gm frens!

Welcome to Ally’s Newsletter, a weekly publication where I curate the top ideas and experiments to design a creative, focused life.

This weekend I made space for about 10 hours of reflection (not totally planned in advance). There was a lot of blank space and minimal distraction. It was slightly uncomfortable and very valuable.

Building with the garage open

Many of you are writers and creators.

In case you like getting a sneak peek into how things are made, these are my 1% improvements this week:

1. Shorter articles.

2. Clearer “why is this useful” heading.

3. Finding the nuance between hustle/productivity culture and intentional improvement of one’s life.

4. Being clear about the value of my writing without sounding sales-y.

How can we choose careers that are both intellectually stimulating and enable us to live full lives?

Life has more to offer than a fulfilling career.

At the same time supporting yourself and figuring out how to contribute your unique skills to the world is upstream of you having the freedom to choose how to spend the rest of your life.

These are 5 trends I’m noticing for those who are able to find fulfilling and balanced careers.

1. Non-standard work requires non-standard approaches.

If you’re looking for a job that’s balanced, challenging, and fun, it’s a non-standard job.

So how and where you look and how you define what it is that you’re looking for should also be non-standard. I found my current role (that I love) on Twitter. LinkedIn is saturated for finding jobs, so you need to look for uncrowded approaches to take (e.g. going to conferences and networking in person).

If you’re an entrepreneur, how you craft and market your offering is upstream of being able to do unconventionally cool work. You must offer something uniquely cool to work with uniquely cool people.

2. Who we work with is almost more important than what we do. 

We know this, yet we still make mistakes when we choose who to work with. Do an audit of all the times you chose to work with the wrong person or took the wrong opportunity - do you have any repeating mistakes that you can look out for going forward?

3. Look at the incentive structures to predict the working dynamics 3 months from now.

My startup is completely funded by our founder, who has founded multiple successful companies. This incentive structure means that we don’t need to waste time gathering vanity metrics or rushing towards a Series A evaluation.

But it also means he 1) has a high bar and 2) wants to see value for his investment. Going back to point #2 about choosing who we work with, he’s also a smart, emotionally intelligent person who’s great to work with.

4. The quality of our work attracts people of the same caliber.

To attract nuance, be nuanced. The only way to get here is to do the work, and then reflect on it.

When I look back at my earlier writing, I see why people weren’t knocking down doors to read it, and I just try to improve it a little more each time.

5. We must enjoy and be good at the core of what we do.

Simple, but it can be hard to be honest with ourselves. What is the core of what you do in one sentence?

1. Are you good at it?
2. Do you like it?

If not, how can you tweak what you’re already doing to use your strengths? It can be terrifying to do something different, but what if it was just a slight variation of what you’re already doing? What are some mini-experiments you could test out in a low-risk way?

15 new people joined this crew in the past couple weeks - welcome, we’re so happy to have you here!

Thank you to everyone who’s been sharing and referring this newsletter. It’s so crazy to see this little newsletter begin to bloom.

If you know someone who would enjoy these types of ideas, consider sharing it with them. Over 70% of my subscribers are from word-of-mouth referrals, and that’s the best way you can support this lil’ newsletter.

Until next time,

Ally