What I learned
-
Becoming aware of the stories we tell ourselves is a powerful tool.
Every day we think things in response to everything that we encounter. This happens with colleague, spouses, other drivers on the road. You can increase your happiness dramatically by starting to notice what you tell yourself about everything.
This is a painful yet impactful read about the mindset shift J.R. Storment (founder of Cloudability) experienced after the recent death of his 8-year-old son.
It reminds me of the warnings given in one of my favorite books, How Will You Measure Your Life?, by Clayton Christensen.
The final question from J.R. is a reality check from someone who just experienced one of the worst parts of reality many of us could imagine:
I hope from this tragedy you consider how you prioritize your own time.
One of the hardest things I deal with on a day-to-day basis is to remember that work, while rewarding in the short term, is not more important than my family. It’s easy to enjoy the daily or weekly feedback of work, with how much money and power are recognizably related to it. Family relationships give tremendous value, but over a lot longer time period. They tend to fall into the category of non-urgent, but important.
Here’s to prioritizing people over products and relationships over relaxation.
What I published
I have a couple articles in the works to publish and this week some thoughts I shared on twitter:
@JeffChang30 The aquisition and activation funnel (% conversion between each step). That lets you see where drop off happens for metric #5 above.
Most product teams don’t spend nearly enough time on the initial part of the user journey, which has major impact to all other metrics.
What have you been learning about?
Ryan