๐น May the Odds Be Ever in Your Favor
Hey Reader,
About three or four months ago, a question came up in one of my private communities and the answer changed how I run my entire week.
The community is a private group of high level entrepreneurs who also happen to write romance novels. Yes, really. ๐ค I am developing my rom com podcast in there and it has been a great space for that particular piece of IP. One of the members, productivity expert Megan Flatt who writes fiction under the pen name AJ Claremont, suggested something that sounded almost insultingly simple: A/B weeks. Your A week has meetings. Your B week has none.
I heard it. I filed it. I did not implement it immediately because I was in the middle of a travel stretch that did not end until BookCon in April. Then it took me the entire month of May to reorganize my calendar and systems so that in June I could fully put it into practice.
I want you to sit with that timeline for a second.
Four months from hearing a good idea to implementing it. In a fully functioning business that is not a hobby. And honestly, in my world, that was fast. I have worked with clients on calendar and systems restructuring that took the better part of a year to actually stick. This is not a failure of discipline or motivation. This is what it looks like to change the operating system of a real business while the business is still running.
We want instant things, but they are not instant. Nothing that looks like an overnight success ever was.
So why did I need A/B weeks badly enough to spend five months making space for them? Because I need DEEP ASS FUCKING THINKING time and I cannot get it in fifteen minute increments between Zoom calls.
I had already tried blocking specific days of the week. Didn't work. The meetings crept in, the interruptions stacked up, and by the time I got to my "thinking day" I was already too depleted to think. What I needed was multiple consecutive days without a single meeting. Days where my brain could go somewhere and stay there long enough to build something real.
Hello B weeks. ๐ I love you forever. ๐
The part that genuinely surprised me when I started researching why this was working so much better than expected was that it is not just about having fewer meetings. It is genuine neuroscience.
Vox recently published a piece about what podcasts do to our brains, following a journalist who quit all audio content for a month. What he found afterward was not what most people would expect. His thoughts felt more orderly, his attention span improved, he finished books, and he experienced what he described as mental spaciousness he had not felt in years.
The neuroscientists interviewed explained why. Our brains do not actually multitask. We task-switch. Language heavy audio like podcasts requires active cognitive work, which means every minute you spend listening to someone else's voice is a minute your brain is not consolidating memories, making unexpected connections, generating original ideas, or processing what already happened today.
There is a brain network called the default mode network that activates specifically when you are not consuming input. When you are daydreaming, staring out the window, folding laundry in silence, or walking without earbuds, that network is not idle. It is doing some of the most important cognitive work you are capable of: insight, self-reflection, and the associative thinking that produces ideas nobody else had.
Most creators are running that network at about zero percent capacity because every gap in the day is filled with someone else's voice. I include myself in that. The B weeks are, in part, my structural solution to a problem I did not have language for until I read this research.
You cannot hear your own ideas if every available space is occupied by someone else's input.
Information is the inhale. Silence is the exhale. Most of us are chronically hyperventilating on information and wondering why we feel stuck.
This connects to something I have been saying for years across both Sensible Woo and Sasquatch Media Grounds and I am going to keep saying it beyond the point of being annoying:
You cannot build what you are building in fifteen minute increments.
The grifting cultures of girl boss moms and dude bros with mics have spent years selling you the idea that you can. That the right system or tool or morning routine will unlock endless productivity in whatever scraps of time you have left over. That is a lie dressed up as empowerment and it has cost a lot of people a lot of years.
I came across a reel this week from a creator who said something I want to put on a billboard:
"Business is hard work. Hard work and hustle culture do not mean the same thing. The second it gets sticky, the second it gets uncomfortable, the second it takes more time than you thought, people say 'oh it's not aligned.' No. Business is hard work. But we do it because it fuels our soul."
Yes. ๐ฅ That. ๐ฅ
Because we are watching the hustle culture era collide head on with a reality check coming from multiple directions simultaneously.
Google just published an official guide on how to optimize for AI search and it is essentially a love letter to everything I have been championing in long form content for years. Their term for what they want is "non-commodity content." Anything anyone could write is now worthless. The seven tips for first time blank, the generic explainer, the recycled listicle... AI produces all of that in seconds and Google knows it. What AI cannot produce is your specific story. The deal that fell apart and why. The step you skipped and what it cost you. The lived experience and earned perspective that only exists because you did the work and paid attention.
They are also explicitly calling out the scammy tactics people have been sold. Paying for fake mentions on Reddit and Quora? Google calls it "seeking inauthentic mentions" and says it does not work. Hundreds of thin keyword pages? They are now calling that "scaled content abuse" and it can get you penalized in search results.
Quality over quantity is not a nostalgic preference. It is now the literal documented playbook from Google itself.
So let me weave this into one uncomfortable truth, because I do love an uncomfortable truth. ๐
The default mode network research, the A/B weeks, the Google guide, the hard work reel... they are all pointing at the same thing. The era of more, faster, louder, busier is running headfirst into a wall.
Your audience is starting to feel the difference between content made in the gaps between meetings and content that came from someone who gave themselves enough silence and space to produce something original. They cannot always articulate what they are sensing, but they feel it and they are starting to choose accordingly.
You now have the language to articulate it too, which means you no longer have an excuse to make lazy marketing content.
The only thing you cannot buy, automate, or hustle your way into is genuine craft developed over genuine time.
Social media ROI is declining because the quick win era of easy eyeballs was never as real as it looked. The people left standing when the next tactic sails off into the sunset are the ones who built something underneath the attention. A real point of view. A real body of work. A real relationship with their audience that does not evaporate when the algorithm changes.
We are watching people have very public online freakouts about AI because they can no longer hide behind mediocrity. And I will bet you a very good lunch at my studio (IYKYK ๐) that you are going to notice how many people do not have much to stand on in a post viral trend world when asked to stand on their own original ideas.
THAT is the reality of this moment.
The odds favor the people who did the work.
May they be ever in your favor.
๐ Check out the Dojo below and join us next week for the business brain workshop with Everett. Whether you use Claude or ChatGPT, honestly both work for this... you need to de-hustle and add as much smarts to your hard work as you possibly can right now.
๐พ Let's Sharpen Your Brain
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Join us on June 24th
We're building your Business Brain: a fully configured Claude setup so everything Claude produces is automatically shaped around you. Click for more info โคต๏ธ
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$97.00
Claude for Creators: Build Your Business Brain
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๐๏ธ Gossip from the creator trenches...
โฝ๏ธ Pick Up Your Trash
World Cup visitors from Japan are going viral for something that has nothing to do with soccer: they clean up after themselves without being asked. It is such a specific and quietly radical act of consideration that it made me think immediately about content. How many creators think about the experience they leave behind? The irrelevant tags, the bait and switch hooks, the low effort posts that waste someone's attention and give nothing back.
โDon't litter in your content should absolutely be a thing โโ
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๐ If You Have Been Showing Up, Prove It
The Signal Awards are closing submissions this week and for the fifth year running they are celebrating podcasters of all shapes and sizes. If you have been producing consistently, this is your nudge to practice submitting your work for recognition. Awards matter for credibility, media kits, and sponsor conversations. And if you realize you have a gap in consistency when you go to apply? That information is also useful. Submissions close June 26th.
โIn it to win it! โโ
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๐ My Business Can Pay For My Life
While I am deep in batch recordings for the final season of School of Moxie, I want to tease the guests you are about to meet. They were selected for one reason: every single one of them can back up this statement without hesitation. My business can pay for my life. Not subsidized by a dual income or propped up by trades and favors. Actually paying for their actual life. GOAT season is officially here and I cannot wait for you to meet them.
โDoes this describe you, too? โโ
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Let's Hang Out
Want to join me in the creator economy, like, for real? You should get your newsletter game up and running or migrated to Kit, like, right now. They just released their biggest product updates in all the years I've been using them (since 2014, no joke). Substack and Beehiiv aren't built for longevity, but this is. Watch the replay or read the notes here.โ
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Participate + Join In
The call for speakers at Podcast Movement's fall conference in NYC is now up! A lot of you watched me get booked to speak at Podcast Movement at SXSW in March. Well, it started with a form like this. Now it's developed into hot contacts and collaborations. My word of advice: really read & absorb the instructions...and then follow them. Seriously. ๐
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