Weekly Good Things 2024 - Week 17
Good Things, and the Weekly Meal Plan.
Hello! Hello! Welcome to another weekly episode of Good Things where I give you a peek into my everyday life during the week, and roundup my good links, ideas, books, and more.
Happy Monday!
This weekend I spent a lot of time outside, walking, running, talking with neighborhood buddies (last night’s evening conversation with Timou’s parents was about the upcoming season of Bridgerton, Rancatore’s ice cream for dinner, and pop tarts), and re-charging. I also ended up taking an unexpected 75 minute vinyasa class on Sunday morning doing some tech support for one of our teachers. It was lovely!
Spending Out
Sometimes I think there’s value in not finishing things – it can weed out the things that really *don’t* need to be prioritized in life. But most of the time, I get fulfillment and satisfaction out of closing loops, finishing mid-stream projects, and “spending out” on things I already have invested in. I try to keep short lists of things to spend out, including:
My TBR list “to be read”, and books I need to finish. I don’t always finish books though – sometimes the closing the loop here is simply adding a half read book to my “put down for now” list. (Which is like a soft-ghosting for books I’m decently sure I will never want to finish.
Courses and Resources I’ve registered for but haven’t completed, finished reading, or I want to continue on self-paced: right now some of the ones I’m working through include my ProHort horticulture course, Katelyn Bourgoin’s Clarity Calls, Simone Seol’s Way of the Dragon (looking forward to her copywriting course: Way of the Sword. There’s a new month of Ship30 coming up.
Newsletters to review: I can’t read all the newsletters I’d like as they come in, so every month I usually sit down and do a deep dive reading a handful of backlogged newsletters from one person at a time, and take notes. (It’s like binging a Netflix show!)
Gift cards: Starbucks, Prairie Fire. I had 150 credits to Feast and Fettle, a delivery service who announced they were closing their neighborhood shop, so I spent out on my dinners for the week!
A Short List of Resources I already have access to as a reminder instead of buying new things: the library, Kanopy, Hoopla. A handful of passes to Planet Fitness if I need a change of scenery.
Self Care items I know make me happy that I could use: eye masks in the fridge. Impress nails.
Marketing Ompractice
One of the big projects I’m working on this quarter is building out our D2C (direct to consumer) marketing for Ompractice! We’ve built our business for the past seven years primarily serving businesses who buy platform access for their members, employees, or patients, but it’s time again to spend some focus on individuals!
Here are just some of the things we are doing to support spreading the word:
A Scratch Plan and a Rolling Roadmap: I’m *very good* at creating comprehensive marketing plans for companies with a good amount of budgets and resources – it’s a lot harder to build out for yourself! What is on our content roadmap? How do we better share our classes, challenges, success stories of our students, and content to support the needs of our community? What kind of questions and feedback loops do we build?
Target Audience: this one is interesting because we have a lot of different people using Ompractice! For this purpose, we’ve been looking at who is the most successful at using Ompractice right now who is already paying for the platform themselves, and how do we find more of them! (And build more content and features to support them as we go along!) Right now, this skews 50+, tech savvy, and wants to stay active! (We also over-index on Nurses!)
Where do we find these people? A fun exercise I used to do for clients – make a list of 100 places where you know your people are! Where are they NOT that you might assume at first glance they would be?
What makes us unique? Pains, Gains, and Jobs to be done: this is diving deep into the challenges of our students. What are their goals? What does success look like for them? (This is actually a very fun project - we have thousands of reviews and testimonials from folks, so I’m going through and looking at how people describe the impact in their own words!) There’s also an external research component: how are people on the internet talking about what we do in facebook groups, Reddit forums, etc?
Student Interviews: it’s incredible the amount of insights you can get when you *talk to your customers*.
Experimentation: when you have a lot of ideas, how do you prioritize and test them? Experiments! We have a range of experiments to test, from building out a “freemium page” with more free resources for folks to try us out, to ads in newsletters, to focusing marketing on some of our specific niche classes like pelvic floor mobility.
Referral engines: for any company, your best customers come from referrals from your existing ones! We’ve needed to build the infrastructure (ie: links! asks!) for a while, so we’re prioritizing this!
People who can help: I’m also making a list of people who can help us. It’s far too easy to fall into the anxiety trap when starting new things – I always remember to ask for the helpers! For this, I’ve started to work out: who is already working with people who might be great potential students in our community?
Podcasts, Panels, Blogs, and Social Groups: I’m a big believer of just getting in front of people. To this end, I’m looking to speak on more podcasts, and directly in groups on the topics of self care, wellness, starting a new fitness habit, or re-starting one – and more.
If you want a free membership to test things out, reply and I’ll give you a link! (If you have ideas for me, or just want to shoot the shit on D2C marketing, send me a note!)
This Week in Good Things
AARP Innovation Founders Summit. I spent a few days with other founders working on AgeTech in one of my favorite Boston venues - the State Room! I put some of my highlights on my LinkedIn Weekly Good Things (work edition). Connection is good for the soul.
Passover Treats: my mom made Matzah bark with a dark caramel and a melted Terry’s chocolate orange which was *incredible*. (Here in neighborhood news, the new bagel shop AND Otto pizza just opened within blocks of me the week of Passover, so looking forward to next week’s eats.
Building up my steps for the start of GVRAT, my summer virtual race that I’ve been participating in for the past four years! Our Circumpolar Race Around The World Team also hit the 12th (and final-ish) stage of our virtual race. We’ve collectively navigated thousands and thousands of miles since we started 3+ years ago!
Good Questions
🧐 One of the best questions I read this week was: “Who would play your parents in a biopic?” My split second response is usually Stephen Colbert and Julia Louis-Dreyfuss (although more Larry David than Colbert personality-wise.)
Also, identifying people who look like other people is a superpower of mine. If you are curious about yourself or your parents, ask me, and I will do my best to pattern-match you to a celebrity better than an AI would.
Level up your movie-watching: If you are a film watcher, you must subscribe to Letterboxd. Alongside the functionality of being able to track, review, and share movies you watch, they just have great thorough newsletters about film that I always want to sit down and really read.
More Good Things:
📖 Reading: (Still) working my way through the 1200+ page book series The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson. I’m on Oathbringer. I’m also looking forward to Emily Henry’s new book Funny Story which is coming out this week.
✍️ Explore: This was a nice list of general life advice that isn’t the stock advice “Discover people whom you love doing “nothing” with, and do nothing with them on a regular basis. The longer you can maintain those relationships, the longer you will live.”
📺 Watching: I’ve been party-watching Renegade Nell on Disney+. (The Showrunner also created Happy Valley and Gentleman Jack – I will say, this is NOT a PG show. It’s visually stunning, with some unexplained magic, jaunty music, and violence. It’s also great.
❄️ Tackling a nagging task: my mail has been diverted to my neighbors front porch, so I wrote a note for the postal folks.
🛍 Good Acquisitions: I tend to buy quite a bit less than the average consumer and then wait for quite some time to research and purchase the exact item I want. I have a list of things that I want to buy that sit in a deferred place for a while: do I *really* want this item? Do I need this item? Is this the right thing for the job? I pulled the trigger on both the DJI Osmo3 Creator Combo, and a Shure MV7+ microphone that I mentioned last week. My job now is to actually create a short list of how and when I’m actually going to use these things.
🌸 Flowers of the Week: Butterfly ranunculus in my flower share. Being a local at a conference, I also got to go home with two gorgeous bouquets!
🤣 Memes and randomness of the week:
The Weekly Meal Plan:
This week I had to unexpectedly use up credits for a food delivery service, so I didn’t need to batch cook this weekend. I’ll be heading on Friday to my high school reunion where they will be feeding us (delicious) food. If I could break into my high school to eat on a regular basis, I would.
Bean of the week: none this week! Still have to eat down my Coco beans.
Sunday: Shrimp and Mango Salad with peanuts, cabbage, lime, and added a little more salmon in there.
Monday: Pesto chicken breasts with roasted cherry tomatoes
Tuesday: Flank steak with adobo roasted cauliflower chimichurri
Wednesday: Bahn Mi Burgers with spicy thai basil aioli
Thursday: Grilled Steak Fajitas with lime crema
Friday: New Hampshire!
Lunches: Salmon with red peppers and marinated artichokes and beans, lamb vindaloo, tadka dal and yogurt. Orange chicken thighs over cabbage and mint salad.
Snacks: Yogurt and berries, yogurt with lemon and nuts, eggs, cottage cheese, cheese sticks. Turkey Chomps.
Treat options: Been working my way a tiny slice at a time through my Tokyo Gateau. It’s a flourless chocolate cake/bar with eggs, sugar, and chocolate.
🥑 Good Eats from this past week: Beef birria. Rice bowl with lamb, broccoli, and ginger. Berry crisp my mom made over yogurt.
What are you eating this week?
Previous Years:
Something I really enjoy doing is flipping back in my journal or my blog to the week of the year over the past several years. When I write it out in a list like this, it feels like a nice accomplishment!
Random note from observing the data this week: almost no posts on my blogs the last week of April in any past years (probably was delighted to spend hours outside!!)
2019: Good Things Week 16
2017: The Weekly Meal Plan
2015: Spring Commitments: Healthy Habits (I still focus on all of these almost a decade later!)
That’s all for now! Hope you have a great week!
xo, Sam