In 2015, I moved to NYC, founded a media company, and became Seth Godin’s in-house CTO. But my hesitation almost prevented it from happening.

At the time, I was Director of Web Optimization for a firm that made software used by more than a million websites. I was running professional services and learning a lot, but something felt off. I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was time for a new adventure.

I emailed Seth, who had previously hired me for his book publishing startup called The Domino Project, and told him I was thinking about my next moves. He responded 19 minutes later, asking me to call him. We talked about what I wanted to do next, what it would look like, what he was preparing to launch, and the role I could play.

I was living in Florida at the time, and he suggested that we continue the conversation in person, in New York. I hemmed and hawed about the next time I’d be in New York, to which he replied, “I’m not waiting.”

I booked my flight that day and moved to Harlem a few weeks later.

Things moved quickly. I secured sponsors. Helped launch altMBA. Cultivated contributors. Hired an Editor-in-Chief. Published articles. Grew the newsletter. Produced a launch event. Made a name for myself.

I learned more in those first two weeks than I would have in two years of puttering along in Florida. It had nothing to do with where I lived and everything to do with how I chose to spend my time. I left the safety of the familiar and stepped into the unknown. It was thrilling.

And none of it would’ve happened if I had dragged my feet.

The problem with waiting is that there’s never an ideal or convenient time to do the work we’re called to do. There will always be great reasons to postpone, delay, and spend another six months “researching.”

That’s why I’m launching Next Year Starts Now 🚀.

It’s an invitation, a permission slip, and a mirror for you to hold yourself accountable. There’s still time to close the year out strong.

You don’t have to wait for the New Year to get started on your resolutions. In fact, I’d argue that waiting for January 1st is the worst way to make a change.

Did you know that of the 41% of Americans who make New Year’s resolutions, only 9% are successful in keeping them?

We can do better than that.

You don’t have to be great to start, but you do have to start to be great. — Zig Ziglar

As the end of the year comes into focus and the holiday season approaches, a growing list of our nice-to-have priorities will be punted to the “next year” pile. And when the fog of the new year clears and the urgency of those punted priorities comes into focus, abandoning our goals and resolutions is the easiest way to make time.

But your dreams deserve better.

The truth is that right now is always the best time to make a change, but right now is never convenient. In fact, the inconvenience of deciding, committing, and taking immediate action is what’s transformative. I know this because taking immediate action—the core of my Next Year Starts Now ethos—changed my life.

Right now prevents us from hiding, demonstrates (most importantly, to ourselves) how serious we are, and interrupts the time-honored tradition of getting ready to get ready, a pattern that kept me stuck and living below my potential for years.

So in that spirit, I hope you’ll consider joining me for an intentionally inconvenient end-of-year sprint. Registration will be open for two weeks starting today, and I hope to see you inside. Email me with any questions.

I frequently walk through an intersection in Brooklyn where cars are occasionally stopped in the middle of the pedestrian walkway. It’s a minor inconvenience to walk around the bad drivers who misjudge the intersection, but it’s still difficult not to feel a twinge of annoyance.

But when I was returning a rental car a few months ago, I found myself traveling through this same area in a vehicle for the first time. The light was yellow and there were lots of pedestrians, so I decided to stop instead of trying to make the light.

I had to smile as a couple walked a few paces out of their way to accommodate the bad driver—yours truly—whose turn it was to inconvenience pedestrians.

The funny thing about extending grace is that it flows in both directions. You might not need it today, but life is long and filled with surprises.

I love tools that make the internet a more private and secure place, and here are a few products and services that I use. Many of them will be overkill for the average consumer, but you might not be the average consumer.

• NextDNS: Cloud-based DNS service that lets you control and monitor DNS resolution on your devices with a focus on privacy, security, and content filtering. Blocks ads, trackers, and prevents your ISP from snooping on your DNS traffic.
• 1.1.1.1: CloudFlare’s super-fast, privacy-respecting DNS resolver that doesn’t log or track your browsing activity. There’s also a companion mobile app that works like a VPN and securely connects to the Cloudflare network.
• Flashrouters: Wi-Fi routers that come with open-source and highly customizable software installed, allowing you to enjoy an expanded feature set, better security, and improved performance. I run an Asus mesh network at home.
• Tailscale: A secure networking tool that creates a private, encrypted network between your devices. Works like a VPN, and uses the Wireguard protocol.
• Proton: Suite of high-quality, privacy-focused tools created by former CERN scientists. Their mail, VPN, password manager, and secure notes app are top-notch.
• Brave: Free, privacy-focused web browser based on Chromium (which powers Google Chrome) that blocks ads by default.
• Ente Photos: End-to-end encrypted, open-source, cross-platform photo backups.
• Signal: Secure, end-to-end encrypted messaging. SMS is not secure.
• Advanced Data Protection for iCloud: An optional security feature from Apple that gives you end-to-end encryption for your iCloud data.

Responsive Conference is my friend Robin Zander’s two-day annual summit in Oakland, California, for founders, entrepreneurs, and executives that want to make things better at work and beyond. 

It’s a conference, yes, but in practice, it’s more of an immersive love letter to collaborative problem-solving. Everyone I know who attends Responsive Conference raves about the experience, and there’s still time to snag general admission tickets.

An unconventional and delightful preamble to the Conference is—brace yourself for some serious meta—The Conference for Conferences by the incomparable Jenny Sauer-Klein. 

The Conference for Conferences disrupts the tired conference paradigm that leaves attendees overwhelmed, overstimulated, and over-programmed. Expect an intimate, high-impact gathering for people who convene people, focusing on the kind of participatory connection that stays with you long after the Conference concludes.

Both conferences will be held at the stunning Oakland Museum of California on consecutive days in September, and I hope you can attend.

I was at a birthday party 15 years ago, and an unassuming guy that I didn’t know walked over and introduced himself. His name was Michael.

He shared how he knew our mutual friend whose birthday it was, and asked me what I was working on. We chatted for a few minutes and exchanged information before mingling with others and enjoying the festivities.

The next day, I received a follow-up email from Michael with a bullet list of five people he was happy to connect me with, along with links to their LinkedIn profiles. They were all interesting, successful NYC-based entrepreneurs that I was interested in meeting and highly relevant to the work I was doing.

Michael is a superconnector.

The introductions beget other introductions, with each new connection radiating with positive energy and goodwill from the last. It’s an infectious energy and activity, so I started being intentional about making introductions in my life as well. This has in turn added a lot of value to my friends’ lives.

You probably know dozens or even hundreds of people whose lives would be made better by knowing other people in your network. It’s easy to complicate the process, and I’ve certainly made some glowing, multi-paragraph introductions, but it’s also fine to just say, “Hey, I think you two will enjoy knowing each other.

My first sales role was as a founder, which was like learning how to swim by jumping into a river wearing winter clothes.

I was running a mission-driven media company that produced long-form content, and I sold sponsorships to fund it. Launching and running that publication changed my life, due in no small part to the lessons it taught me on cultivating a healthy relationship with sales.

I secured six sponsors for the magazine’s launch, and the fanfare around our splashy entrance generated significant sponsorship interest that sustained us for a while. But once the momentum slowed and things were humming along, sales became something I dreaded (and dutifully avoided).

The challenge was that I felt personally identified with the sponsorship I was selling, and every time someone declined to purchase a sponsorship, I felt personally rejected. I asserted that the world needed what we were producing, and I went to the market to validate that assertion.

Another challenge is that I took myself and my work Very Seriously, which left little room for creativity and fun. Work felt like work.

Things changed when I shifted from being consumed with my feelings of worthiness to inhabiting a place of generosity. When I treated money like it was scarce and unavailable to me, it was elusive. When I treated it like an abundant resource to attract, sales became more of a game with a scoreboard than a quest for survival.

This shift in perspective helped me get clear on what I was selling, which was the opportunity to be a part of something meaningful and worthwhile. When I exuded the confidence and power of the mission, my value proposition shifted from focusing on metrics and subscriber growth to the story my buyer would share with their spouse over dinner.

Being in alignment with the power of my mission also led to some weirdly awesome things happening: when I spoke with a prospect about sponsorship, he was excited and assumed the pricing I sent was per month (it wasn’t monthly pricing), and said he’d like to start with three months (as it turns out, it was monthly pricing). That was a fun email to forward to my advisor.

Ultimately, I parlayed my insights into a mission-driven career at the intersection of my passions: facilitation and public speaking, empowering people to more deeply inhabit their humanity in relationship with others, and serving as a coin-operated spokesmodel for the cause (sales).

The result was millions of dollars in sales activity that I mastered, looked forward to, and helped others unlock their brilliance around.

The shift in perspective changed everything.

I’m in a mastermind group with a group of disturbingly impressive professionals. Most of us knew each other beforehand, and a couple of us had even worked together on projects, but consistent biweekly meetings focused on mutual support are new territory for us as a group.

The conversations have hit their stride in recent weeks, and I’ve been reflecting on how the group only exists because the organizer reached out to a few of us and said, “Hey, do you want to do this?”
And so we did.

Some masterminds cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to be a part of, and have application processes with stringent requirements around business revenue. That makes sense for some groups, but not ours.

Our group is composed of people in one transition or another, questioning and answering, and perhaps most valuably, reflecting what we see in each other.

At any given time, we’re scattered across two countries and three time zones, navigating imperfect circumstances and life transitions. It’s a sacrifice and an opportunity to show up, and we’re all better for it.

You might benefit from a group like this as well, and you can be the reason that it happens.

Proceding in the crosswalk when you have the right of way, delegating a task to a direct report, and having a friend deliver an important letter should all be fine.

But it pays to verify that the coast is clear, the assignment is understood, and that the task is complete.

We don’t need to move through the world as paranoid, micromanaging, and mistrusting, but we can bring judgment and increasing levels of trust to bear when appropriate.