On this day

May 5th

What does making something in public for years actually take? →

Published May 5  ·  , ,

I’ve been blogging since 2011. Movers Mindset started 2015. Open + Curious in 2024 with a different shape. Podtalk started in there too. Each project has its own arc, and it’s own specific thing that draws me to keep creating. After all this time, I can now see there’s a question I never paid attention to which lies underneath all of them: What does it take to keep making something in public, for years?

The pieces below are about the practice of showing up — what permission feels like, what resistance is, how cumulative invisible work pays off, and what “uphill” writing means. A couple are distilled from Podtalk conversations with people who arrived at hard truths and put them into words. This thread is sequenced for someone who’s making something in public and wondering how to keep at it without burning out, quitting, or going sideways into something they didn’t set out to do.

Permission to continue
7 for Sunday — March 2025

Open with the inheritance. Someone who modeled the practice for me dies, and I realized the permission they gave wasn’t theirs to give. I already had it. Jack London’s club it — go after what you want with force — turns out to be the most generous instruction possible, because it gives you permission to commit even when the outcome is uncertain.

Sit down
constantine.name — November 2024

The Pressfield line that does the most work for me: “It’s not the writing that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is resistance.” Cling to that for everything you’re trying to keep making — it’s not the doing that’s hard. It’s the showing up that’s hard. Really hard.

The illogical thing
Podtalk Field Note — with Cassian Bellino

Cassian got laid off and immediately built everything nobody asked for — courses, communities, funnels. By any reasonable measure it was a mistake. But: “my emotions wouldn’t have settled had I tried the logical thing.” Sometimes what in hindsight is clearly the wrong path, is actually the only way to reach the destination, and the flailing is how some creators process toward clarity.

Bifocals
constantine.name — January 2026

My bifocal attention: solving today’s problem while simultaneously noticing the friction I can’t leave alone. I’ll stop in the middle of the task to write the script, the alias, the doc, the template — not because I’m procrastinating but because that is the real work. The payoff is cumulative and mostly invisible, which is what makes it hard to commit to.

100 issues of my “7 for Sunday” email
constantine.name — August 2024

At the 100-issue mark of 7 for Sunday — three years of weekly issues — what mattered wasn’t the number. It was that I’d kept going through stretches when simply knowing that readers existed was what got me through. The life preserver that saves you is necessarily thrown by another. External validation isn’t ideal, but sometimes it’s what keeps you in the boat.

Writing uphill
7 for Sunday — December 2024

Downhill writing is what you want to say; uphill writing is what you need to say — the thing you’re afraid of, the thing you think nobody wants to hear. The best writing is almost always uphill. The discomfort is usually the sign you’re onto something real.

When a Podcast Is Finished
Podtalk Field Note — with Alasdair Plambeck

Closing on the hardest part: knowing when to stop. Not failed, not abandoned — finished. Alasdair ended his podcast after four-and-a-half years because the work was complete. The skill isn’t just keeping going; it’s also recognizing when keeping going has quietly become a different act than what you set out to do.

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Momentum with Robin Waite →

Published May 5, 2025

How can podcasters build meaningful relationships that expand their reach, create new opportunities, and grow their shows—without relying on promotion or algorithms?

A five-step method helps you land dream collaborations by being helpful, not pushy.

[One little shift?] That’s it. If I hadn’t have gone to that event, if I hadn’t have just dumped my coat and helped direct people, if I hadn’t offered to help for free, if I hadn’t got to know the team, if I hadn’t, if I’d asked for the wrong thing or too much or too, I don’t know if I’d got the ask wrong, any one of those things could have ended up being like a Sliding Doors [the 1998 film -ed] moment where I then I go from 3000 leads to just going about my life as a coach.

~ Robin Waite (15:00)

Robin Waite shares how he reinvented his business growth strategy by focusing on building partnerships rather than following conventional marketing playbooks. Feeling burnt out by social media and traditional outreach, he adopted an “outside-in” approach—intentionally targeting people he admired, getting in the same room with them, and offering help without expectation. His approach centers on showing up, adding value, and making intentional asks that are aligned with what others actually need.

He illustrates this with a detailed story of how he ended up as a guest on Ali Abdaal’s Deep Dive podcast, which generated over 3,000 leads and $300,000 in business. Key elements included making himself useful at events, building relationships with team members, and being ready with a modest but well-timed ask. Waite expands on this philosophy by identifying five steps: be intentional, get in the room, be helpful, find the inside person, and offer something on a silver platter. The conversation underscores the power of authentic connection, strategic generosity, and long-term thinking in business development.

(more…)

May 05, 2024 — #83 →

Published May 5, 2024  ·  

Reading time: About 3 minutes, 600 words. 
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This issue is https://7forsunday.com/83

Return to asphalt

Nobody →

Published May 5, 2024  ·  

I’m a brooder. Ruminating on one’s problems can be good, if one is actually trying to understand the situation and is seeking solutions. But brooding, that’s just ruminating without the potential for change. Brooding is simply going around and around on the same old thoughts.

Nobody else needs to endure my negative thoughts.

~ Nate Dickson from, The Life-Changing Power of Shutting Up

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It’s not enough to simply shut up. One also has to change one’s thinking.

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Wisdom and learning →

Published May 5, 2023  ·  , ,

Seek to learn constantly while you live; Do not wait in the faith that old age by itself will bring wisdom.

~ Solon

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Extraneous as passing fiction →

Published May 5, 2023  ·  ,

After this era of great pilots is gone, as the era of great sea captains has gone — each nudged aside by the march of inventive genius, by steel cogs and copper discs and hair-thin wires on white faces that are dumb, but speak — it will be found, I think, that all the science of flying has been captured in the breadth of an instrument board, but not the religion of it. One day the stars will be as familiar to each man as the landmarks, the curves, and the hills on the road that leads to his door, and one day this will be an airborne life. But by then men will have forgotten how to fly; they will be passengers on machines whose conductors are carefully promoted to familiarity with labelled buttons, and in whose minds the knowledge of the sky and the wind and the way of weather will be extraneous as passing fiction.

~ Beryl Markham from, A Different Solitude: Pioneering Aviator Beryl Markham on What She Learned About Life in the Bottomless Night

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As if there’s anything I could write which would add to that.

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Gravitation →

Published May 5, 2022  ·  ,

Laws and institutions are constantly tending to gravitate. Like clocks, they must be occasionally cleansed, and wound up, and set to true time.

~ Henry Ward Beecher

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What’s in a name →

Published May 5, 2022  ·  

A challenge arises when we make something over a long period of time. As we evolve — as we add experiences, impressions, memories, deepening knowledge and self-knowledge to the combinatorial pool from which all creative work springs — what we make evolves accordingly; it must, if we are living widely and wisely enough. Eventually, the name we once chose for it begins to feel not like a choice but like a constraint, an ill-fitting corset ribbed with the ossified sensibility of a former self.

~ Maria Popova from, Becoming the Marginalian: After 15 Years, Brain Pickings Reborn

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Popova changed the name of her project a while back, and this is a nice unpacking of her thinking. I’ve a lot of projects, and they have various names; Names that are public and names for them in my own mind.

With each project, I continuously struggle to balance the desire for concision and the desire for clarity. I drive myself mercilessly to find the simplest phrase that is something memorable and meaningful. And then I drive myself mercilessly to be ready and able to explain things as iterative layers of unpacking. That name. A few sentences. A few minutes of explanation. And so on, expanding to a fully dynamic conversation about the thing. On one hand, I know that this zooming in, (towards a concise name,) and zooming out, (toward a coherent and thorough explanation,) improves my thinking and understanding. But on the other hand. It’s really exhausting.

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The challenge →

Published May 5, 2021  ·  

The process isn’t overly complicated or hard. The challenge becomes moving through it at the right pace in a way that aligns with your principles.

~ Shane Parrish from, How People Make Big Decisions

This is the exceedingly rare case where what I really want to quote is a small graphic from the site, and I simply don’t feel like copying the image and uploading it, just to include it here. (You’ll have to click over.)

I found myself thinking about the little graphic, which has an outer circle describing a process for change. Starting at the here-and-now called, “doing,” forward over a “Rubicon” and then full circle to a new here-and-now of “doing.” There are several ways to fail at changing, by short-circuiting through self-defeating statements. And that’s what I’m thinking about today.

What self-defeating stories am I telling myself? Why?

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Blindingly obvious →

Published May 5, 2020  ·  

A few weeks ago I had a rapid sequence of ideas related to reading books. All of these are blindingly obvious in hindsight:

One can gang books together when reading. Grab Aurelius’s Meditations, Frankl’s, Man’s Search for Meaning, Seneca’s Letters, and Epictetus’s Discourses, Handbook and Fragments—and read a little from each of them in each sitting. Or grab the Constitution of the United States, The Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers, and Stevens’s Six Amendments. (What “gang” of books springs to mind for you?)

One is permitted to place multiple bookmarks in the same book. Yes I’ve long advocated adding sticky notes to mark various things in a book as I go along. But the idea of reading in multiple places simultaneously in the same book hadn’t really occurred to me.

One can make their own bookmarks from 1/4″ satin ribbon! I have all sorts of bookmarks; things which slide onto the edge like a paper-clip, printed cards (“Remain calm. I’m the Doctor.” for example) with the usual string or ribbon from the end, 3×5 cards stuffed in randomly, and large sticky notes. But it’s way cooler to cut a length of ribbon and drape it through the book… just like really cool and expensive books which arrive with a bookmark sewn into their binding.

If you’re cutting ribbon to make bookmarks, you can easily attach it into the book just like the fancy books’ marks. Cut it long enough to: lay one end between the last two pages of the book, tight in against the binding, with the end near the top of the page, and the ribbon laying down the page. Flip a few pages on top of it to hold it in place, and lay the ribbon back up across the entire book again tight in against the binding. Now you have a bookmark that feels like it’s sewn into the binding when you grab the lower portion sticking out of the book as your mark.

My final thought in that recent cascade was of course: Okay, wow, I really have a book problem.

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Purpose in life →

Published May 5, 2019  ·  

Everyone has a purpose in life. Perhaps yours is watching television.

~ David Letterman

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The one who smiles →

Published May 5, 2018  ·  

Better to be the one who smiled than the one who didn’t smile back.

~ unknown

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The “wind and solar will save us” delusion →

Published May 5, 2017

There has been a misunderstanding regarding the nature of our energy problem. Many people believe that we will “run out” of fossil fuels, or that the price of oil and other fuels will rise very high. In fact, our problem seems to be one of affordability: energy prices don’t rise high enough to cover the rising cost of producing electricity and other energy products. Adding wind and solar tends to make the problem of low commodity prices worse.

~ Gail Tverberg from, The “Wind and Solar Will Save Us” Delusion

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Presented without comment.

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Calm down and be civil →

Published May 5, 2015  ·  

You laugh, and then you probably think to yourself (like I did), “oh crap…that’s me…many, many times.” Whether it’s a delayed flight, or slow service at a restaurant (where we’ll overeat and then complain about being full) it’s amazing what we can complain about just so we have something to complain about!

~ Steve Kamb from, Does It REALLY Matter?

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Traitors in our midst →

Published May 5, 2014  ·  

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

~ C.S. Lewis

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