Hope you had a good New Year’s Eve last night. Slightly different newsletter this week – perhaps the end of an era?
Update to the newsletter
Over the holidays I’ve been thinking about what to do regarding the writing I do, which right now is mostly via this newsletter.
My current “output” is a combination of thoughts and podcast etc recommendations that I (hastily) put together the Friday before the first Saturday of the month. The email gets read by roughly 100 people who signed up any time from 2016 (when I first decided to move to East Africa and started the newsletter) through to more recent times being in Denmark.
Writing the newsletter can be rewarding at times, though recently it’s felt like the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
Getting the most from social media
Despite its flaws, I have found that there are positives to being active on social media.
A couple of years ago I arranged a short bike tour in Scotland which wouldn’t have been possible without connections made out of the blue online. Whilst privacy is important, I’ve found there are also benefits to demonstrating your personality through an online profile rather than being an unknown (less trustworthy) entity. Side note: it turns out I wrote about this back in 2017.
As I think about what will help Cofruition grow in the coming years (more good quality customers + employees), both would benefit from strangers (online) getting a sense of who I am.
As such, I plan to try out engaging more online (most likely Twitter).
Minimising the downsides
In order for this to work, I’ve realised there are certain conditions I’d like to keep to. I really dislike feeling “glued to my phone” and have, to date, found that social media distracts me from other more important things.
Now that there is more of goal in mind (more value than being a sometimes-mildly-interesting way to pass the time) I want to make sure that this doesn’t come “at any cost”, especially as I don’t find that it comes naturally to me.
My initial sense is that I’ll stop if:
- I find myself being distracted from important work stuff
- I find that, in non-work mode, I am more interested in my phone than what’s happening right in front of me
- I have to expend a lot of mental energy to write things
- I feel like I’m getting nothing in return after ~3 months
In practice, this means I will likely:
- Share short “rough” thoughts: demonstration of what I find interesting/ how I think without the effort to polish them
- Ask questions of people: an easy way to interact with interesting people who aren’t physically proximate
- ink to longer form blog posts: I may still want to write about certain topics once in a while that I can use samfloy.com for (e.g. contracts from last month)
As a Twitter voyeur for the past few years, there’s plenty of behaviour I’ve observed that I don’t wish to emulate and so I’ll try to stay true to myself, even if I could boost my followers by writing humble brags/ posting photos of myself.
What next for these emails?
I’m not sure really.
It could be that I hate this foray of “putting myself out there” and so retreat to sharing thoughts/ writing via a newsletter format again (or indeed, never again).
Either way, there may be moments in the future where it feels appropriate to update, via email, on things that you might find interesting. Now that these newsletters will stop in their current format, if there is anything you’d be interested in hearing from me about, then do let me know (so I don’t end up barking up the wrong tree).
You can also have a read through several years of past newsletters/ blog posts here: https://samfloy.com/blog/
Thanks for the ride
I guess all that’s left to say now is a big thank you for taking the time to read this, and previous emails.
If you’re interested, I intend to tweet from @Sam_Floy
And if you ever want to chat, then feel free to send me an email! I do really enjoy the interesting conversations that come from them.