Welcome!

Another six newcomers this week. We've grown from 27-33. We're a class-full now. Cram any more than 33 students in a high school french class and that teacher's got a tough gig ahead. Kind of a fun mental image, all of us at desks, looking up towards a whiteboard, learning "sac à dos" means backpack.

We'd be a formidable classroom. I feel lucky to be here, learning alongside you all.

Thanks for being an early subscriber to my digital postcard. I prefer the description postcard (rather than newsletter) cuz it feels more casual, personal and specific to a moment in time.

In this postcard I’ll share updates, anecdotes and links to things I enjoyed recently. I’m committed to weekly publishing, but not yet tied to a particular day of the week. The arrival will have the same element of surprise you get with a traditional postcard.

TIP: First-time recipient? A reply will help prevent these emails being marked spam. Don't feel obligated to say something kind or clever. In fact, I encourage the opposite. Make your reply as conveniently incoherent as possible. A quick: "sDGHsdasd" is splendid :)

Draw In Business

On the learning theme, I signed up Monday for a new course. Here’s why:

I’ve now got 5 long-form articles up on my site. Each 1.5K+ words. Before I invest in the next one I want to grow the audience on the receiving end.

This doesn’t come naturally to me. I avoided self-promotion for years. So I’ve set a target of 100 Twitter followers before I begin writing long-form post #6. I’ve also made a personal commitment to ship a daily tweet till I reach 1K followers.

Growth requires instantaneous ideas. When you see a picture, a huge amount of depth is unpacked, understood + shared in seconds. If I see a high value image (laugh/insight) I can share it with a friend + they’ll receive that value almost immediately.

The same is not true for a 1,500 word essay. It requires a longer engagement to payoff. Both are important to where I want to go. But right now the instant idea aspect is missing from my outputs.

To catalyze this I joined @aaraalto’s course + community Draw In Business. I’ve got a 1:1 onboarding call with Aaron on Tuesday. Excited to unlock a part of my creativity that's been a bottleneck for too long :)

Here’s a peek of the lessons page that shows his gorgeous sketch aesthetic.

Ultra-Nano-Virality Musings

I mentioned last week that I sent my first Tweet on Nov 1st. This week I had my first pleasant surprise of a tweet punching above it’s weight class:

Tommy Lee @thomaselliotlee Today I have 31 newsletter subscribers, 52 Twitter followers, 658 pageviews (year-to-date) on my site. Excited to retweet this in a year to show what consistent publishing does to those numbers. 🌱📈🌳 November 11th 2021 0 Retweets 62 Likes

The tweet received more likes (62) than my total followers count (52) when I posted it. It got 2,100 impressions (people who saw it). It also led to 3 messages of new people introducing themselves. All fun stuff!

Half the likes came from people in Write of Passage (WOP). This is yet another showcase for the power of community. I wouldn't be on Twitter without the urging of WOP. And without my WOP followers (at least 40 of my inital 52) it'd be difficult to get enough traction to catch other people's attention.

Another chunk of engagement came from a group called Ship30. People in Ship30 post a microblog every day for 30 days. There's a natural crossover there with WOP. Once a critical mass of each of those tribes showed up it had a broader snowball effect.

A bit after sending the Tweet I realized I could've mentioned my newsletter, Twitter, and website are all newborns. Each only 1-2mths old. That would've given better context.

This can be a temptation towards a delay fallacy. To take "could have..." as a cue to polish more. But you only have that kind of realization once you put the idea into the world. And you can always quote retweet, thread an update, or write a better new variation in future. Action breeds insight.

It amazes me how off-base my perception of Twitter was for so long. It gets portrayed as an outrage machine. That's probably true if you seek controversy/news/politics. But if you curate the feed towards creativity and insight from kind people, Twitter is a great place :)

That's all till next week!

I decided to try something different this week and leaned fully into my own experiences. I've noticed when I read other people's newsletters I almost never click on links. We've each got enough articles in our personal queue already. I'm more interested to read their lived experience.

A benefit of this approach is the email becomes both a public journal and cultivator of article seeds. Reflections can be expanded into essays in the future.

Let me know what you think though....

...Was the anecdotal skew enjoyed? Or did you scroll to this sentence in a disappointing search for a bullet point summary or song?

Thanks for reading,

Tommy

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PS. Replies Encouraged :)

• If you have 27 seconds to jot an impression of this postcard, please do!
• I know each of your lives bustle with activity. If it helps, think of the reply as a text (rather than an email).
• A quick jotted: “Lol, sac à dos” or "2 long dude, chop some word" is valuable signal of where to re-invest :)