📧 PivotList: Delulu is the Solulu + It's Not Just YouYou
Plus 🏝️ Does your business pass the Fiji Test? Last chance to register for a free workshop for solopreneurs on Thursday :)
Hi Friends,
There’s a reason Us Weekly magazine runs a feature called, “Stars — They’re Just Like Us!” Although these are often staged or submitted by the celeb’s PR team, it’s oddly satisfying to see even the rich and famous pumping gas, rolling luggage, shopping for groceries, and taking out the trash.
Stars — They take naps! They wait for flights! They launch things that don’t go as planned!
Last week, my friend Sarah sent me the following headline as I sat in a Tribeca coffee shop: “Jennifer Lopez Tampa concert, and others, cancelled.” While I anticipated something dramatic, a little digging revealed a simple reason: flagging ticket sales.
It’s oddly comforting to know that even J-FREAKIN-LO doesn’t instantly sell out a concert tour. It creates space for our own confounding launches, where wild success fantasies meet the market in cold, hard reality.
Let’s be clear: even one arena tour in a career—one single arena show—is a lifetime achievement for ninety-nine percent of the population who have such lofty ambitions. I doubt J-Lo will lose much sleep over a few cancelled cities; she’ll merely gain more of it between bigger stops.
I try not to revel in too much schadenfreude, but I’m not immune to it either. Sarah and I traded notes of surprise . . .
Keep reading the third installment of my Delulu is the Solulu series on Rolling in Doh. It all started with J-Lo’s documentary coinciding with this reel that my husband Michael sent me:
Now onto this week’s #PivotList, with bonus goodies over the paywall rainbow at the end :)
📆 Upcoming Events
🏝️ LAST CHANCE TO REGISTER! Does your business pass The Fiji Test?
Speaking of streamlining, it’s time to say goodbye to overwhelm from repeating yourself, death-by-a-thousand-question cuts, struggling to remember where something lives, and letting important client work fall through the cracks.
Freeing time is a skill, and it’s one you can get better at.
The Details: Thursday, March 28 at 12 p.m. ET on Zoom. Those who attend live will get a special one-time discount for working with me 1:1 on your business operations ☺️ The recording will only be available for those who register. Learn more and sign up here »
🧡 Office Hours for Paying Subscribers
Join us on May 15 at 1pm ET for our Quarterly Office Hours hang: ask me anything, connect with fellow Pivoters, and talk through your pivot-in-progress.
Want to join us? See footer (below the paywall) for the link, with lots of additional resources and ideas in the show notes. Upgrade your membership here »
⚙️ Tools
If you have (or want help) managing your inbox(es): I manage our team email through HelpScout, where we can create workflows (automation), assign messages to different team members, write notes to each other, save drafts for someone else to take over, and see customer communication history.
🍿 Watching
Anyone else get a kick out of the new Road House rendition starring a shredded Jake Gyllenhaal and the hilariously balletic and bouncy acting debut from UFC fighter Conor McGregor? It’s so bad it’s good. (Here’s the original starring Patrick Swayze.)
📚Reading
Rebecca Jennings’ Vox piece, Everyone’s a Sellout Now:
When Rachael Kay Albers was shopping around her book proposal, the editors at a Big Five publishing house loved the idea. The problem came from the marketing department, which had an issue: She didn’t have a big enough following.
. . . It was ironic, considering her proposal was about what the age of the “personal brand” is doing to our humanity. Albers, 39, is an expert in what she calls the “online business industrial complex,” the network of hucksters vying for your attention and money by selling you courses and coaching on how to get rich online.
She’s talking about the hustle bro “gurus” flaunting rented Lamborghinis and promoting shady “passive income” schemes, yes, but she’s also talking about the bizarre fact that her “65-year-old mom, who’s an accountant, is being encouraged by her company to post on LinkedIn to ‘build [her] brand.’”
Pair this with
’s 2020 treatise, The Death of the Artist: How Creators are Struggling to Thrive in the Era of Billionaires and Big Tech. I enjoyed his three conversations on .🎧 Listening
🎁 For complimentary Free Time audiobook access for you and a friend, submit your proof of purchase here and Faye on my team will get you all squared away! You can also host your own book club with this Free Time Leader Kit.
I can’t wait to listen to this episode of ICYMI thanks to
by the brilliant and team. From their description:💖 ICYMI, my eternal heroes for discussing things I sound insane trying to talk with anyone else about, has dived into some of my favorite online drama: the mess that is the yarn, knit, and crochet world online. You might not immediately associate these cozy crafts with drama, and I hope you will be delighted to know you are so, so, so wrong. In this episode, host Candice Lim is joined by culture reporter Morgan Sung to dive into some of the biggest, baddest moments in this community, and it is SO FUN.
✍️ Writing
Recently on , a three-part series:
🎙 Podcasting
Pivot:
363: 🌈 Taking a Quiet Sabbatical and Pausing the Podcasts — For Now . . .
361: On Decision Engineering and Evaluating Quality instead of Outcomes
360: 📦 Unpacking a Big Business Decision and Dissolving Related Doubts
358: Crossing the Cringe Chasm when Taking Career and Creative Risks
Subscribe wherever you listen here »
Free Time:
268: Strategies for Surpassing “The Magic Number” of Book Sales (Part 1) and Specific Road-Tested Tips for Book Sales and Marketing (Part 2)
264: 🦧 What to Do When You Lose Your Biggest Client: Part One and Part Two
Subscribe wherever you listen here »
That’s it for now . . . thank you for reading and listening!
❤️ With Love,
P.S. Extra Goodies Over the Paywall Rainbow 🌈💰
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