I look up to him when it comes to designing a fulfilling life, and also when it comes to acoustic Kanye West covers.

One of the coolest things he does is name his year in advance. It sets the intent for your actions and is a quick heuristic for decision making.

For example, your year’s theme could be “connect,” and that could mean striving to build your professional network or to deepen the existing relationships in your life.

Last year, I chose the word “Arena,” to reflect my desire to become more visible and vocal, particularly with my business, but also in personal life, spending a significant amount of my time outside of my apartment, into my new home, the arena of New York City.

It was, of course, inspired by the Teddy Roosevelt “Man in the Arena” speech, which I know is cringey to some modern, jaded readers. But I like it. And I think cringe is probably a good thing, or at least a signal that it means something to you.

How did it go? Pretty good. Second half of the year was better than the first. The first half I don’t think I embodied the word if I’m being honest. I stopped hosting meetups as regularly, stayed in more, etc. But around June / July, that changed, and I started doing guest podcasts, speaking IRL, and hosting marketing meetups every 2 months or so.

If I look at the past few years, there’s a theme among the words I’ve chosen. In 2021 and 2022, I chose “commit.” This was what I desperately needed to be fulfilled, because I had previously been a dilettante with hobbies, work, and relationships, more interested than side projects and escapist travel than digging deep and laying roots.

Now, I love commitment.

In 2023, I chose “king,” to embody the mature masculine, a sense of magnanimity and leadership that I needed to guide our business through a rocky and chaotic year and myself through a life transition moving to NYC.

All of these words, to me, represent a sense of courage, a faithful step into the unknown, a “shoulders back and head up” unflinching approach to the world.

So, my word of 2025 is the seemingly religious, “Faith.”

What “Faith” Means to Me

I grew up catholic, lost my religion around high school (when the words of George Carlin, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins sunk into my brain) throughout college and into my twenties, and I’m too scatter-brained to tell you where I’ve landed now. But it’s somewhere in the realm of a believer without the dogma. I wear a cross, but it represents something broader than what I learned as a kid.

But “Faith” to me doesn’t necessarily mean religion. It means a sense of confidence, fidelity and commitment, and optimism in the face of uncertainty.

The word “faith” originates from the Latin word “fides,” which means trust, belief, or confidence. The term passed through Old French “feid” or “feith” before entering Middle English as “faith.” The Latin root reflects concepts of trustworthiness, loyalty, and reliance, particularly in relationships or agreements (e.g., the fidelity of a contract).

Obviously, in modern times, the religious connotation is the strongest. In religious contexts, “faith” often denotes a firm belief in something without requiring empirical evidence, aligning with the idea of trust in divine authority or spiritual truths. In truth, I like this definition, but mostly because it is in opposition to overly rationalist takes and jaded or cynical positions

Critics, like skeptics or rationalists, may equate faith with a lack of evidence, reducing its nuance. Conversely, advocates often see it as an active, intentional trust in uncertain domains. I choose the latter.

I mean, I light a manifestation candle every time I take a sales call.

Overall, what it really means to me is what my business partner David and I have been repeating to each other for the past 3-4 years: faith, not fear.

In many ways, I’m at a precipice, standing in front of big lifestyle changes, and that can often induce a sense of fear or paralysis. Considering entering a serious relationship or marriage, considering bringing your business to the point of large stature, from dozens to hundreds of employees. What could go wrong? Anything and everything. What could go right? Anything and everything.

When I was a little kid, we often went to this waterpark in Wisconsin Dell’s, Noah’s Ark, and the coolest ride was the “point of no return.” I desperately wanted to ride it, but I was always too short.

When I finally hit the adequate height, I remember taking the long walk up to the top of the slide, every step inducing slightly more fear and panic, my heart incrementing 1-2 BPM for every 5 feat of elevation gained. Standing, ultimately, at the top of the slide, looking straight down the barrel at a seemingly vertical drop, I was completely petrified. My brain and body screamed, “walk back down!”

I looked back, the line behind my long, winding, and tracing down the steps I had just progressed. Luckily, my sense of shame over walking back down was more powerful than my fear, so I plugged my nose, and plunged down the slide. And it was exhilarating.

As a former skateboarded, I liken it to the first time I successfully dropped in on a quarter pipe. Anyone who has done this knows you must commit fully, leaning into gravity, otherwise you’ll fall backwards and hurt yourself.

So, that’s what I mean by faith. A blend of fear and passion where ultimately you just trust yourself and the outcome and take the leap.

The post Name Your Year (2025): Faith appeared first on Alex Birkett.

I look up to him when it comes to designing a fulfilling life, and also when it comes to acoustic Kanye West covers.

One of the coolest things he does is name his year in advance. It sets the intent for your actions and is a quick heuristic for decision making.

For example, your year’s theme could be “connect,” and that could mean striving to build your professional network or to deepen the existing relationships in your life.

I realize I forgot to write my post for last year, but I named the year “King,” which sounds a bit grandiose, but want I wanted to invoke was a sense of equanimity, maturity, and leadership, all threaded by a strong reliance on my principles and integrity. An aspiration to a mature masculine archetype (a la King, Warrior, Magician, Lover).

It’s weird how naming your year works out, certainly some form of manifestation. Because what I needed most in 2023 was that type of energy and decision making.

It was a hard year, actually. Business was rocky, but we ended up growing and in a very advantageous position coming into 2024. I moved to NYC and that was a massive transition that certainly took a lot of equanimity. Other stuff too — too personal to dive into. Anyway, King energy served me well.

This year, the word is Arena.

What “Arena” Means to Me

Bit of a history buff here, and most people know the Teddy Roosevelt “man in the arena” speech.

Don’t really care if it’s cringe, the quote inspires me.

What it means is action, faith over fear, and a willingness to put myself out there.

Tactically, it means getting on stage (or on podcasts) and giving our agency a voice and a presence. It also means exiting the digital matrix and immersing myself into New York City – culturally, socially, professionally, etc.

It means never wandering too far away from the weeds, despite what some business gurus tell you. I strive to lead from the front, not from a distance perch.

It also literally means I want to compete in jiu jitsu this year.

A common thread has formed through my past few year’s intentions – commit, king, and now arena.

Arena is the embodiment of “it’s showtime,” “fuck it, let’s do it live,” and a trust in oneself and one’s skills.

It’s a fun reminder to get off the sidelines, stop critiquing / analyzing, and get in there and build something.

The post Name Your Year (2024): Arena appeared first on Alex Birkett.

Back then, it was simple enough to work on clients on nights and weekends. We were small and only used contractors, so we didn’t need to worry too much about growth, hiring, finances, etc.

Now, we’re ~10 people and tons of contractors, and there’s a lot more to balance.

I’m quite driven, so I can take on too much from time to time. Without reminders, I’ll work myself to the bone.

So I wanted to drop some reminders (to myself) as I grow this agency so I can balance grand ambition with “self-care” (or at least the sustainability to be able to grow the business as fast as I want to).

I may add to this or change it as I go.

1) Faith, not fear

Most important one. Fear causes bad decision making and short-term & lowball thinking. Act out of faith and confidence instead.

2) Say no to stuff.

Naturally a yes man. Most things you can do are marginally valuable. Your job now is to identify and work on what is *most valuable* and uniquely solvable by YOU.

3) Never stray from the fundamental problems

This is usually getting more clients, making clients happy, and hiring talent.

4) Stop justifying scrolling on Twitter as important to business

Productive procrastination lowers my vibration.

5) Absorb complexity and communicate simplicity

The world is uncertain, but vision and direction at the leadership level has to be communicated simply and clearly. No need to “show my work” and all of the complexity involved in decisions.

6) Do yoga

You’ll work ‘round the clock if you let yourself. Schedule yoga class at night to get some stretching and meditation in.

7) Do sauna

Start the day with an ice bath, sauna, and some meditation for the exact same reason as the above.

8) Reinvent your role constantly

At the start, it was scrappy. Now, it’s building processes and honing focus. Next? Who knows. Be unafraid of evolution.

9) Always be writing

Writing is at the center of the company, and it’s the birthplace of ideas, strategy, and marketing ourselves. It’s also my zone of genius. Write everyday.

10) Memento mori

You’re dying one minute at a time. How do you want to maximize your time? This doesn’t just apply to growing a business. Always keep in mind. Cherish relationships and health.

The post Reminders to myself to grow my agency and stay sane appeared first on Alex Birkett.

Both of us harbored dreams of entrepreneurship and had been doing a lot of individual consulting. We had wanted to build a SaaS product, but when we found there was demand for our content services, we jumped at the opportunity.

For two years, we experimented a lot, but the business stayed at side hustle size, never more than a few clients at a time.

However, in the last year or so, the agency looks like…well, a business. We brought on our third co-founder, Allie Decker, and now have a team of several full time and part time employees. This month (May 2022), we’ve collected over $150k in revenue.

So obviously, I’m jumping in full time now. Fully focused on the agency, I’ve reclaimed a level of ambition and motivation I haven’t felt since I was 22, scared and green, but determined to prove myself.

My mind is largely positioned towards the future, so I wanted to take this moment to write down what I’ve learned up to this point in building a $1M+ revenue business while working a full time job.

1. Build a business with your best friends

Part of the reason it’s been such a joy building the agency is because I started it with two of my closest friends, David Khim and Allie Decker.

Our goals and values are all very aligned; our operating styles are perfectly complementary.

I come from a growth and experimentation background, and I’m liable to throw out multi-year abstract thought experiments. I love the sales side of things and motivating the team.

David also comes from a growth and product management background, and he’s one of the best systems thinkers I’ve ever met. He perfectly balances today’s needs with tomorrow’s plans.

Allie is a writer and craftsperson that wouldn’t allow us to skimp on quality (if we ever wanted to). She’s the Don Draper to my Roger Sterling, and is the creative force behind our services.

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We’ve also all grown to become close friends and confidants, which is great because a business partnership can be likened to a marriage in its commitment level.

Because we grew this on the side, we had some challenges, the most obvious of these being time and energy levels.

So in addition to our partitioning of roles (me: sales, David: ops, Allie: services), we also kept each other balanced each week with an “energy check-in.”

These energy check-ins are based on Brene Brown’s “50/50 myth,” which is described here:

“People aren’t built to have one consistent energy level. We can’t always be up to our 50% of our emotional contribution. This is also true for our partner. It’s unrealistic to expect everyone to contribute the same share when it comes to relationships.

Instead, our efforts or contributions should complement each other. There may be times where we need to contribute more. There are also other times where it’s ok to contribute less. Relationships that last are those where one partner is willing to be at 80% when the other is only at 20%.

When we complement each other in relationships, we can cooperate and get to 100%.”

Some weeks, David would have a massive amount of meetings and would clock in at 30%. Then, Allie and I would know we needed to support David or give him some breathing room.

Some weeks, Allie would be at 90%, and thus willing to take on extra tasks with the additional energy levels.

Because I’m addicted to caffeine, I’m pretty much always above 75% (kidding…sort of).

We still do this check-in every single week with our team in our all-hands, and it’s a great way to get a pulse check on everyone’s motivation and energy (and importantly, to avoid burnout).

2. Hire awesome people

This almost goes without saying. It’s literally the advice given in every business book and essay about growing a company.

The people you work with are everything.

Building Omniscient while working full time jobs allowed us to forgo a salary and instead invest it in hires who could level our business up. We wanted to bring in ambitious people who could do things we couldn’t do.

We brought in Karissa to help us grow our audience (through the blog, podcast, YouTube, and our gated offers and events). Doing so was absolutely pivotal in getting us to the place we are with our marketing, especially the fact that we’ve published well over 50 (!) podcasts.

We brought in Glenn to develop content & SEO strategies for clients. His work has been critical in our high retention rate with clients and he’s innovated and built a few new services and tools for us to offer.

We brought in Seema to scale our SEO and content editorial, and she’s not only excelled there but has also contributed to a ton of new and interesting growth ideas for the business.

Mason has been foundational in building out our digital PR program, guest writing program, and link networks. We now have an asset that very few other organizations can compete with, and it’s only growing.

And Sam is the managing editor we dreamed of hiring, someone with experience managing and scaling programs with hundreds of writers and moving pieces. Someone who deeply cares about leveling up writers but also in achieving process efficiency and leverage.

The team will only grow from here, but the team we’ve brought on up to this point will always impress me in their talent, spirit, and energy.

Hiring also includes a lot of freelance writers who we couldn’t have done this without. I can’t list everyone here because we work with dozens and dozens, but we really did bring in the most talented people we could, and that has also helped our high retention and satisfaction with clients.

It also forced us to better articulate our ideal customer profile and our positioning, as our costs associated with our high end writers meant we also needed to charge quite a bit more than most competitors.

We get the results to back it up but we still need to hone our messaging so people buy-in in the first place.

3. Will it make the boat go faster?

In building a substantial business on the side, we learned all about ruthless prioritization.

Simply put, we couldn’t waste our time on shit that doesn’t matter.

When we first started, I think David and I probably *did* spend time on things we shouldn’t have. We didn’t know any better. And we didn’t have the impetus of a growing team to focus our attention.

But we kept each other accountable through the journey, always asking “is this the most important thing I can be working on?” And if not, we’d scrap it for the moment. And if it didn’t move the boat (i.e. grow the company or improve our business health), we wouldn’t do it at all.

Quick aside: “will it make the boat go faster” is a phrase originated by the British rowing team. It was a guiding principle where, in the face of any option or action, they would ask, “will it make the boat go faster?” If the answer was no, they didn’t do it.

For us, this involved balancing Eisenhower’s four quadrants, particularly things that were “important and urgent” (short term stuff) with “important but not urgent” (long term stuff).

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For instance, we knew we’d eventually draw inbound traffic with our blog. But we deliberately ignored that early on because we knew a) it would be a long cycle before it produced leads and b) our blog DR was too low to compete on the high intent keywords we wanted.

Instead, we launched a podcast to build brand affinity and get our target market onto the podcast. And we did direct sales to our network and incentivized referrals, all while we slowly built links to the website in the meantime through quotes in other articles and link requests.

Now we’re at a point where we can compete on blogging, so we’ll work on scaling up that channel.

But this is the thing: we didn’t try to do it all at once. We did what was impactful, and let the small fires burn.

4. This should be fun

Another interesting cultural artifact that resulted from us starting this on the side: we wanted it to be fun. Actually, we *needed* it to be fun, otherwise we couldn’t have mustered the nights and weekend energy to work on it.

This sounds obvious, but many service businesses operate from not only a scarcity mentality, but a “all revenue is good revenue” mentality.

The principle (and reminder) “this should be fun” made it so we didn’t take on clients who we didn’t think we would like working with. That actually allowed us to scale much better because we were choosy with who we worked with. We defined a good target client, and we also avoided the energy suck of shitty clients (and oh boy, are there clear red flags).

This also guides us in our daily decision making. Of course, there will be things that you’re not absolutely ecstatic about working on, but they still need to be done. But any time there’s a piece of work we repeatedly do that we hate, we step back and question it. Can this be automated? Can it be outsourced? Can it be neglected entirely? What would the cost of eliminating this be?

We ask this of our team as well. I think if you’re passionate about what you’re doing, it just leads to better work, more energy, and a flywheel of infectious enthusiasm.

We now have several guiding principles that we use to manage our company. They’re all available for viewing on our website:

5. Letting go of perfectionism and control (or, automating and outsourcing)

On the idea of outsourcing, automation, and elimination: it was hard.

All of the co-founders, myself included, are self-proclaimed perfectionists. Or at least, we were. I think we’ve made tons of progress in this area. I’m now a former perfectionist.

Building this on side, though, was a forcing function that effectively made micromanagement and perfectionism impossible. We *had* to outsource stuff, and trust those to whom we outsourced it.

Obviously, this includes hiring our current team, but even before then we had to get comfortable with letting go:

• Doing a podcast without a full strategy and plan to distribute it.
• Creating and launching a course in only two months.
• Experimenting with outsourcing various aspects of our writing and marketing.

Not all the outsourcing experiments worked, but each one pushed us further outside our comfort zones.

I’m happy to say that, while there are some things I could still let go of, we’re all much better at doing this today. It’s a psychological battle and it takes practice, but it’s crucial for scaling a company.

6. The long tail of serendipity

Over many, many years and hustling, each of us co-founders have built valuable personal and professional networks.

David and I did a bunch of public speaking. I used to go to like 10 conferences a year. Allie built a successful freelance business and an influential Twitter presence. I wrote hundreds of articles for CXL.

And we all worked at HubSpot, where we built a great network as well.

All of these things helped us massively when we were starting the agency and they continue to help us out.

The thing about an agency is it’s hard to predict what’s going to bring you clients. Content marketing can work, podcasting can work, sales can work. But you have to get the timing right; if someone’s not looking for a $10k+ agency, they’re simply not interested in doing a deal.

You have to be on someone’s mind at the time of interest. And that’s where long tail connections have paid off.

People I met at conferences years ago, people who have read my blog posts from CXL in 2016, people who were at HubSpot but left to lead new companies…they’ve all helped us along the way.

I call it the “long tail of serendipity,” because there’s no single action or event or thing we did or can do to predict this stuff, and of course, there’s a lot of serendipity involved.

But the cumulative advantage to having done all these things made it way easier to start, build, and scale this agency. We have no intention to stop doing these things that helped bring about serendipitous opportunities.

7. Balancing long, short, and infinite games

The short game is to get to $250k/mo by the end of this year.

The long game is to build a stellar company where our employees can develop personally and professionally.

The infinite game is to continue building and treating work like play. Enjoying what we do and building the financial freedom and options to do that.

It’s important to keep all of these in mind as you go about your daily business. If you forget the short term games, you’ll never get to live out your infinite game. You’ll just be day dreaming.

But if you only focus on the short term stuff, you suffer a lot of stress and potentially burnout. You become what you swore you’d never become, and you lose yourself and the vision of your long term life.

We do biweekly founder calls to keep the short games aligned with the long games and the infinite games we all want to keep playing.

Conclusion

While I could have jumped sooner, I’m glad I started Omniscient while working full time.

It gave me the runway to try out interesting things, and it created forcing functions that ended up creating a healthier business from both a cultural and financial perspective.

Now it’s time to scale. I want to build a remarkable company. And I’ve never been so excited in my career to work on something.

The post 7 lessons learned building Omniscient to $1M+ “on the side” appeared first on Alex Birkett.

I look up to him when it comes to designing a fulfilling life, and also when it comes to acoustic Kanye West covers.

One of the coolest things he does is name his year in advance. It sets the intent for your actions and is a quick heuristic for decision making.

For example, your year’s theme could be “connect,” and that could mean striving to build your professional network or to deepen the existing relationships in your life.

Last year, my theme was “commit.” I’d always been somebody to straddle both sides, so I consciously chose to dive in and follow through on what I was doing and who I was with.

Consciously acting this way caused me both a lot of joy and a lot of pain, and I’m so glad I chose this theme for my 2021.

As I was thinking about this year’s word, I first though I should choose something else. I had considered “recover,” as in recover interests and passions I had enjoyed earlier in life. Another option was “surrender,” as I tend to try to control outcomes and surrendering to the present is something I’ve been trying to do.

However, I’m going to pick “commit” again. I’m going to double down on the double down.

Fear of loss had always spread me thin. Made me wear a mask with certain people. Kept me chasing optionality and some childish definition of “freedom.”

Last year made me realize there’s no true freedom without commitment. You end up a slave to your indecision and options. When everything is a choice, nothing is fully embraced.

I’ve learned a lot about commitment and am no longer afraid of it. Loss either.

In fact, I’ve learned that in many ways, I’ve cut myself short. On my goals, in my relationships, with my passions.

So this year, I’m committing again.

I’m committing to my business. It’s no longer a small side project. We’ve got teammates and clients to care for. I’m bringing it to the finish line.

I’m committing to my passions. I’ve flirted with hobbies I love but end up sporadically engaging in them. I’m diving deeply into music (guitar), fitness (CrossFit and BJJ), and my core hobbies (skiing, scuba diving).

I’m committing to my goals. I let excuses get in the way of my bucket list items. This year, I’m chasing them down early (a few for the year: meditation retreat, Spartan race, hunting trip, 4 scuba trips).

I’m committing to a sense of truth and integrity. Lying to myself and others is no longer an option.

I’m committing to writing. I know this makes me happy and brings success and serendipity.

I’m committing to my relationships and continuing to walk into relationships with an open heart and strong back. I’m building and investing in my tribe. Long term games with long term people.

Most of all, I’m committing to myself. Journaling and meditation for self-care, loving myself like my life depends on it, and never cutting myself short to maintain connection or please others.

It took me years and a ton of therapy and psychedelics to feel the psychological courage to go all in on something. Why stop now?

The post Name Your Year (2022): Commit appeared first on Alex Birkett.

2021 Was a Good Year (Recap)

2021 was shockingly adventurous. My word of the year was “commit,” and I dove deeply down the paths I wanted to (relationship, building my business, scuba diving and skiing, and health).

I got one good international trip to Costa Rica, and otherwise did a lot of travel within the US. Importantly, each trip had a purpose was also oriented around a group or people I wanted to spend it with. Less aimless, solo travel.

Agency growth exceeded our expectations.

I’m in a good place, though still quite busy. Growing the agency has been a masterclass in personal time management, delegation, and problem solving. This year, I hope to be similarly challenged, but on a new and evolving class of problems.

I’ll dive a bit deeper on each section below.

Career

I quit HubSpot, joined Workato to lead their experimentation team and program, and scaled the agency to 6 figures a month in revenue.

Busy, busy. I was bored before. Now I’m not.

I’m at the point in my career where I’m a bit abstracted from new technical challenges, and almost all of the problems I’m solving are leadership and team building. So both through Workato and the agency, I feel like I’m learning a lot and leveling up.

Omniscient Digital

This year at Omniscient was incredibly fun.

We’ve done almost 50 podcast episodes and have started to scale out decentralized content marketing. We increased our prices and optimized our sales process. We have two full time employees, one part time employee, several contractors. We’re hiring three new roles right now.

We wanted to get to $50k a month by the end of the year. Doubled that.

On a more anecdotal note, it’s simply fun to do. I get to flex creative muscles here and build relationships. I’m highly optimistic about our work in 2022.

Personal Brand & Professional Development

I spoke at one live conferences this year (CXL Live) and have focused on building my Twitter and LinkedIn followings. Also, I’ve done like 50 podcast episodes and built out my blog to like $750 a month in affiliate revenue. This was a pretty good seedling year for personal brand stuff.

I’m less focused on this outside of its facilitating function for growing my agency.

Next year, I’m hoping to do many more podcasts (of our own and to appear on others’) and continue to build out decentralized content marketing on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Health

Best year for health ever!

I finished my 18 month long “get jacked” project and ended up around 181 pounds and 8-9% body fat. Wrote a post about it here.

I did this through regular CrossFit, HiiT, and weight lifting, and also diet / nutrition coaching by my friend Garrett Conley.  I mainly wanted to see if I *could* get super fit, and I treated it like a long term challenge.

I like the lifestyle as well and find it quite easy to maintain. I also absolutely love doing CrossFit and weight lifting. More of a mental necessity at this point than a burden (and also a great way to meet cool people).

I also continued doing recovery work, including ice baths, sauna, etc.

Mental health was huge for me this year, too. I did a therapeutic MDMA session that was life changing, continuing having deep and challenging sessions with my therapist, did Wim Hof breathwork or meditation almost every morning, and kept a morning pages journaling habit.

Relationships

Relationships are good. I’m in a very good place here and this will be a huge focus into 2022.

Travel

This year I took several group trips and co-working adventures:

• Costa Rica
• Utah
• New Orleans
• Colorado
• Miami / South Florida (several times)
• Midwest for family

Also had a few group trips centered in Austin. Was lovely eliminating swim lanes in travel, bringing in both loved ones and adventure pursuits like skiing and scuba diving. Made travel feel more purposeful and less indulgent.

Hobbies

I went deep on music, writing about 7 songs and playing with a group of friends on the weekends.

Got super into scuba diving and did several dives in South Florida. Lots of ski trips this year as well, including to Utah (some of the best skiing I’ve experienced).

I’ve been trying to do fewer things and go deeper on them, and I think I’ve succeeded there.

I flirted with some random hobbies, like magic tricks and poker, but none of them stuck too hard.

Conclusion

Every year is better than the last.

2022 Will Be Even Better (Goals)

I’ve never felt more confident in my direction, both in terms of via positiva goals (things I want to add), and even more so, via negativa goals (things I want to subtract).

I always make a “scorecard” of sorts at the beginning of the year. I treat it like a big goal checklist, with big milestones like “achieve C1 fluency in French,” etc.

Here are some of my 2022 milestone goals:

• 1+ coastal sailing trip and coastal sailing certification
• 1200 club in lifting weights (almost there!)
• $250k MRR at Omniscient Digital
• $10k a month affiliate revenue
• Consistent (1-2) BJJ classes per week
• Buy 1+ property
• Middle East / South America travel
• 4+ dive trips
• Record an album
• Do a meditation or yoga retreat
• Deepen relationship
• Invest in love and stillness

Here are some things I’m removing:

• Coding classes and learning (I’ll still pick up the patchwork I need to do little stuff, but no ML courses or anything crazy)
• Social media (blocking in the morning, seeking <1 hr unproductive phone time)
• Most drinking (the goal, really, is to have fewer hangovers, not less fun)
• Long term nomadic/city hopping travel

Career

Very similar goals to last year, just scaled up. Again, heavy focus on building and scaling out the agency. I also want to build a top 1% experimentation program at Workato. I want to have a passive affiliate income stream from my blog approaching 10k a month by EOY.

Personal & Hobbies

Again, very similar with the addition of BJJ. Adventure related hobbies like skiing, diving, and sailing. Creative hobbies like playing and writing music, writing, and reading. Continuing my Spanish education and practice.

Health

Health will continue to be a huge focus for me, continuing CrossFit and other things I already do and adding in BJJ. I also want to do at least one Spartan Race (looking at Hawaii in August).

I also want to do another psychedelic therapy session and continue my therapy work. Setting a goal to do one meditation or yoga retreat as well.

Relationships

I’m basically just trying to deepen the relationships I have now, take them seriously, and be more vulnerable with those close to me.

Travel

Middle East and / or South America trip.

Conclusion

I’m excited for 2022. Every year has been better the last so far in life, and I expect as much moving forward.

The post 2021 Recap (2022 Goals) appeared first on Alex Birkett.

I’ve always wanted to get jacked.

Health and fitness have always been top priorities for me. But at a very basic level, I’ve always wanted to achieve the vanity goal of looking shredded.

Why? Mainly to see if I could do it. A personal challenge.

Plus, if we’re being honest, deep down I think every man wants to do this.

When the pandemic hit in March 2020, I figured it would be the perfect time. I could fully control my diet and exercise routine, and I didn’t have any external distractions or social temptations.

So I hired a diet and fitness coach and plugged in.

Here’s the before and after pics (Dec 2019 and June 2021)

I started the program around May 2020 and stopped in June 2021, so roughly a full year for the transformation.

I weighed ~200 lbs before and ~181lbs in the after picture. I didn’t take my body fat percentage before, but I was around 8-9% in the after picture according to InBody Scan.

I’ll break down how I did it and I’ll also cover some learnings (which apply beyond fitness, I think).

My Process for Getting Jacked

Before I started the program, I would have considered myself in the “optimizer” or “biohacker” category.

I read all of Tim Ferriss’s books and listened to the podcast.

I ate broccoli sprouts because Rhonda Patrick recommended it.

I drank bulletproof coffee in the morning and did keto because Dave Asprey recommended it.

I intermittent fasted because a bunch of gurus recommended it.

And I jumped on every trendy health topic you could imagine.

But I stayed around the same weight and fitness level. Healthy enough, but just a bit thiccc.

(By the way, it’s hard to filter out the hype in the diet and fitness space. Diet Wars, Legion Athletics, and Examine.com are three great places to get research backed info.)

When I started the program, I was almost appalled to learn that I would be:

• Eating 300g of carbs per day
• Eating breakfast
• Doing a fairly boring workout routine with periodization

All the stupid shit that nerdy biohackers talk about, it turns out, either a) doesn’t matter or b) doesn’t work.

When you do keto, you deplete your glycogen and energy levels for workouts (not to mention potentially increase SHBG and reduce your free testosterone). This is clearly not good if you want to build muscle. Both your brain and your muscles like good carbohydrates (I wasn’t eating plates of sweets and white bread, you know).

When you intermittent fast, you lose muscle at a faster rate than when you simply eat breakfast and otherwise restrict calories. The autophagy and longevity benefits of fasting also appear to be exaggerated when compared to simple calorie restriction.

You don’t need to wear a continuous glucose monitor (which may mislead you into thinking blueberries and HIIT workouts are bad for you). This nerd shit is overkill. Return to bro science: rice, veggies, salmon, and consistent resistance training with some cardio.

That’s it.

My workout schedule was the following:

• Monday: CrossFit
• Tuesday: Chest and arms
• Wednesday: CrossFit
• Thursday: Deadlifts and legs

Then I would do some yoga or whatever I felt like doing on other days. Didn’t matter too much.

My diet changed every two weeks (either progressively reducing calories during cutting or increasing during bulking), but looked like this:

• Breakfast: fruit and protein smooth / avocado toast and eggs
• Lunch: rice, salmon, veggies
• Dinner: rice, steak/chicken, veggies
• Snack: Halo Top, rice cakes, peanut butter

The lowest caloric intake during cutting was around 2000 calories. The highest during bulking was around 4500 calories.

During cutting, I tried to lose about 1 pound per week. This varied. Sometimes it was 2 pounds. Sometimes I didn’t lose anything during a week. We adjusted diet and cardio based on feedback.

During bulking, I tried to gain about 2 pounds per month (to minimize fat gain while putting on muscle). Bulking was much less strict, to be honest.

I did take supplements. I always do. I just took the same stuff during this time period that I did before. For what it’s worth, you probably don’t need most of these. But I like taking them.

I’ll list them here (with affiliate links)

For fitness:

• Whey protein
• Creatine
• Pre-workout

For nootropics:

• Legion Ascend

For general health / immunity / covid:

• Quercetin
• Legion multivitamin
• Vitamin D (5k IU a day)

For sleep:

• Chamomile
• L-Theanine
• Magnesium Taurate

I also did quite a bit of recovery work.

• Sauna, ice bath, hot tub combo: 3-4 days per week
• ART once every 3 months
• Yoga usually once per week

I wasn’t super strict on any of this. I had many more cheat meals than I was supposed to, and I even drank alcohol several times during the program, to my coach’s annoyance.

But it still worked over the long run.

What I learned from all of this

I won’t try to stretch the metaphor too much, but I did learn a lot from this process.

Namely, most of the shit thought leaders talk about is totally useless and/or wrong. I’ve basically entirely stopped following the constant noise flowing from influencers like Ben Greenfield and Dave Asprey, and now I just hit the fundamentals and then enjoy the rest of my life.

Sometimes, in fact, I think the advice from these thought leaders can backfire and create a sort of orthorexia. When you think all carbs or bread is evil and you’re counting down your fasting time on some app, it can be quite stress inducing. Not the way I want to live.

So I learned to stop listening to the noise and run my own race using science and experience backed protocols.

Next, I learned about the value of big goals over long time horizons.

During the pandemic, I felt my world get much smaller. I used to travel almost as a function of my personality. I was gone 6 months out of the year. I filled my life with noise, excitement, and social stuff. Then, silence.

This was great, as it forced me to look internally and start doing a lot of inner work and healing. But it also sucked. I didn’t feel the same motivation and many days I felt directionless.

Having these fitness goals were really a stable rock in the storm for me. Something to strive towards, chip away at day by day. Progress and goals are inherently important for me. Doing this during the pandemic taught me that.

Finally, I learned that while goals are great, which goal and at which time of life matters a lot more. This was fun and challenging to do during the pandemic, but I don’t want to keep up the same level of fanatical dieting and fitness. I don’t need to be 8% body fat. I want to be fit, but that comes at a sacrifice – socially, energetically, etc.

Health and wellness will always be huge priorities in my life, and it was fun hitting this vanity goal out of personal challenge, but in the future I’ll be setting different types of fitness goals (Spartan races, BJJ goals, etc.) and focusing less on pure bodybuilding stuff.

Best Resources to Look Into

• Legion (for content and supplements)
• Examine.com (for supplement meta analyses)
• My coach
• Onnit for kettlebell workouts
• Black Swan Yoga TV
• CrossFit
• Dr Andrew Huberman’s podcast
• MyFitnessPal for calorie tracking

The post Getting jacked during the pandemic (how and what I learned) appeared first on Alex Birkett.

29 was my favorite year. Really, I’ve enjoyed every year more than the last. But 29 was particularly unique and enlightening.

For one, it was spent entirely within the confines of a pandemic.

This led to a deepening of my closest relationships and commitments, an elimination of shallow relationships and obligations, exploration of deep questions and personal goals, and wading through the forest of therapy and trauma healing (including a profound MDMA-assisted psychotherapy experience).

Coming out the other end of the decade, I can say that my 20s were amazing, but I’m fully prepared for the symbolic start of something new.

My former boss Peep Laja used to write down his learnings on his birthday. It was inspired by others who have done the same. A lesson of belief for each year passed.

I typically do yearly reviews around the New Year, mostly reflecting on the past year and setting some broad goals for the following. This birthday I’ll try to outline 30 beliefs or lessons I’ve learned.

I’m writing this like a letter to my younger self, in a way. It’s clearly not supposed to be universal or representative of everyone’s experience. It’s a series of beliefs, pieces of advice, and lessons learned that I’m writing to me earlier in life.

1. Lay claim to your universe

A few months ago, I woke up and realized I actually hated a large part of what I was doing during the average day. I had too many meetings, no time to process my thoughts or emotions, and very little time to work on important projects or even spend time with close friends.

Then I realized: I can choose how I spend my time. The sentence “lay claim to your universe” flashed before my eyes.

I was a music major when I started college. My percussion instructor was strict, organized, insightful, and lively.

One day, when our percussion ensemble was standing around, disorganized and cluttered, she told us to “lay claim to your universe.” She said many wise things, but WOW, such a profound way to describe self-efficacy. Since then, whenever I feel like I’m being pulled by forces that I don’t agree with, I stand up and lay claim to the space that I’ve carved out for myself in this life.

2. Water polo, not swim lanes

I’ve written before about removing ‘swimlanes’ in areas of my life. Instead of looking at each segment of my life — friends, family, health, career, relationship, etc. — in different buckets, I see where I can combine them.

Morgan Brown told me on the podcast that, at Shopify, they don’t like swim lanes. Instead, they play water polo (or jazz).

“They’re playing the same game, playing the same song, but you have the autonomy and opportunity to be creative and apply that and to create something that’s new.”

3. Sacred Saturdays

Read this article by Ryan Holiday: You Could Have Today. Instead You Choose Tomorrow.

In it, he describes his perfect Saturday. Then he wonders, why not do this everyday?

It’s not always possible to perfectly architect your days, and maybe it wouldn’t even be desirable. The winds of obligation meet the storms of circumstance, and sometimes, you’ve got to do things you don’t want to do.

That’s the case for me. But now I have “Sacred Saturdays,” where I wake up and have zero plans, nothing on the calendar. I do whatever I feel like.

Somedays that is read for four hours. Somedays I go on a hike with friends and get tacos. Sometimes I go on a boat with friends and day drink. And once in a while, I get a ton of work done.

But it gives me breathing room and a mental model of what I’m working towards: the possibility of every day being spent with this kind of freedom, choice, and autonomy.

4. Know thyself

Here’s a pretentious one: the winding process of understanding myself has been one of the most fruitful journeys I’ve begun.

It never really ends. You keep peeling back layers of the onion, understanding your traumas and contextualizing them, understanding your behaviors and motivations, your faults and weaknesses. And this understanding can be painful, enlightening, your exciting.

And sometimes you get it wrong.

But the pursuit and gradual uncovering makes your relationships better, your business life smoother, and your goals more precise. Self awareness leads to less friction for those around you.

5. This should be fun

One of my agency’s principles is “this should be fun.”

Of course there are some things that aren’t naturally fun that you’ve just gotta do. Taxes, admin stuff, etc. I try to outsource or automate this stuff, but sometimes you have to roll up your sleeves.

But if I reflect on the past few weeks and realize that I’m forcing myself to go through the motions and I’m not having fun, something has to change. I have choices. This is a privilege, yes. But if I hate what I’m doing, I shouldn’t be doing it. People who are having fun will beat those who are doing it by obligation; their energy will outlast the latter.

Related (and possibly controversial): I think relationships should mostly feel easy, at least at the beginning. If it’s a huge struggle and not very fun in the beginning, it’s probably not going to get better, and it probably means you’re trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Better off closing that door to open up space for a better one.

I think this way about friendships, too, and that’s why I hate personal CRMs. If you have to be reminded to follow up with something, they clearly aren’t important to you.

6. Opportunities involve closing doors

Cliche advice but I find myself continually telling it to myself: every time you say yes to something you don’t really want, you’re saying no to something you do want.

To give space for a relationship to grow, you have to close the door on a million potential relationships. That’s commitment.

To exploit the business opportunity you’ve been given to the maximum potential, you have to close the door on potentially fun consulting gigs, conference talks, courses, and other distractions.

If you have an opportunity, something you’re chasing, the hard part (for me) is closing the other doors and paths. But I do realize now that I can usually reverse these decisions if I really want to, and life is long. Maybe you can do everything, just not all at once.

7. Dream bigger (there’s always room at the top)

Whether you’re Elon Musk or you own a corner convenience store, your work is going to take up a large amount of your time and energy. Why not aim at a huge goal that you really care about?

Also, big goals mean there’s less competition.

As Tim Ferriss said in Four Hour Workweek, “The fishing is best where the fewest go and the collective insecurity of the world makes it easy for people to hit home runs while everyone is aiming for base hits.”

8. Where you go determines who goes with you (but you need both)

Throughout my life, I’ve never had a problem standing up for my own goals. At times, that has led to sacrifices in relationships. Now, I just bring people with me.

But I’ve known many people who sacrifice themselves and their aims for people whose paths and values differ from their own. This isn’t good, and it eventually leads to fractures or despair.

When you and the people around you have your ‘vectors aligned,’ it’s like magic – very little friction.

I, for example, have some idiosyncratic ways of living my life. I’m essentially semi-nomadic (homebase is Austin, but travel *a lot*) and have a flexible and strange career, but I would try to date people who worked stable jobs and spent all their time in Austin. Didn’t work.

9. If I’m afraid of it, I’ve gotta do it

“What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.” – Tim Ferriss

Breaking up, making up, asking someone out. Taking an improv class. Calling to negotiate lower rates. Cliff Jumping.

There’s a rational limit here, so don’t nitpick this one. But usually if I feel a bit of fear and excitement, it means I’m headed in the right direction.

By the way, this means that I have to take a venomous snake handling course later this year. Oof.

10. Just do shit

“I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.” – Mark Twain

Most of my problems come from overthinking. Action, in most cases, tends to solve my problems.

Nuance here (I spend a lot of time in thinking and reflecting mode, and it’s valuable), but in building my own business, the co-founders and I make the most progress when we just jump in and figure it out later. Send the email. Take the sales call. Figure out the service as we build it. Try the minimum viable test before building a huge strategy presentation.

When I’m feeling stuck, I tell myself, “just do shit.” Just do something.

11. Hard exercise is necessary

I don’t feel like my full self unless I’m getting in regular strenuous exercise – CrossFit, lifting, long hikes, etc.

Hard challenges in general, really. Things like cold baths, saunas, meditation, and challenging intellectual work.

But when I go 2+ weeks without a heavy lift or CrossFit session, I notice I become more anxious and irritable, and I seem to lose some of my creative and intellectual edge, too.

Plus, hard exercise makes me look better and gives me more energy. And I feel great after doing it.

12. Take the swing

I worked with a colleague in the past who would probably sling about a dozen jokes a day and maybe 2-3 would land. Most were duds (though I’d give a courtesy laugh).

But I loved it. I loved the attempt. Better to swing and miss than watch a strike go by.

Like experimentation, you often don’t know what you don’t know. You get wins by tinkering and exploring. Feedback is the mechanism for growth, improvement, and sometimes mastery. The more feedback you get through repeated attempts, the faster you grow and the more fun you have.

But it takes guts and the willingness to look silly or fail sometimes. Oh well.

13. The art of asking good questions

The smartest people I’ve ever worked with tend to be the ones who naturally ask the best questions.

Helps in relationships, too.

Proof for me is since I’ve started doing my podcast, almost all areas of my life have improved – agency sales, work meetings, management, pretty much any conversation, and of course dating.

Also, the questions you ask yourself (even unconsciously) form the basis of your narrative and reality. Asking better questions is a form of therapy (see: CBT).

I’m obsessed with good questions and I even keep a Notion document of “Questions I Love.”

14. Dopamine fasting isn’t bullshit

When I first heard the term “dopamine fasting,” I thought it was another dumb Silicon Valley biohacking thing. Maybe not as dumb as butthole sunning, but I definitely thought it was some nerd echo chamber invention.

Since then, I’ve felt the dark tunnel of the pandemic and all of its digital milieu closing in on my creative brain. All day spent on the phone, laptop, and Zoom calls make Alex a dull boy.

I won’t pretend to know the actual factual neuroscience, but I’ve listened enough to the Huberman Lab podcast to realize that if you keep amping up the engagement loops, normal stuff doesn’t do the same thing for you.

And you become an incredibly boring person when you spend your free time scrolling Twitter and sitting in Clubhouse chats.

I’ll be honest: I struggle with this constantly. But I do try to check out a bit on the weekends and spend more time on my paddleboard. I also try (and sometimes fail) to set limits on my social app usage.

15. Time spent with smart people is nourishing

Before the pandemic, I used to do a lot of lunches, coffees, conferences, and other social meetups with acquaintances and business connections. Little did I realize how much it fed my intellectual spirit.

Reading is great, but doesn’t do the same thing. No amount of blog posts can replace one good conference happy hour conversation.

There’s some mixture of the value of live IRL interactions, the mental stimulation you get from debates, and sheer osmosis of novel ideas.

16. Make stuff

I like to make music. I didn’t do that for many years, but now I’m doing it again. I’m learning how to play songs on the piano, and I’m trying to write songs again. They suck, but it’s fun.

When I spend time building things, I’m happy. My company, songs, crappy paintings, new food dishes, etc.

The better your “create to consume ratio” is, the better.

17. Avoid Productivity Hoarding and Looking Busy

I recently re-read the 4 Hour Workweek. The last time I read it was when I was in college, and it really influenced a lot of my subsequent decisions. First, it introduced me to the world of startups and tech in many ways. Second, it made me want to design my career to fit my ideal lifestyle. I ended up working remotely while traveling to dozens of countries.

Somehow, in the last year or two, I began collecting productivity rituals and tasks. Things that made me feel important and busy. Things that clogged up my calendar and prevented me from doing actually important work as well as from actually experiencing my emotions in the moment.

Don’t do that. If you have browser tabs open with the hopes you’ll eventually read that article one day, just close it. To do list items that have been on your list for 30+ days? Remove them.

Take an inventory of things you do regularly that you don’t like doing and automate, outsource, or eliminate them.

This isn’t laziness, it’s making space for actually impactful work. Or maybe it is lazy, but it’s smart laziness. No one sitting in meetings and making slide decks all day can actually be fulfilled by this stuff.

18. Personal Optimization is a Laffer Curve

I’m speaking more about personal and life optimization than conversion optimization here. Your efforts and results with self optimization, biohacking, whatever, look like this:

Start off doing things that move the needle. You get an Oura ring and learn that phones before bed and alcohol aren’t good. Drop those. Take some magnesium and start meditating. Great.

But there comes a point where the pursuit of perfection is really just an excuse for avoiding real risks and feelings. Also, when you’ve got such a rigid diet, sleep routine, morning routine, whatever, that rigidity backfires. Your 2 hour sleep ritual gets in the way of actually relaxing to the point where you sleep well. Your morning 30 min meditation + journaling + whatever else prevents you from actually getting work done.

Self-improvement has certainly, um, improved myself. But I’ve also had the pendulum swing too far. Now I embrace, love, cherish inefficiency, redundancy, wasted time, and aberrations from my habits and rituals. We’re not robots.

19. Slack Notifications Are a Trojan Horse

Always on communication has built poor expectations for workplace communication. Slack, email, and other notifications have increased stress and prevented deep work.

The accessibility is a double edged sword. Personally, I’ve chosen to turn off all notifications on my phone, and I only check Slack a few times per day.

20. Arguing is Mostly Pointless Unless It’s Fun

You’ll rarely *actually* change someone’s opinion, so I just let go most of the time when someone says something I disagree with. Unless they’re a close friend and I want to spar with them for fun. But most of the time, arguments are wasted effort, especially political ones.

21. Politics as Moral Identity is Dangerous

Humans are tribal, and it also seems like we need to believe in something higher than ourselves that grants moral boundaries and intuition. Religion had its problem, but in its place, fractionated politics and tribal identities seem to be taking place.

When you can justify your moral superiority by the side you’re standing on, you’re in a dangerous place, personally and historically.

Your neighbors, even the ones with different political opinions, have more in common with you than you think (and certainly more in common with you than your favorite politician). Don’t let the team blood sport of politics ruin your family and relationships.

The worst atrocities in history were communities by people that vehemently believed they were morally superior (overactive superego also leads to atrocious crimes).

22. Writing is Thinking

When I write more, my ideas become crystalized. When I write and then publish more, my ideas become leveraged. And the feedback from those articles further crystalizes my ideas.

So: write more. Simple one (but not easy).

23. Substance > Style in Writing and Elsewhere

Style matters, but you can’t put the cart before the horse. In content marketing, there’s a lot of talk on how to create good outlines, style guides, personas, etc. Editors look to replace passive voice with active voice (the passive voice wasn’t removed from this sentence) and shorten sentences.

However, unless you’re writing about something that actually matters and helps people, this is the wrong order. I’d rather read a shoddy, typo filled landmine of an essay that was truly interesting and useful than a beautiful poetic bit of fluff.

24. Long Term Games with Long Term People

Naval:

“But essentially if you want to be successful, you have to work with other people. And you have to figure out who can you trust, and who can you trust over a long, long period of time, that you can just keep playing the game with them, so that compound interest, and high trust will make it easier to play the game, and will let you collect the major rewards, which are usually at the end of the cycle.”

The games I want to play are long/infinite games, so it’s incredibly important to pick the right people to play them with. This matters for my business partners and hires, but also for every contractor, assistant, outsourced agency, etc. I work with.

25. Having a Dog Improves Your Life

You’ve got some extra responsibilities, but that’s a small cost for every other part of your life being better by having a dog.

26. Don’t Fear Being “Squishy” From Time to Time

Friend of mine says more men should be “squishy” — aka show their emotions, be vulnerable.

Midwestern stiff upper lip guy here; totally agree. Through a few years of therapy and “plant medicine” work, plus really opening up to select long term people, I’ve realized this makes you feel closer to the people around you, enriches relationships, and just generally gives life more depth.

New thing I’m working on, but it’s going well so far.

27. Novelty Elongates Your Perception of Time

When you’re doing a lot of interesting stuff – travel is the easiest example – your days feel like they fly by, but your weeks feel like decades. You look back and think “wow, I can’t believe we’ve done X, Y, and Z all within the last few days.” And voila, you’ve actually increased your perceived quantity of time. This is a real magic trick.

The opposite is when you sit in the same cubicle and take the same commute every day and sit in the same meetings. Days feel excruciatingly long, but you look back at the past few months and can’t remember where the time went. The first few months of the pandemic were like this for me.

I learned this from Moonwalking with Einstein.

28. Mostly Ignore Fitness Advice From Nerds

I was super into the biohacking, the whole nine yards. Did keto, drank bulletproof coffee, did intermittent fasting, optimized my workouts according to Dave Fucking Asprey.

Then, during the pandemic, I hired a fitness consultant. I told him my goal was to get jacked (sounds arrogant, but deep down you know it’s an authentic goal).

We added back a big breakfast, tons of carbs (including white carbs like rice and bread), added in cardio (a no no for biohackers since it raises cortisol or something), and basically just walked back all the shitty internet advice. Results: I got jacked. I felt great. Bloodwork got better.

I saw a Tweet where a non-diabetic tech nerd was wearing one of those continuous glucose monitors and learned that HIIT workouts were bad because they spiked his glucose. IYI.

Now, I still try to keep an eye on emerging research, but I try to ignore advice from new health gurus with books and trademarked diets and supplements to sell. Turns out most good advice is: lift weights, eat clean. The margins are for the athletes, not those who sit at their computers for 12 hours a day.

29. Manifestation Kind of Works

My co-founder and I started joking that we were working on our goals by ‘manifesting’ them, like the secret. Oddly enough, we started attaining the things we were hoping to manifest.

My old manager Scott Tousley sent me an ‘idea job description’ I wrote to describe my dream role. This was written many years ago. Well, I have that job today. Didn’t even think about it.

Obviously, you’ve gotta work towards your goals and I’m not just creating vision boards all day. But there is something to articulating your goals, what you really want, and focusing on the details. You notice opportunities when they come up, you subtly position other areas of your life to get those things.

So yes, I keep a vision board.

30. Advice is Contextual

This is a letter to myself, and maybe it will help you, but maybe not. Really, I arbitrarily picked 30 things that came to my mind in the scope of writing this. I didn’t hear your backstory, I don’t know the context in which you’re reading this. In fact, I’m sure some of this advice wouldn’t make it to the list if I had written in next month. I’m also sure I’ll disagree with some of it in the future.

So always be careful with advice, on life, business, relationships, or otherwise.

Gathering copious advice is also akin to perfectionism, procrastination, and the fear of earnestly trying and failing. Just go out and do the thing.

Conclusion

Thirty feels great. I’m ready for the next decade of life, learning, and the pursuit of happiness.

The post this i believe (30 lessons for 30 years) appeared first on Alex Birkett.

I gave an answer off the top of my head, which I think was okay. But I’ve also got a little sister who just graduated, so after I did the podcast, I ended up thinking more about what my response would be.

This post is what I told her (and would tell others in the same position).

A career in digital marketing is exciting because of the endless possibilities and paths, but that same aspect of it makes it daunting, overwhelming, and often confusing.

Note that marketing advice should always come with a grain of salt: this is based on my experience, so it’s going to be biased by my perception. In the end, you’ve always got to forge your own path and make your own choices. But if I can be one data point that helps you map out those steps, then this article will have been useful.

The Three Digital Marketing Career Differentiators

There are so many different types of digital marketing jobs out there, and your path on each of these routes will differ. But these three pillars are important no matter which specialty you choose:

1. Deeply know something specific
2. Be able to communicate that knowledge to others
3. Connect and build a network

Or in other words: expertise, communication, and connection. These matter whether you’re entry-level or at the top of the online marketing field.

These are fairly obvious at the high level, but I don’t think most people understand the extent of the specifics and what it actually means to “network” or develop a speciality. So I’ll cover each of those pillars in detail.

The other piece is that you have to follow your own inclinations. For example, many posts will tell you to go into a specific area, like “data science” or “social media.”

The problem with this advice is twofold.

First, it’s impossible to predict which fields or specialties are going to be the most in-demand and opportune in the future (beyond the next few years).

Second, even if you could predict that a specialty was the most lucrative, if you hate doing it you’ll never be the best at it (and you’ll live a less rewarding, more stressful life).

Know thyself, right?

Deeply Know Something Specific

The world is filled with people who don’t know what they’re doing, especially at a deep and technical level.

At a certain level, we’re all making it up as we go. You will be too.

This is inevitable, even at the highest levels of a trade. There will never be full certainty or clarity as to what you’re doing or what decisions you make.

But you can pick a subject and get really fluent in it. You can be a beacon of light and stability for others looking to learn about a subject, and you can charge people a lot of money to do this thing or consult them on this thing.

The landscape of specialities to learn in digital marketing is, in some aspects, limitless and always changing. That’s because new platforms and technologies arise, new jobs are created, and old ones are deprecated. However, at this point in time, these are some of the top areas to dive deeply into:

• SEO (search engine optimization)
• Social media marketing / Social media strategy
• Content marketing / content management
• Inbound marketing
• PPC and SEM (digital advertising, search engine marketing, Google Ads, etc.)
• Affiliate marketing
• Mobile marketing and ASO (app store optimization, like SEO for app stores)
• Copywriting
• Email marketing
• Conversion rate optimization
• Referral marketing
• Design and web development (WordPress, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Figma, Sketch)
• Demand generation (broadly speaking)
• Brand marketing and brand awareness (a lot of “traditional marketing” falls into this, too)
• Interactive / field marketing
• Marketing automation
• Ecommerce marketing

At the end of the day, your job is to attract and convert more potential customers to your business. There are many ways to do that.

Again, depending on how you categorize the disciplines, there could be more specialties there, but those are the big ones. As you can see, there are many marketing roles you can inhabit, and they span an array of disciplines and skills.

I also think there are core disciplines that you should have some understanding of no matter what specialty you pick (but you can also go deep on these):

• Strategy (knowing the different marketing strategies you can employ)
• Analytics (knowing how to understand data and use tools like Google Analytics)
• MarTech (knowing which marketing tools are useful for which purposes)

On Digital Marketing Career Titles

You may end up with a fairly broad title like “digital marketer,” “digital marketing manager,” “marketing specialist,” or “digital marketing specialist,” but it’s still a good idea to become deeply specialized in a given discipline. This helps you reach new heights as your career path and digital marketing skills progress.

You may also start out in a more specific role with a specific title like “SEO specialist,” “social media manager,” or “content writer.” This doesn’t preclude you from moving to other specialties, but it does give you a head start to deeply learn that which you’ve been hired to do.

For the record, I picked conversion rate optimization and experimentation as my deep expertise. But it didn’t start that clear. I started as more of a generalist digital marketer.

When I graduated college, I knew I eventually wanted to build my own companies, so I knew I wanted to join an early stage tech startup. I did this (joining a pre-seed stage startup in Austin), and I learned about pretty much every aspect of launching a business, from sales to customer success to product to marketing.

But then I found myself getting more and more interested in this emerging field of “growth hacking,” or simply “growth” as it’s known now. I particularly liked articles on A/B testing that I read on Andrew Chen’s blog and Sean Ellis’s content.

When I had the chance to join CXL as a growth and content marketer, I jumped into it. The founder, Peep Laja, was the biggest name in the space, and I knew I could learn a ton from the experience.

On Digital Marketing Career Mentors

Side note: having a mentor will speed you up. But the idea of “getting a mentor” is nebulous and stressful. You’ll almost always be able to get a mentor simply by being curious, ambitious, and proactive, not by emailing random influencers asking them to be a mentor. So don’t worry as much about finding a mentor, but rather worry about becoming someone people want to mentor.

I did learn a ton from the experience. I got direct mentorship from Peep and the team, but I also got to work with clients and learn CRO hands-on.

Moreover, I got to network with the best in the business through the conferences we hosted and the blog I wrote on. I pretty much got paid to learn about CRO and to write about it (thus building my personal brand, which I’ll cover in the next two sections).

After this experience, I was highly recruitable because I had a specific depth of knowledge about a specific subject people cared about. No longer was I subject to convincing others of my abilities in one of many areas. I knew I didn’t want to work on social media or brand; I wanted to work on growth and CRO, and the companies who wanted a specialist in that area knew to reach out to me because of the small reputation I had built there.

That reputation (built through experience and blog posts I wrote) landed me at HubSpot where I worked for 4 years on freemium growth.

Explore First: Why Startups Are a Great Option

You don’t have to know exactly what you want to do right away. In fact, I think joining a startup can be helpful for two reasons:

• You’ll do more than one job
• You’ll learn how to be proactive and work hard and smart

There’s a concept in machine learning / artificial intelligence known as the explore / exploit problem or the multi-armed bandit problem.

Imagine a hundred slot machines with varying expected values (i.e. each one pays out better or worse), but you don’t know which one has the highest expected value. Your strategy, then, is to first explore the selection by pulling each arm. As you start to pull the arm of each slot machine, you’ll notice some give more rewards than others. So you start to pull on those more often, and you pull on the less lucrative ones less often.

This process of refinement is called “exploitation” because you’re using knowledge you gained during “exploration” to earn more rewards in future iterations.

So you want to first explore to see which career options there are and where your inclinations lie, and when you get an inkling, start exploiting that option more and more.

And startups, like I said, make you a more proactive and better worker.

There’s no safety net, and if you don’t do something, it might not get done. And there’s an unlimited array of options when it comes to what to work on, so you get good and judicious at prioritizing based on business value. There’s no time to sit around building slide decks and hosting meetings.

This attitude, when brought anywhere, will make you stand out.

There are Tons of Great Online Courses for Specific Knowledge

Unlike many other ingrates in this industry, I liked college and thought it did well to prepare me in many ways for an unclear but highly opportune career.

However, when it comes to specific knowledge, you’re not going to be able to rely on your marketing 101 classes in university.

Luckily, there are just a massive amount of courses out there for people in this industry.

I built a digital marketing course specifically for content marketers.

There’s also CXL Institute, which is world class education taught by actual practitioners. Cool thing here is they have mini degrees in broader specialties like growth, CRO, or digital analytics to build you into a T-Shaped Marketer (aka one with a broad skill set but one or two deep specialties).

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As a rule of thumb, there’s probably a good digital marketing course out there for what you want to learn and which career choice you pick. You can find them all over the place, but here are some of my favorites:

• CXL Institute
• Reforge
• Omniscient’s Content Strategy Course
• Brian Dean’s SEO That Works
• Joanna Wiebe’s Copywriting Courses

Just try to pick one taught by actual full-time digital marketing professionals, not by theorists or teachers.

Be Able to Communicate That Knowledge To Others

There’s a certain class of online influencer tha is great at communicating with people and building an audience, but they don’t actually know much about the subject they’re talking about.

You shouldn’t be this person, at least morally speaking. But you should learn as much as possible about *how* they’re able to reach as many people and resonate as they do.

You see, communication is leverage. If you run a great A/B test or email marketing campaign, but no one knows about it, did it really happen? In one sense, yes, because you’ve got the results to speak for. But the world is noisy, so unless you’re good at showcasing what you’ve done, you’ll almost certainly be overlooked for those more boisterous personas.

Communication doesn’t have to be via a given channel, but channel does matter when it comes to who you reach and how influential you are. You want to pick the channel best suited for your communication abilities as well as the place where your audience is most likely to respond.

I like writing and think I’m pretty good at it. So I started a blog in college to write about the things I was learning about marketing and advertising. I still blog, and it has brought me career opportunities, consulting opportunities, affiliate revenue, and now agency clients. Like I said, huge leverage.

You can also get great at public speaking, which also helps you connect with people and build a network (which I’ll talk about in the next section).

I know people who have picked writing on a specific network or channel – Twitter, Quora, LinkedIn, etc. – and have built huge audiences there, just speaking out their subject expertise.

I also know people who are more private that don’t want to build a “personal brand” (which is totally okay, too). But they’re still great at communicating their ideas internally via memos or slide decks (internal communications need to reflect how people in the company already communicate, lest you go unnoticed).

Communication also helps you work together with your marketing team and the broader organization. You can have all the skills and ideas in the world, but if you can’t work with others, it’s not going to work well.

This is the soft side of the equation. But if you already have a hard skill and you can learn skills like persuasion, storytelling, writing/speaking, and visualization, you’ll surpass those who are solely experts in their field but can’t communicate about it.

Connect and Build a Network

There’s the old trope: it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

This isn’t totally true, because you don’t want to be a charlatan who knows nothing. But it is true that if you just know a lot of people, you’ll have more opportunities than other people will.

I read “Never Eat Alone” on my drive down to Austin after college and it really changed how I thought about my career. I began to look at “networking” as something not only critical to my career success, but something fun I could incorporate into all aspects of my life. I wanted to connect with smart and interesting people; if they could help in my career, that’s great, but I began doing it for its own sake.

I’d now say that’s one of my biggest superpowers, both in career growth as well as when it comes to growing my agency (our first several clients came directly from my network).

Also, now that you can’t really plan on working at the same place your whole career, you need to look at your network as your safety net. If you lost your job today, do you have people you can reach out to? How many connections would help you get back on your feet?

Your network is wildly powerful, and it’s almost just more fun to engage with the tribe and broader community. Digital marketing can get “lonely” in a way that other fields don’t. It’s less structured, and our work is virtual, so we have less tangible ties to the outputs of our efforts. Having people – an in-crowd – to share this with is critical to your professional growth, but also to your personal satisfaction in what you do.

If you can get great at meeting people, building relationships, connecting those people, and ultimately building a tribe, you’ll do well.

Where to Work

Like I mentioned before, I think startups are a great place to start your career. But the average salary at a startup isn’t incredibly high. I wouldn’t worry about that as much as learning early in your career, but you still want to make money and judiciously pick where you work.

Glassdoor reviews are worthless. You ideally want to work somewhere that is growing quickly where you can get hands-on experience and mentorship from a more experienced marketer (one with high quality standards). Even better if you can pick a pretty visible company, because that will increase your value as you think about moving to other companies.

I think later in your career, it also helps to work for a household brand name (Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc.). People put a “halo effect” on you because of the reputation of that company.

Conclusion

A digital marketing career gives you insane optionality, but that can also breed stress and discomfort. You can add some clarity and stability by picking an area of expertise to go deep on, getting good at communicating that expertise, and building a network of like minded people.

The post No-BS Advice for Starting Your Digital Marketing Career appeared first on Alex Birkett.

I like to do a post-hoc write-up on lessons I’ve learned (like this one from my time at CXL).

First, why leave?

My former boss, Peep Laja, told me in a podcast interview that if he’s not having fun and if he’s not learning, it’s time for him to do something new. I learned a lot at HubSpot and had a ton of fun. I would have kept learning and having fun if I stayed. But I felt the call to return to experimentation, data, and startups. And I really wanted to get a feel for running a team and a program, which would have been difficult or a long way off at HubSpot. So I took the jump.

Anyway, here are some lessons I learned at HubSpot that I’ll take with me:

• A Little Technical Knowledge + Perseverance Goes a Long Way
• Influence & Communication Supercedes Technical Know-How at a Certain Stage
• Territorialism is for Losers; Instead, Help People
• Do the Work, Show the Work, Scale the Work
• Go Where the Fish Are
• Remote rocks, but in person is irreplaceable
• If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together
• Maybe The Real Treasure Was the Friends We Made Along the Way

A Little Technical Knowledge + Perseverance Goes a Long Way

One of my favorite articles of all time is by Simo Ahava. It’s titled “The Myth of the Non-Technical Marketer.”

In it, he rants:

“The whole polarization of non-technical vs. technical is silly and artificial, and nothing irks me as much as this constant undervaluing of the human capacity to learn new things. Code allergy should be a thing of the past by now. Why not instead embrace the fact that our industry is rife with opportunities to not only understand more about the technology stack we work with, but also to combine this technical know-how with our marketing skills for some true hybrid insight?”

I’ve always prided myself on being willing to get my hands dirty and learn new things, from Spanish to R to BJJ (just learning the shrimp was hard enough). At HubSpot, I learned how valuable this is, especially if you’re in a “non-technical” role like a marketer or a PM.

(Note: read the Simo article. There’s no such thing as a non-technical marketer nor for that matter a non-technical PM if you’re working in tech/digital).

Here’s the truth: most people don’t want to wade too far outside their domain of expertise. But as Tim Kennedy said, “everything you want is on the far side of hard work.”

If there’s an A/B test you want to run, but you’re waiting on your development resources, could you simply learn a little CSS? Probably. If there’s a bit of user research you need to make a business decision, could you simply learn a given methodology and give it a spin? Probably.

I knew, for instance, that we needed additional tooling to scale the surround sound strategy at HubSpot. At first, I tried to garner resources and hire a freelancer to build them. When that was taking too long, I just started coding. And Googling. And coding more. It took me several weeks of doing this mostly in my spare time, and then, eventually, I had a functional script that did the bare minimum of what I needed.

Then I built more and refined the code. Then I worked with a code mentor to help me host it on Shiny and give it an interface. And eventually, I had built a custom tool with R and Shiny.

Most of the process sucked, but like a hard math problem, it felt great to persevere and eventually crack the code. Genuinely, it felt so fucking cool to have built my own internal data product. It’s something I’m still super proud of.

Then, I got to help build other mini tools. This was some of the most fun work I’ve had in my career.

There were many people at HubSpot that took control of their destiny, despite technical challenges. One of the things I’ll miss most about working there is working with Braden Becker on custom tools, optimizations, and automations like this.

But the learning remains: in a non-technical field, the slightly technical person is incredibly valuable.

Influence & Communication Supercedes Technical Know-How at a Certain Stage

Despite all that, the best analyst is going to have a lot of trouble if they can’t communicate, manage stakeholder expectations, influence without authority, and get buy-in for projects.

Before HubSpot, I had worked at startups. Super early stage. You didn’t “get buy-in.” You just did shit.

At a big company, even if they try to keep a sense of autonomy and speed, it’s just not the same.

You need to work with other teams, who have their own goals and may see your project as either a) not contributing to their goal or b) in direct conflict with it. In these situations, you need to lead with people skills, not technical skills.

To my chagrin, this means skills like writing memos (my favorite), building slide decks (my least favorite), and running meetings become super important.

If you’re interested in learning more of my specific lessons on influence and communications, I did a presentation on this for Forget the Funnel:

I couldn’t be more grateful to have worked with and learned directly from leaders who I think are *really* good at this, like Scott Tousley and Matt Barby.

Territorialism is for Losers; Instead, Help People & Solve for the Business

All those political lessons aside, my guiding heuristic is to choose the projects that are most impactful for the business. I make sure my goals are hit, but if my skills can help another person hit theirs, I’ll try to do it.

Obviously as a company scales, you need to draw lines in the sand for ownership, accountability, and clarity. In the beginning of a startup, you have a lot of generalists doing a lot of things. Later, you need specialists with specific domains.

However, if something impinges on my goals while simultaneously providing a net positive impact for the business, I’m going to take the hit on my goals. This is where experimentation and a true data-driven culture can help. Where arguments and territorialism traditionally reign, data can help you make these decisions (and despite your best hopes, sometimes the pie *is* finite and goals are in conflict).

Additionally, I loved helping out where I could even if it was on a team that was unrelated to my function (granted, my function was quite open-ended so it gave me a lot of room to choose what to work on). I got my stuff done, of course, but then had a lot of fun helping others out. This led to more and better relationships and a broader understanding of the scope of the business.

I talked to Tim Soulo during an Omniscient Office hours this month, and it seems that this attitude of entrepreneurialism, bias to action, and sense of ownership/responsibility in maximizing business value is the secret to the small but powerful Ahrefs’ marketing team.

Territorialism is boring.

Do the Work, Show the Work, Scale the Work

I had multiple roles while at HubSpot, one of which was working on freemium acquisition.

My job on the freemium user acquisition team was to find net new acquisition opportunities, validate them, and scale them through process documentation, education, evangelisation, and general support.

As such, here was my process:

• Tinker
• Hit on something promising
• Scrappily do the work myself to prove the value
• Share the initial promising results to get more buy-in
• Repeat with greater scale
• Share and evangelize your work. Recruit others.
• Pass the baton and move onto the next project.

That’s how it went with the surround sound strategy, which is essentially a strategy designed to “monopolize” search results pages for high intent product terms by appearing on all product lists.

We saw that listicles (e.g. “best live chat software”) convert well. We didn’t have buy-in to write more of them because it didn’t fit with the existing content strategy. It would have been en uphill battle to simply persuade through storytelling at that point.

So we put pen to paper and just wrote a few of them, both on HubSpot’s blog and for content partners. We measured conversions, and sure enough, the results were replicated. Product listicles worked.

We shared these promising results and got additional leverage through a) permission to write a certain amount of these each month and b) budget to hire freelancers.

We scaled it to great results, resulting in thousands of portals a month. Then we shared this in a Wiki post internally to cement the strategy in the lexicon of HubSpot’s content plays.

The reins were then passed to Irina Nica, who scaled this strategy beyond HubSpot’s blog and onto partner and affiliate websites as well as to international properties. Meanwhile, I worked to enable the strategy through infrastructure and tooling (hence all the coding I mentioned above).

Do the work, show the work, scale the work, and then move on once you’ve provided the support and infrastructure to pass the baton.

Go Where the Fish Are

I learned a ton from Scott Tousley, but one of the most replicable lessons I’ve learned is the “Go Where the Fish Are” framework. I guess he took it from Ramit Sethi, but either way, we applied it to all of our acquisition efforts at HubSpot.

The premise is simple: if you want to catch a lot of fish, find a pond with a lot of fish. Fishing in an empty pond isn’t going to work, and fishing in a pond with many other fisherman isn’t great either. You want to find ponds with lots of fish and less competition.

The cool thing about this framework is that it puts the customer first. Doesn’t matter if your expertise is in content marketing, if content marketing isn’t going to be a good pond to fish in, it’s not good marketing.

Many marketers are holding on to old Maslow’s hammer (when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail). A better bet is to build structural skills in customer research, data analysis, and the meta-skill of validating and scaling channels. Then, you can pick and choose which channel or tactic to invest in based on what is actually the most impactful, not just the one you’re already good at or used to.

By the way, do you know how rare it is for marketers to actually talk to customers? PMs do it. Marketers should do it, too. Bucket this in the same category as technical skills (i.e. many people are unwilling to do it, so if you do it, you’ll be extremely valuable).

Remote rocks, but in-person is irreplaceable

Pandemic remote is different than normal remote. In normal times, I worked from coffee shops and coworking spaces and traveled to Boston or Dublin once every quarter to get face time with my HubSpot colleagues.

In absence of that, remote sucked. It was incredibly lonely and isolating to spend all day in front of a Zoom call.

Before this, I would have said I’d never work in an office again. Now, I’m craving it.

I think in the future, I’m going to strike a balance: spend 60% of my time working in isolation, 30% of my time working with others in Austin, and 10% of my time working with colleagues (either at my day job or at Omniscient) in person.

Those in person trips I took at HubSpot were awesome, not only from a personal enjoyment standpoint but from an effectiveness standpoint. Many times I would struggle to get collaborate work done *until* I had met someone in person for coffee. After we got to know each other, working together was seamless.

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together

I tend to be scrappy and fast. I like it that way. I think most organizations move far too slowly. One of my favorite essays I’ve read in recent years was Frank Slootman’s “Amp It Up!” One of the pillars in it was advice to “increase velocity.” More:

“The pace has to be profound, palatable, breathtaking, order-of-magnitude type change. You want to go 20% faster? It’s barely discernible, and you will be back in your old mode before long.”

I still think this and I’m deliberately and consciously making this a part of Omniscient’s culture. Make decisions quickly, feel free to act autonomously, we trust you, etc.

However, in a large company, you need to get a coalition. You need leverage, and that comes in the form of a team, and sometimes cross-team work.

Sometimes, that requires slowing down to make sure everyone’s on the same page. This could be through increased documentation, process optimization, or even just more emphasis on persuasion and buy-in (yes, maybe an extra memo or slide deck).

It’s context dependent. When it comes to big initiatives that require many people working together, it helps to slow down to get everyone to come together.

Maybe The Real Treasure Was the Friends We Made Along the Way

I met my co-founders at HubSpot. I take trips at least once a quarter with current or former HubSpot employees. Working together was awesome, but I’m even more fond of the relationships built through the years.

I hope to make many more friends at Workato and through the rest of my working years. Otherwise, I’m just running A/B tests and looking at Google Analytics, and that alone is kind of boring.

Conclusion

I learned a ton at HubSpot. I’m going to keep optimizing for learning and fun and challenges.

The post 8 Things I Learned at HubSpot appeared first on Alex Birkett.