Permission to slack off

👉 and lighten up

I haven’t figured out how to switch off the “Discover” feature on Chrome on my phone yet, so today an article about Alfred Hitchcock’s “Suspicion” popped up on my screen.

Cue 30 minutes of rabbit-holing into studio-enforced script changes and rivalries between Oscar-winning leading ladies and their sisters.

30 minutes wasted?

I don’t believe so.

1. I enjoyed it.

2. It will help me retain my title as the king of obscure trivia when a related question appears on the Brodie Family Zoom Quiz.

3. I genuinely think it’s stuff like this that makes you a more interesting person and makes your emails more fun to read. Somehow, some way, a Joan Fontaine-Olivia de Havilland reference will find its way into a future email in a vaguely relevant way.

Of course, the ideas and tips you share are the mainstay of your emails and newsletters.

But there are a lot of great ideas and tips being shared in newsletters.

A brand new idea or a unique point of view will make you stand out. But not everything we write about is going to be unique. Far from it.

But we can illustrate our ideas in unique and interesting ways every time. It makes them a better read, it makes them more memorable, and it often helps readers to understand them better.

And it’s the stuff we do when we “slack off” that can give us the raw material to make our emails interesting.

For me it’s me deep-dives into weird trivia. For you it might be your obsession with hiking. your interest in the inventors behind the industrial revolution or your love of 90s dance music.

You don’t need to shoehorn your hobbies and interests into your emails. If you’re interested enough in them and you think about them regularly then the links and useful examples will spring to mind when you need them.

What you do need to do is give yourself permission to slack off enough to follow those hobbies ← and this is hard when you run your own business as there’s always more you could be doing and you always feel like you should be spending 24 hours working on “important stuff”.

And perhaps the biggest barrier: you need to give yourself permission to “lighten up” and include some of these stories and examples in your emails. To overcome the fear that somehow your readers will think you’re “not serious”.

After all, isn’t it better that you grow an audience of people who like who you really are - weird hobbies and all - than ones who just want the serious stuff?

- Ian