be tempted to print a logo hat and have that CHRO above autograph it.

Because we should all be so lucky to get that good at ourselves. 

Happy new year ya wise old owls,
Jesse

PS: I don’t believe in New Years’ resolutions, but I do believe in resolutions and sometimes they accidentally happen in January.

So this January 2^nd, I will be 2 years candy-free, which probably sounds silly to you but I had a genuinely sour patch serious problem.

It annoys the heck out of me to say that reminds me of one book I read this year, but I do have to share it. Gretchen Rubin’s The Four Tendencies was surprisingly very useful, even if a little bit too pop-psychey.

I would say a quick read or listen will actually immediately improve your hit rate motivating, managing, partnering, employing, and/or loving.

The idea is there’s 4 possible ways we all respond to expectations; so we’re all one of 4 tendencies. Some of us respond mainly to others’ expectations (external), and some of us respond better to our own internal expectations. Some both, and some neither. (You can just feel a designer at Duarte wanting this to be a quadrant).

Rubin writes that my type (questioner, my own expectations) has two interesting quirks: we hate standing in lines ✅, and we don’t believe in New Years’ resolutions ✅.

Here’s a link, if you want a fast cheesy read that will actually advance some of your interpersonal style. And regardless, I hope your 2024 had very minimal time spent in lines. No croissant is worth it.

And if you ever want a DMV with zero lines, c’mon out and get a car in Idaho, I’d love to show you the road. And the ski lifts if you promise not to tell. ⛷️

-J

PSS: New year, new plea to share. And DM me if there’s anything this letter is missing for you!