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In this episode, Justin sits down with Ryan Baum to unpack the crucial practice of prioritization and how it affects your productivity. They deep-dive into the pitfalls of prioritizing the wrong tasks and share advice on how content marketers can focus on activities that truly move the needle. They'll challenge you to adopt a mindset that's centered on results, efficiency, and clever repurposing — without losing sight of what's important.

Subscribe to Distribution First and join us in fine-tuning your content's lifecycle for maximum impact.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• How to prioritize tasks for better productivity.
• Why focusing on "big rocks" boosts content impact.
• When to push back as a team player.
• Ways to battle perfectionism and anxiety.
• Strategies for embracing authentic perspectives.

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All right, let's get in the show.

Welcome to Distribution first, the show where we flip content marketing on its head

and focus on what happens after you hit publish. Each week I

share playbooks, motivations, stories, and strategies to help you repurpose and

distribute your content because you deserve to get the most out of everything you

created.

Everybody, welcome to this week's episode of Distribution first.

So excited to have Ryan with me today. And we're going to be

chatting a little bit of a divergent path, but it's all going to tie

back in to what we all love and talk about here, which is

distribution, repurposing content, actually really doing content marketing

the smart way, a more efficient way. And so

really today what we're going to talk about is how do we, as content

marketers or marketers in general, how can we focus on what we need

to work on versus what we think we should be

working on versus what we're told we should be working

on versus. There's no time to work on the things that I need to

work on because I'm in 18 meetings a day. So we're going to talk about

all of those things today. Super excited to have Ryan on the show. Ryan, welcome

in. Hey, Justin, how are you doing? Glad to finally be here.

Absolutely. So it was funny, it was kind of serendipitous. As

we were talking about this topic and what we were going to talk about, I

came across this quote from Tim Ferriss that I think is a great starting point

for this whole conversation, which is doing something

unimportant, well, does not make it

important. Doing something

unimportant, well, does not make it

important. And I think that's a huge sort of launching point for how

we do things. I think sometimes, man, as marketers especially,

it's easy to get sucked into the tactics, it's easy to get

sucked into the work and make everything important.

And really, at the end of the day, the unimportant things that we think we're

doing, well, it doesn't actually make them important at all.

Exactly. So I guess talk me through a little bit

in your roles as you come from gorgeous, you've

worked at other companies. Now you're working for yourself as well. So talk to me

about either your struggles or maybe some of those experiences that you've had

in terms of prioritizing the correct things or even just

coming up with what the heck is the most important thing that I should be

working on. Oh, my God. Yeah. I mean, it is, to this day,

a constant struggle. When I texted you before this, and I

dropped this topic because it's been on my mind from therapy this morning,

and I am not coming at this. I may be on a podcast right now,

but I am not coming at this from any place of expertise. I'm coming at

this from a place of being very interested in it because of how bad I

am at it. Right. And how I want to get better. I think when you

start consulting, everything is a trade off. You're in house. It's all a trade off.

You spend time doing one thing versus another or working extra hours,

that's a trade off on things. You could be spending time with a partner or

family or friends. But when you get to set your own 40

hours a week, and in our cases, like, is it even 40 hours a week?

The trade offs become so apparent and so

present in your day to day thinking. And so I've

always known I need to prioritize better and ship faster and all

these things we all say we want to do, but when I don't have to

be on until six, and I could be at the park right now, and I'm

not, because I'm doing a thing that I don't need to do. You really feel

it in a new way because there's, like, parkinson's law, like, the work

expands to fill the time, and so when you

have 8 hours a day at work, you're like, well, I got to be here

till six. You're not really incentivized to

speed it up, especially since a lot of people who are really efficient get

rewarded by taking on someone else's work that they didn't.

You know, it is kind of like an interesting shift. And

even Erica Schneider posted yesterday about this

idea of overstrategizing and taking too long. It's never

done. Just ship it. And I posted a little

bit about what I've been working on, which is understanding that

perfectionism, I think, for everyone in all cases, is like,

at its core, an anxiety response. Right? Because wanting

to do good work, wanting to get better results, those are absolutely things

that can drive that anxiety response. But they're not

what's driving the perfectionism, because if you wanted to do good work and get

results, you would ship the thing and you would let it be good

work that gets results. And so I think, for

me, the first unlock happened when

I was at gorgeous, realizing that if I

actually want to make something not perfect, because that's

impossible, but close as possible, you have to ship it as part of that

before it's done, actually, which is the hard part, because if you want to make

the best thing possible, necessarily, you have to start getting those

ideas out, start battle, testing them, getting feedback from the

market, right? We all, as content people, have a story

of the blog post or the LinkedIn post that

we overthought and

overdid, but then we were like, it's worth it because it's going to be a

banger. And then it is not a banger because at the end of

the day, you just don't know until it goes

out. And so I'm really trying to take more of this

iterative approach. Oh yeah. And so that feedback

loop was the first unlock. I'm not doing this efficiently.

I think I'm being efficient by only doing it once, but that's actually not even

possible. Second unlock, the more important unlock that actually has started to do

it for me is recognizing this stress response isn't

coming from this project will be bad and there will be consequences,

because no one bad project, for the most part, sinks any of

us. Right? It's the self

worth and sense of self that we have tied up in our work and our

ability to be productive. That's what takes the hit, or what we

imagine will take the hit from shipping

bad work, right? Erica's post was most

human response, gets a cookie. And the end of my comment was

like, never ever received a cookie for the

ideas that are idealized in my head that no one knows about.

Gotten a lot of cookies though, for shit that I shipped that I wasn't happy

with and thought it wasn't ready, and then it worked really well.

So I think there's a lesson in that. Mostly for me, I'm speaking to myself

and trying to like this news flash is, for me, almost

entirely 1000%. This is the

thing, too. It's like if you're listening to this show, you're probably on the higher

end of achiever than somebody who's not, right? So I think if you're washing

the dishes or walking your dog and you're listening to distribution first, you're probably

a little bit on the high achieving end. So I'm sure lots of people relate

to that. I'm on the high achieving end, and I think anybody who

bends that way holds themselves to a much higher standard

than anybody else would. And sometimes it's to

the detriment. And you touched on it with the ideal standard. And so when you

measure yourself against an ideal, you're never going to get

there. I've heard it described as the horizon line. Right.

If your ideal is, I'm going to hit that line,

and yet every bit of progress you make, that

line never gets closer. And that's your measuring point.

You're going to be miserable. And so you feel like you're doing so

many things, and yet there's no way that you can even get

there because you've set your measurement point at a place that is

completely and utterly unrealistic. Absolutely. So what I've sort of found and

what I've started to do that has completely changed how I measure myself, how I'm

viewing success. It's allowed me to ship things faster. And this has really only

started, really, this quarter is

measuring backward. So measuring backward on

how much further am I at the end of Q one

compared to the beginning of Q one? How much further am I

in March compared to February? What learnings have like,

having learning be a goal. Learning by

shipping, by sending that email series that I did not want

to send because it was salesy. Oh, I learned I could sell a workshop and

I could write it. I learned that I could do that. That's how you build

confidence and you're able to do more things. But, yeah, when you have

that ideal set of. This is what a good blog, even on a

tactical, like something you want to create. This is what a blog post is. This

is what this is. And we've all been through rounds of edits

and 100 things, and it's never the perfect thing. One of my buddies who does

video, he's like, a video is never done. It's never done because you can always

edit it. You can change this, you can fix it. And so you just got

to ship. You just got to ship. Yeah. And, you know, something that's been

really helping me with all of this mindset outside of just

therapy is I've been reading Rick Rubin's book. I've been listening to a lot of

his podcasts on this circuit he's doing.

And I've had folks that I really admire where

I'll listen to them on a couple different shows, and even some of the ones

that like a big fan, they've got their talk track that they've

worked on with. They're selling their thing. And Rick Rubin's

book comes from such an authentic place in him that the host can kind of

take it in whatever direction that they want. And because what he's

selling is his philosophy. He doesn't have to bring it

back. It applies. So I listened to him do like an on

being episode with Krista Tippett, and that shows very much about a holistic

and well lived life. And what does that mean? And how does creativity fit

into that? And how can we release some of these expectations on

ourselves to be happier and more at peace? And then I

went and listened to him on the Happiness project. I think it's called dude took

a completely different avenue. And another thing

I don't love about podcasts is sometimes it feels like the guest, especially with someone

like Rick Rubin, who's like a legend, is unwilling to challenge

them because what am I going to say to Rick Rubin? You

know what I mean? But he really embraced that

and was also very quick to be like, I

disagree with the way you just took that thing that I said, but

it wasn't. You're wrong. It's. We have different

perspectives. And I think that's been something that

in a lot of areas of my life, but especially in marketing,

where it's business and you really want to get it right, kind of letting go

of the fact that there is no absolute truth anywhere,

right. In marketing especially, but in life, you know what I

mean? At least not objective, right? Because for everything you think is

an objective truth, there's someone else who is not

accepting of that. And so in my

content efforts, I'm leaning more into wanting personal

pOVs to drive the work that I do. Even

if you do a study to have five people with different perspectives

on it give full commentary, to give the context from their

perspective, and not just getting quotes from ten people and

finding the mean, really showcasing that there are

different approaches to this. I think best practices

are not useless, but I do think

we rely far too much on them. I'll speak for myself. In the past,

I have relied way too much on best practices

because like everyone, I want to achieve and

accomplish the results that I'm set in my OKRs. And the best

practice is like a proven way, proven framework playbook to

get there. What I'm realizing, looking back and also just looking around, talking

to a lot of consultants, working at a lot of different companies, talking to a

lot of in house folks, it's not even that. Best practices

are not the full picture, and there's nuance beyond it. I'm kind of

not huge on them at all right now because to

me, best practices are designed to

reduce to that mean, to reduce the surface area

for failure. And in business and

in life, to a degree, we are really incentivized to

not fail. Right. You can have an absolute banger

quarter and take that risk, and people will be like, yeah, pat you on the

back, but then you're only as good as your next quarter's numbers. If you have

a dismal quarter, you're not going to see your next quarter's numbers. You won't be

there to tell that story. A lot of times. I'm not blaming anyone.

I totally understand why we're incentivized to not take risks. It's

like the idea of no one ever got fired for hiring Deloitte

because people would rather hire the firm that can be the

scapegoat that is respected and lose than take the

risk to win big, but then have to eat it with the risky

option if it doesn't go well. Right. And I think I just said

a lot, so I'll let you respond to that. But that's kind of where I'm

at, is not only are we not incentivizing great work, I think we're, like, actively

making it impossible when everything has to follow this best

practice. And I've just seen too many founders point

at these companies that are unicorns who took big risks,

that paid off and did things that no one else was doing and say, be

like them, but they think they're going to get there by trying a new outbound

sequence. Right? It's no risk, no reward.

Right. Well, and it's never the tactics that get them

there. Right? Microsoft could do the exact same

tactics as apple and fail

miserably because Apple, at least

at the time, with Steve Jobs, when everything was really

exploding, was willing to take risks. And

I think to Steve Jobs credit, if you pulled the

board when he was going after

the sort of outcast as the target market, I bet there's

a whole slew of folks who said, that was the dumbest idea. It's too small.

What they missed that Steve Jobs understood was that everybody has

a little bit of that in them because he wasn't. Going on a

dashboard. He was tapping into something that he felt deeply as a

human being and saw in others and in himself. And I think when

you look at why Steve Jobs was successful, a

big part of it was he had a very strong POV that

he was unafraid. He would rather go down doing it his way

than doing it the safe way. And obviously, he

had great instincts over time. And we see that in the

products that launched under his tenure. But I don't know.

I think there are things that Steve Jobs launched that if another

company did the exact same launch, exact same way, it wouldn't have

worked. I think people like the audacity of it to a degree.

It feels authentic and it feels bold. And the fact that they

know Steve Jobs doesn't care is, I think, kind of the point.

And he had a lot of good checks in the right areas. So I think

that's the other side of this, because then you have the founders who think that

they walk on water and don't ever want to listen to their team. And that's

also wrong, because, a, you're not Steve Jobs. And even Steve Jobs was wrong. Plenty

of times. You look at stuff that he wrote or that was written about him,

and there's a quote from, I think Andy Grove

said it, who was the CEO of Intel, wrote high output management, one of my

favorite management books. But I think it's in radical candor,

actually, Kim Scott's book. And she's talking about

basically having lunch with Andy Grove. And she

was, yeah, like, it's crazy. Apple's on such a tear. And

he. Well, you know, Steve and the guys at Apple, they always get it right.

And he was like, no one always is right. And he said, I didn't say

he was always right. Said, he always gets it right. And if you actually look

at her examination of the

culture at Apple during the time when these big innovations were happening,

first of all, she was pretty toxic. So there was definitely a better way to

do it. I was going to say it's not. All roses, but it's definitely not.

And I'm not saying that you need to be an ass like Steve Jobs was

to get this done. But what I do think he did really well is

if you didn't challenge him and he realized that you had the answer

and you were too scared to say it, he held you accountable for,

like, it was as bad to be quiet. It was actually worse, probably to him,

than to be wrong. And so that's kind of the point Andy, I

think, was making in that passage, which I probably badly paraphrase. But the idea

is you have to both be bold, but you also have to

empower the people around you to be bold to tell you when you're off track.

Because the downside of a singular POV is that

there's no feedback loop in your head.

I can tell you from twelve years of working in house

now working with several companies and talking with several

companies, having a POV is a

very rare place to be for a company.

And having a founder who owns the

POV and understands the market and understands

the why behind the product, it's rare. It is rare to

have and then have that spread through the entire company. Totally. I

think there's a reason why at the heart, if you're looking at the heart and

the core reasons why those things struggle is like, okay,

marketing department, go create some messaging. This is who we are as a company.

Marketing department struggles to come up with anything that resonates with the

founder or the CEO or they come up with something, but it

doesn't truly feel authentic

because it's not. And so I think I can say, even for

my small level of success that I've been able to have with distribution

first. It all comes back to having that core point of view

over time that I actually believe and care about.

And it's not to say distribution first is the only way you can do content

marketing. I've never said distribution first is the only way you can do content

marketing. I've said it's a differentiated,

potentially better way if you want to get the same

output with less inputs and get more bang out of your buck, all that

type of stuff. But you can run a successful content marketing

program with volume and manage a volume. That's not

how I would do it anymore, but you can do that. And so I think

that's the core of it too, is being able to have a

really strong point of view that you care about and you believe

in and a story that you believe in. Way easier as a solo

person to figure those things out than if you're working at a company. But

if you're looking to move jobs, if you're looking to how do I advance in

my career? What am I looking for? Those would be some of the main things

I would be looking for moving forward because that's

how companies are going to win.

I saw somebody the other day kind of just chatting and it's like they're waiting

for the Costco version of

Salesforce to come out. Like Kirkland Salesforce, where

it's like a 10th the cost with all the like,

it's kind of a funny joke, but that could happen. There's no reason

why that couldn't happen. And so unless you

are sort of building your business in that way, that's going to be hard

to compete on. But yeah, just to keep things moving. Talking really about

the productivity side and to move that back. I'm curious, on your end,

one of the things I think people struggle with when it comes to

prioritization is even going back to the

important versus unimportant urgent, know, like the classic

quadrant, if anybody's familiar with the Eisenhower Quadrant. And

if not, make sure to look that up because it's a helpful exercise.

But for me, I always love the analogy of the big

rocks, pebbles and sand. Are you familiar with that, Ryan?

Okay, so I am. And it was a huge thing at

gorgeous, to the point where all hands meetings were literally big rocks

on our calendar was the name. But I made it

through two years at gorgeous, and no one explained to me what the hell big

rocks are. So, Justin, I think you should just share really quick what the concept

is because once I actually learned what it meant, now it's all clicking. Why

didn't someone just tell me that? I thought it was their big boulder. So you

have to push them forward slowly, but they're important. Got

you. Yeah. Big rocks are like life's a jar. Your work is a

jar. You've got this jar of stuff and then big rocks being your most

important things. These are the things we have to get done. Pebbles being

like this stuff is okay, it's not

necessary. Sand being like the worthless

junk that we kind of need to do to keep the lights on, but is

really unimportant in the macro. And so if you think about this from like, a

content perspective, because you can break this down in a business, you can break this

down for a content. So let's look at it from a content perspective. A lot

of people that I coach and consult with, they have big rocks.

And part of the problem is they have so many big rocks, you could never

fit them all in the jar to begin with. So that's one problem. You might

have so many big, small, little rocks and your jar container

is only so big, the volume does not. Or they have the right number of

big rocks. But in their notion, doc, they have a lot of

pebbles sized bigger than they actually are in real life. Right.

Well, because if you don't deprioritize, then there are no big rocks.

I'll let you continue. But I think that's like an important distinction. Yeah. And so

the idea being like, you've got these unimportant tasks, kind of important

tasks and really important tasks, and what ends up happening for most people,

myself included, unless I'm being focused on this, is that your jar

fills up with sand and sand being meetings,

emails, scrolling, LinkedIn,

mindlessly flipping through the 18 tabs that are on your

browser because they're there and they must be important. And now I got to check

this, and I got to check that. I bet if you audited your time,

because I did this at the beginning of the year, if you audited your time,

most of your time would be spent on sand. So

your jar is like three quarters of the full of sand. And then after that

it might be some pebbles, which are maybe sending emails,

not replying, but you've got some important stuff you got to reply to send those

things, writing LinkedIn posts, creating maybe some

smaller email campaigns that type of stuff, small things, but not

movers. And then your jar fills up with that. And then at the end of

the day, you have no time for the big rock moving things,

the content initiatives you want to move forward, the strategic

thinking you need to have done, the planning you need to do, all

the things you actually have to get done. And so for me, it's been

shifting priorities and actually starting. What I've been doing is

laying understanding what my big rocks even are for

a quarter. And this

really ties into my whole methodology around cornerstone content, core content

and cut content, which is like, if you don't get your big rock

right, the stuff coming off of it at the bottom will not matter

or you're not going to have time for it or any of those things. So

if you don't have time to record the podcast, to write the blog

post, to write the newsletter, all the rest of the stuff starts

to fall apart and then you lose consistency. You don't

have room for that. So what I've done is I've actually said like, these are

my big rocks every single week from a content perspective. Just as

example, let's say it's podcast, it's

newsletter. Like, if I ever talk about those are the big rocks and then those

get scheduled out on the calendar. So podcast is going

out here, newsletter is going out here, and then I can work back the schedule

on when I want to create those pieces of content. Pebbles also

get scheduled. I've got to write the promo email that goes out. I've got

to send the promo email that goes out. I've got to be able to write

those things. I got to be able to write the social content, make sure the

clips are organized, those things get scheduled out and then sand,

that's just kind of like time blocking that to a different part of the

day where I'm not feeling like I have to come into the day,

check all my email, get email done. Because that's the problem is when you start

your day with sand, you never get to your big rocks. Yeah, absolutely. I mean,

I agree with everything you said. I think you really explained the

concept well. I have a few kind of builds

on the concept that I'm realizing for me. I don't know if I'm comfortable saying

that these are like universal, but I will speak on what I

have noticed personally, which is the big rocks. So

part of the thing that I had to understand was the big rocks alone

are enough, or maybe not everything you want it to

be. But a jar filled to the top with pebbles and sand

is not nearly as powerful as just the four big

rocks in the jar with all that empty space. Because you did the things that

mattered. Right. Big things, important things that

you've already said. These are big things and important things.

Yeah. And I think when SaaS companies do this really badly

in a lot of cases, but I can also say I do this not great

is like you have the big rocks, right? Let's say you have the perfect big

rocks, you're prioritizing them, but if you come at it from the

perspective of like the big rock is first and the pebbles are second,

but it all needs to get done, then you're not actually really the

way it should be is how long does the big rock need? And then fill

the remaining time with pebbles. Because if the whole to do list has to get

done. Yeah, you're putting the order in the right order, but you're not

prioritizing. It's prioritizing in a way, but it's like only on a

daily level. You know what I mean? Like what gets done first in the day.

And so I'm really trying to internalize this concept. I

heard of we're all juggling these balls, right? You're going

to drop them. It's not if, it's when, it just

is. Right. So instead of trying to keep all these balls up in

the air, which is only going to lead to you losing controls over

which ones drop and when, because they are going to drop again. This is an

inevitability. Unless you are just like Tim Ferriss and you have 8 hours of work

on your schedule for the week. Or on the flip side of this,

you could basically take control, drop the ones that are rubber. So it's

this idea of like rubber versus glass balls, right? And

so the rubber balls, they don't feel good to drop. And that's why I like

this analogy, because you're still dropping them. It still feels bad,

but you can pick them up and dust them off and

get them back in the air and it's fine. But you drop a glass ball

once and it's done. Right. That

intro that you offered proactively to

make for a friend that they've already forgotten about the second they logged off your

call, that's looming over your head, that's a rubber ball. Oh, yeah. That's

sand. That's sand. Yeah. I would say it's a rubber ball because I would say

it's a pebble. Because I think it's really important to keep your word and to

be connecting people. Maybe it's a small pebble, but my point is,

you can make that intro in three weeks. Well, they'd be stoked, right? Because

they forgot. And now you're coming out of nowhere and making this introduction. They're

stoked. They don't care about the timing. But if you start missing

distribution first meetings with guests,

and start to develop a reputation that you don't show up, that's a

glass ball. And the way this is showing up for me personally as a consultant

right now is everything that's internal to me is

all rubber balls. Because only I will be upset. And

I'm trying to recognize the glass nature of the balls

that involve work and relationships with other people, because you only

have so many shots at the way someone perceives you. And trust is really easily

broken. Right. And so why am I spending 3 hours

reorganizing my notion and ten minutes prepping for a call with someone I

care about? That doesn't balance for me. So

I think understanding that to get all the big rocks in the jar, all

the pebbles won't fit, was really important for me. Because

you just have to be okay with the fact that it's all not going to

happen. And every company, every company I've talked

to, I won't even names, because I don't want to get their content marketers in

trouble. But talking to people that are at these big unicorn

companies, that all of our CEOs want to be like, it's a mess there

too. They are just as burned out, if not more. And what those companies do

well is that they are prioritizing the right fires so that they continue to grow

in spite of the chaos versus fighting the wrong fires and

putting all the energy and not growing. But it's still

chaos. The to do list never ends. There's always more that you could do.

And so I think that's like one of my big ads of the

three, another is like the sand. And even, honestly, some of the

pebbles maybe are like a performance for the other people at

your job. I read an incredible newsletter article

a couple weeks ago that I will give to you to put in the show

notes. And basically, the title of the newsletter is called LaRping your

job. Justin, do you know what LaRping is? I've heard of it, but yeah.

Explain. It's an acronym that stands for live action role

playing. So, like, if you were ever in college, you're, like, on the quad and

people are fighting with foam swords and stuff like that. Okay. Yeah.

And so she basically made the case that the digital nature of work

now and the slack, every conversation you have at work

now has, like, a record in slack, which makes you want

to show up and be there more. And you're not in the office to show

face and have a personality, so you feel even more driven to

be around. Like, I can speak for myself. I absolutely. At gorgeous,

we had a pretty active slack culture, and

we were really good compared to most companies about response times, it was

actually like you could wait 24 hours and you would not get in trouble to

get back to someone. Now, they might not be happy, but that was a rule

that was written in notion, right? That being said, there were

constantly conversations happening, and I wanted to be there and be a part of them

and be seen being a part of them. I don't even think I was doing

it on purpose at the time, but looking back, it's definitely something that was intentional.

Right. And so her argument is, how much energy and time are we

wasting doing the performance that's even, like, one level

deeper than doing the wrong work. That's not doing any work. You're like, tap dancing

on stage for people you don't even know. And so I

think that that's something to keep in mind. But the flip side of that one,

though, is that a lot of times in the past, I at least, and I

know many others who have done this, too, want to

designate the work around the work, the getting buy in, the

managing up, all the meetings as just sand.

Why are you wasting my time? I could be doing it. And in some cases,

you may be right. But unfortunately, the work around the work is the work. Getting

things sold in is the work. You can have the best campaign in the world.

And if it never goes out, you didn't have the best campaign in the world.

You had a really cool idea that you couldn't get done. You know what I

mean? Benjamin Elias has a newsletter called Diamond Pencils

that genuinely I reach for before Harvard Business Review on

things like this. And again, because it's a very personal

POV from Benjamin, who I trust not some random

byline who happens to have an MBA. Like, cool. Not to

talk down about HBR, great publication, but in terms of trust

for me, they may have more credibility, but I trust Benjamin more. Oh, sure.

That's something I'm trying to really hone in on and even maybe

make a consulting offer around, is like content marketers are like

everyone else. No one wants to spend time getting the work done. Everyone wants to

do the work that they feel like is actually going to drive the results. But

I think a lot of content marketers are creative at

heart, and that's why they got into it. And they still have this kind of,

like, creatives versus suits dichotomy

and selling in the work and the corporate jockeying and the

politics. That's just actually work. Culture is

the work, unfortunately. And so I think we all, and I can speak for

myself 100%, that was something I could have done better at gorgeous, and

I could have probably gotten more done if I had been better at explaining the

why. And then the last thing I will say is, we did retros every quarter

at gorgeous. I can't speak for every team at gorgeous, but I know that the

marketing teams, a lot of times it ends up just being a time capsule, showing

you that you didn't fix things over time and that they just keep happening again

and again. The reflection is great, but if you don't do anything about it, then

what's the point of doing it? And so something, again, it comes back to the

shipping and the experiments and the volume, and that's where volume is a good play,

even if you're not trying to go for content. Know Alex

Burkett, who runs on mission digital with his partners. And he's really

brilliant. He comes from a background in marketing experimentation at CXL, and I've

been asking him a lot of questions about it recently, and he'll basically

tell you with nuance, there's obviously ways to do better experiments, but generally,

the way to do better experiments is to do more of them so you can

see what works and what doesn't, because you don't know what you don't know until

you discover it, right? And so

I do think that we're all trying to find this, like, 80 20

Pareto perfect balance, but that's the

whole thing. You don't know it going in, assuming it because of a best

practice, is also not knowing it, going in,

doing it for a quarter, getting the feedback that your customers love it,

and that it presides outsized pipeline, and then

doing it and doubling down the next quarter. That's the Pareto principle,

putting all your eggs in one basket because it seems like the best or safest

option. Like, categorically not the Pareto principle,

actually, just really not diversifying your

portfolio of strategies. Yeah. The

hard thing with that prioritization, because it's hilarious. I've been

in so many planning meetings where I think this joke might

even been made at some point in the last decade in a meeting I've been

in because we used to talk about the big rocks, too, and it's like, there's

too many big rocks. We have not enough jar and too many rocks. And so

I think the hardest thing to do is to

ruthlessly eliminate the things that aren't

going to move the needle. I can speak from experience at building

up this business. There are a million things

that I can do. A million of them. I could go all in on

YouTube, just in content. I could go all in on YouTube. I could stick with

the podcast. I could expand out to a different channel. I could try shorts. I

could try this. I could do that. I could offer a million different types of

services. I could test this out. And I'm just testing. I'm just testing this

out over here, right? But everything I do is taking away from something

else that I'm not going to do over here. And so for me,

I really start again. It's funny you brought this up because it's so top of

mind for me because I started the year this way, is like, what are the

three goals? What are the three things in Q one that I'm going to

get done? And I have looked at those goals almost

every single day for the entire quarter. And the funny

thing about that is I was looking at it yesterday. I've almost completed all of

them. There's little steps in a couple of them that I haven't finished, but I

would say 80% of the goals that I set out to do in

Q one have already been hit. Hell, yeah. So now I'm trying to look and

I'm trying to figure out, okay, and I will say this, too, they weren't

necessarily revenue goals or things like that. They were like tangible, actionable

things that I could measure against. And it was way more helpful for me to

do that versus just like a random number of something that I was trying to

hit. And so for me, it's been really cool to do that. And so I'm

planning on doing the exact same thing in Q two, and I'm going to start

planning those things out. What are those goals I want to hit. And then the

key that we didn't talk about is with those big rocks, is

chunking up the things into smaller milestones

so you can keep winning and feel like you're making

progress against that bigger goal. So, for

example, one of the things I wanted to do in Q, one that I did

in January, was do a paid training. And so

with that paid training, I had a whole slew and it was like, I've never

done this before. It's kind of overwhelming, like, all the things I might need to

do. So chunk it out. I need to create email series. I need to create

the deck. I need to create the topic. I need to send it out. I

need to do the post show, send to the group and give

them the replay. I need to house it up on here so that somebody can

get it after the fact. And by having those things chunked out, it made it

so much more approachable and so much more easy to be like, oh, okay, this

week I'm going to work on this chunk of this big rock,

and from there, it allows you to build and make progress.

Yeah. And, I mean, retrospective feels like such a

scary word. And it's called the retrospective

prime directive. I think I found it in someone's blog. I'll try to find it

so we can source it. But I put it at the top of every one

of my retros with my team because it's basically like,

we are all going to agree going into this, that we're going to look back

critically, but that everyone was doing their best with what they had at

the time. You have to be honest, and if you feel like you're going to

hurt someone's feelings, you can't be honest. And so I think that's important. But

in terms of milestones, I think you're totally right. And something I'm trying to do

for myself is start up and shut down. It's like five minutes at beginning, end

of the day, every day, and then like a weekly review, maybe a monthly review,

but definitely a quarterly review. And again, retrospective puts all

this weight on it. It's a check in with yourself. You're looking back and you're

saying, I want to be intentional and aware of what happened

because it's so easy to just barrel into the next quarter and let all

of that kind of straight over your head.

And I think that you need to do both because

what I found at gorgeous is like, you're at the end of the quarter, you're

grabbing all of these things that you can't even remember doing because it was two

months ago and you feel like it's been a year and you're trying to find

the slack conversation to describe what happened. Yes, there's value in doing

the long term look back over three months with distance, but a if you're

not doing the smaller check ins over time,

you're coming at that perspective like almost too blind. Looking

back, you've actually let it fully leave your field of

vision and brain. But also you are not

getting that real time view from when it happened to

look at. Also because you can look back in three

months and get a worse perspective on something that happened. Like distance

is not always a good thing. You know what I mean? It's good when you

have all of the checkpoints to then compare against,

and then you can kind of go back and forth, but generally you don't want

to just look back every three months. And so I think at the end of

the day, this is something everyone struggles with. I do think that there is

like a certain performance in new content, new

bylines, all of these things that make it harder to refresh,

repurpose, distribute, do all the things with the content that is already

ranking, that is already converting, that you know is the proto principle because it's one

of your content power law whales.

And at the end of the day, it's like the two breakdowns I think,

is if you are having trouble prioritizing

and you're doing too much, to me, the two places where it breaks down is

either you don't understand the program or the data, or the feedback

loops well enough to know what should be prioritized, or you do

and your boss doesn't, and your shortcoming is more on the side of

you can't sell it in, you can't convince them that what you know to be

true is true. Right? And that's not to put everything on the direct report

or the content person, but you can only control that side.

So that's something I'm trying to be more conscious of even in

consulting. In what way could I have done this better? And

it's usually one of those two ways. It's like either I didn't know the

story well enough or I didn't sell it well enough.

Yeah, yeah, that's kind of what it comes down to. And at the end of

the day, you have to have that story, whether you're going to be or that

system or whatever you're going to be executing on. To know those

priorities, you have to know what you're going after. And then you have to know,

how the heck do I pitch this up and make sure that that's something that

we can actually execute on and tell that story and all that stuff. So yeah,

Ryan, we will have to have you back at some point to chat about maybe

some more content specific things, but this was a super fun conversation on

mentality, on mindset shift, on trying to weigh out what the heck to

do. And it was a blast, man. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me.

All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode of Distribution

first, and thank you for listening all the way through. I appreciate you

so, so much and I hope you're able to apply what you learned in

this episode one way or another, into your content strategy as

well. Speaking of strategy, we have a lot of things going on this year that

are going to help you build your brand ten x your content and transform

the way you do content marketing. Make sure to subscribe to the show and sign

up for my newsletter at Justinsimon Co. So you don't miss

a thing. I look forward to serving you in the next episode as well. And

until then, take care and I'll see you next time.