Electric Speed - [Electric Speed] Bias for survival

A note from Jane

Recently I was speaking on a panel about email newsletters when I realized I was a significant outlier compared to my fellow panelists. I don’t send as frequently as most, I don’t study my metrics, and I don’t follow best practices on email length or subscriber retention.

Could I be doing better if I modified my practices? Maybe. Probably. (OK, certainly.)

But what’s more important to me is sustainability. I’m only willing to do what I can reasonably sustain for years. I alone am responsible for staving off my own burnout. If I get tired of doing my work, there is no one else to step in. (For the most part. I have my husband, Mark, to thank for freeing up my time to focus on writing and teaching. But he can’t write or teach for me if I grow tired of it.)

Recently, I saw this tweet from Ben Orenstein: "I got asked for some advice about starting a podcast. My #1 tip: there’s a 95% chance you’ll quit within a year, so spend ~all your effort avoiding that outcome. Everything else rounds to unimportant."

What does that mean?

You can ignore best practices. You can ignore all the things you "must" do. Instead, set up your own parameters that make it likely you will stick with your new activity.

Later on, when you have better footing—and valuable experience in the trenches—you can decide how to level up your game and what additional effort might be worthwhile.

But don’t make the game so hard to continue that you stop before you’ve even really started. "Bias for survival," as Orsentein said.

In the last issue, I asked you to tell me about your favorite search engine hacks. Here’s what you said:

Search bangs at DuckDuckGo. It’s a shortcut to a site. For instance, if I want to search Wikipedia, I type !wiki Tom Cruise into the search bar and I’ll end up at Tom’s Wikipedia page. There are thousands of search bangs out there, such as !a for Amazon and !gm for Google Maps. See them all. —Bob Mueller
I think we get too complacent with Google and forget that it often doesn’t immediately provide us the things we really need or want. I’ve grown to like WebCrawler. It is the oldest search engine that still exists today. Another good one is Dogpile. It aggregates results from the search engines Google, Yahoo, and Yandex. —Cindy Bahl

Next question: Any TikTok users here? Tell me about one of your favorite accounts. Hit reply to this message to let me know, or share on the Discord server for Electric Speed subscribers.

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Electric Speed - [Electric Speed] Bias for survival

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