10 Years of Meetup

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Back in February of 2012, I attended WordCamp Atlanta for the first time (and that old site is still up!).

During that weekend I met some incredible folks, but the most immediately impactful was Kathy Drewien. We kinda, sorta, vaguely knew each other, and were able to talk more there. She knew I lived in her part of town, so she invited me to attend her upcoming Meetup the following week (the event listing for that is still around too!).

That’s where I first met some other incredible people such as Diana Nichols, Renee Dobbs, and the late great Brad Iroff.

As it turns out, Kathy literally knows virtually every skilled WordPress user in the Atlanta area, and hundreds around the country. I often said that if someone in Atlanta claimed to be a WordPress power user but didn’t know Kathy, then they were likely to be lying. That’s not totally true, but it’s really close. 🙂 She’s the “Dave” of WordPress in the southeastern US.

Kathy’s Meetup was excellent, but I quickly found a problem; one Meetup per month wasn’t enough for me. I figured I’d be the solution that I wanted to see, so we fired up our group that April, exactly 10 years ago today, and have been going strong ever since. Since then, a variety of other WordPress-focused groups have formed in the Atlanta area, including long running groups such as Melanie’s in Newnan and April’s in Woodstock.

Over the last 10 years we’ve had thousands of people attend ours, generally in little batches of 20-30 each month. We’ve met some incredible people, have learned more about WordPress and business than I could have fathomed, and we look forward to keeping it going for years to come.

We’re still hosting our events online for this, so anyone reading this can attend from wherever you live. Join our group on Meetup and I hope to see you at an event soon!

You begin to fail when you deny your mistakes

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Mistakes can often be amazing. I’ve shared ideas from people like Thomas J. Watson and Niels Bohr that literally prefer people that have made mistakes.

There’s an important caveat in there though — you must be willing to learn from them.

This was summarized perfectly in Carol Dweck’s book “Mindset“, where she shared:

“John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach, says you aren’t a failure until you start to blame. What he means is that you can still be in the process of learning from your mistakes until you deny them.”

As long as you can admit you’ve made a mistake, you can learn from it.

If you start hiding mistakes and pretending they didn’t happen, you’ll look better in the short run but fail to learn a lesson that could make you far better in the long run.

I trust purple people more

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I was listening to a podcast from Gary Vaynerchuk a few weeks ago when he made a point that he tends to trust “purple people” more. In this case, “purple” refers to people that aren’t 100% red or blue when it comes to politics. I totally agree.

I’ve said before that I gain the most wisdom from people that can see both sides of the aisle. If you are hardcore red or hardcore blue when it comes to politics, that’s a stance you are absolutely allowed to take. However, it means that I know your views are likely slanted and it will be more difficult to gain a fair understanding in many situations, and it can have some bad outcomes.

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For example, in our last school board election, we had a hard-fighting mother (D) with children in the local schools going against (literally) a racist old white man (R) who falls asleep in meetings. He won solely due to the (R) next to his name and people that “had” to vote a straight ticket. It was shameful. More people being willing to be just a little bit purple would have made our county a better place to live.

We all have the stances we take on various issues, and sticking close to our desired political party makes a lot of sense. However, if you’re unwilling to ever let a bit of “purple” show up in your supported candidates, your view of the world might be a bit too narrow.

But that doesn’t scale, does it?

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Automation can be a great thing. In a way, it’s the reason you’re reading this right now instead of me having to come over to your house to tell you in person. There are databases, algorithms, feeds, and various other things that help get this post out there.

That said, I’ve been clear over the years that automation isn’t always the answer and it can lead to truly awful results. Authenticity always wins.

That’s not to say there isn’t a case for some automation in your life, but the more you can intentionally do things that can’t scale, the better you’ll look.

On an episode of “The Long and The Short of It” podcast (episode 811), Pete and Jen said it perfectly:

“Things that don’t scale make people feel seen”

Anyone can click the “happy birthday to x” button on Facebook, but a quick hand-written card is 1,000 times more appreciated. Things you do that aren’t scalable are often the most valuable.

Invoices

One interesting topic related to this is invoicing clients. Pete has relatively few clients, so he always sends a personal message with each manually-sent invoice. Jen, on the other hand, has a ton of small invoices to send and simply has no choice but to automate most of them. Both of their takes on this are valid.

We’ve discussed this at GreenMellen as well. We lean more toward Jen, as we often have a ton of small invoices and we automate much of it, but there’s another layer. Even with automation, there is still a good bit of manual work to be done (re-sending when needed, helping with credit cards that don’t go through, etc).

For a little while we considered hiring someone to help deal with those and take those efforts off our plates, but have opted to keep doing it ourselves. If a client is having trouble with an invoice, that’s absolutely a situation where some non-scalable human interaction is appropriate. Beyond that, it gives us another touch point with those clients, which is always a great thing.

Balance

Like much of life, balance is the key. We certainly automate quite a few things, but we try to find key areas where automation is possible but the non-scalable action is the better way to go.

Algorithms versus value

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As I’ve been working to improve my content on my LinkedIn profile over the past few months, I’ve learned a lot about how their algorithm works. For a while I was trying to tailor my posts to better suit their algorithm, but I’ve learned to (mostly) ignore it and focus on providing great value.

For example, LinkedIn tends to show posts to more people if there aren’t any links in it. This makes sense, because it’s less likely to be spam, but it leads to weird outcomes. Either people omit links that might have brought more value to the post, or they do the cute “link in the comments” thing to get around it.

That’s not a horrible idea, but it’s silly to have to play those games.

For example, in this post about mistakes I discussed a study from the American Psychological Association, so the post was more valuable if I included that link.

Or in this post about anchoring your new product to an existing idea, I linked to a podcast from Seth Godin and a link to an article on Compio that provided more context.

I’ve also recently talked about the growing trend of sharing screenshots instead of links. That’s often for dubious content that would be unraveled with a link, but it’s along the same lines. Algorithms that discourage links are also discouraging context for posts, which can be very problematic.

If all of these links start burying my posts on LinkedIn, perhaps I’ll change my mind. I hope not, though, as I’d rather focus on bringing valuable content than worry about what LinkedIn’s algorithm thinks about it.

Deceit is a poor marketing tactic

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A while back I shared how you shouldn’t try to hustle those that you wish to serve. Taking shortcuts to try to reach people is rarely a good idea.

For example, the below came in the mail from a local HVAC company, with the indications of a check (such as “pay to the order of”) clearly visible through the envelope window. During tax season, this is probably a great way to get people to open the mail.

As a result, Casteel has begun our relationship by being intentionally deceptive in order to start a conversation. How could that possibly lead to a good outcome? Hustling those that you wish to serve is just a foolish and selfish thing to do. David Meerman Scott has said that you can Buy, Beg, Bug, or Earn attention — even he didn’t think that “deceive” was something that should go on the list, because it’s so ridiculous.

If you’re in the Atlanta area, use a company like Summit Heating and Air instead. They’ve earned the respect of our area by being heavily involved in the community, treating people right, and never sending out deceptive mail like this one.

I change my mind. What do you do?

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The increasing propensity for people to refuse to change their minds, even when faced with irrefutable evidence, is baffling to me. I don’t like being wrong – no one really does – but being wrong means that I’m now less wrong than I was before.

More importantly, as I’ve shared before, most of the smartest people are those that frequently change their minds. Being open to new ideas is a wonderful trait.

A quote from J.M. Keynes is what inspired this post. He said it well with:

“When somebody persuades me that I am wrong, I change my mind. What do you do?”

Is memorization important?

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Over the years I’ve read many articles about memorization. Many are against it (“We have the world’s information a Google search away”) while others are for it. I’m heavily in favor of taking time to memorize things, but I’m always open to new perspectives on how valuable (or not) that practice might be.

I recently found an excellent article from Pearl Leff that gives great support for memorization and the value it can bring. Her main points are summarized here:

But as I’ve gotten older I’ve started to understand that memorization is important, much more than we give it credit for. Knowledge is at our fingertips and we can look anything up, but it’s knowing what knowledge is available and how to integrate it into our existing knowledge base that’s important.

Among other reasons, Pearl suggests that memorization leads to an increased ability to tie different areas together. Looking up individual facts is easy, but having a scaffolding to connect various pieces can offer huge advantages.

It’s similar to some of the thoughts that David Epstein gave in his book “Range“, saying:

“Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains. Our most fundamental thought processes have changed to accommodate increasing complexity and the need to derive new patterns rather than rely only on familiar ones. Our conceptual classification schemes provide a scaffolding for connecting knowledge, making it accessible and flexible.”

Memorization is seemingly less important these days than it’s been in the past, but there are advantages if you can take the time to memorize the right things.

I encourage you to read Pearl’s full post, as it really is excellent.

Say something – or not

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In the book “Seeking Wisdom“, author Peter Bevelin talks about the misjudgement of “say-something syndrome”, which he describes as:

“…feeling a need to say something when we have nothing to say”

George Eliot put it similarly, saying:

“Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.”

If you have nothing worth sharing on a particular topic, then don’t share it. We all know people that need to make their voice heard, even on topics with which they have no value to contribute.

It’s similar the ideas of “we have to do something about it“. If people see a problem, then they will often rush to “do something”, even if doing nothing is the better course of action.

People that talk all the time may indeed have good things to share, but it can be tough to separate the wheat from the chaff. I much prefer people that are frequently quiet, because when they take the time to speak up you know they’re worth listening to.

I was fantastic with Google+

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I thought Google+ was a great product. I dug in deep, and developed a solid following on there. Today, that’s worth absolutely nothing.

It’s good to develop strong skills in a particular area, but it’s even better to develop skills that don’t rely on a particular piece of technology or a single service.

My Google+ experience makes me feel like the fish that Stephen Jay Gould referred to when he said:

“Even if fishes hone their adaptations to peaks of aquatic perfection, they will all die if the pond dries up.”

It’s a tricky balance. On one hand, you don’t want to go too wide. Most people that try to be super active on a dozen different social media platforms tend to end up with mediocre outcomes in all them. On the other hand, relying on a single platform for your reach isn’t ideal either — that’s Donald Trump’s biggest problem with having been kicked off of Twitter.

In my case, I should have done a better job of building the public to private bridge that David Perell has talked about. My email list is growing nicely now (come join it!), but I should have been working harder on it years ago. The more you can attract people to places that you truly own (like email lists and blogs), the more sustainable your efforts will be in the long run.