The Thread #5
Back in the groove, building towards 1,000 subscribers, with Phil Parkinson and Jensen Huang on the way
I’m genuinely delighted with my small and growing subscriber list, and even more delighted by the way people are engaging with it. The open rates are high, and the readership is already reaching well beyond the number of subscribers. Every time I see those figures come in, I notice. The people who’ve found this are reading it, sharing it, and staying with it. That means a great deal.
Thank you.
Now, what’s coming.
I’ve been putting in the hours on a piece about Phil Parkinson. If you’ve been watching Welcome to Wrexham, you’ll know the man: direct, blunt, and not shy about his language. What I’m working on is what’s underneath all of that. Because behind the directness and the swearing, there is a subtle craft at work. He weaves confidence and mental strength into his players in a way that most people watching wouldn’t spot.
I’ve been going through dozens of YouTube interviews, reading press reports, pulling apart the patterns beneath the language. It’s intense work against the clock, but I’m thrilled with what’s coming out of it. This will be the next entry in the Pressure Test series. I’m aiming to have it ready for the weekend.
After that, Jensen Huang. The CEO of NVIDIA. I came across him on Lex Fridman’s podcast, and he made a big impression on me.
He has a way of thinking about success, failure, and pressure that has clearly helped him enormously, and there are parts of it anyone can pick up and use. My working title is A Mindset Anyone Can Copy to Be Successful at Anything. I want it ready for next week, though there is so much material to work through that it may take a couple of weeks yet.
I feel back in my groove. I’m loving the work again.
I mention this because, for a while, I didn’t feel that way.
A few newsletters back I touched on this. My dog died after sixteen years. Then my mum died after a short battle with leukaemia at ninety-one.
Neither was tragic in the way some losses are. She had a long life and was sharp until near the end. But they were sad, and both happened at exactly the moment I was putting this work out into the world for the first time.
I published before I was truly ready, and I knew it. Here’s why.
It took me six years to write the book. Six years. I had told my mum it would take six months. She was supportive in the way she always was, which included a gentle, recurring nudge: “Marky, this is taking a long time. Are you sure you’re focused on it?” That would sting a little. I never let her know.
When the book was finally finished and the site was coming together, she fell ill. I wanted her to see it published. So I hit the button before I was ready. When I told her, I’m not entirely sure she fully understood. But I’m glad I did, it was published two days before she passed.
The early posts didn’t catch people’s attention quite the way I’d hoped. Some of you know I’ve worked through the PTSD that was part of my life for years, but when I’m just a little below my best, a setback can still unsettle me. This one did, for about four days. A proper slump, which isn’t like me.
I want to share how I came through that short slump, because the ideas I’ve been writing about genuinely helped.
I fixed my attention on the Outcome: my first 1,000 subscribers. I have 105 right now, as I write this. When I’m focused this way, I find that my breathing slows and the tension in my shoulders drops.
When I face a barrier, or an idea doesn’t work, instead of knocking me off course, I just reset and try the next thing. It becomes incremental, continuous experimentation: new ideas, small adjustments, I keep going.
I learned this from Peter Kaufman and wrote it up in a piece about his 22-second Leadership Course. It’s one of my favourite posts, and somehow it found almost nobody. I’ll republish it soon.
The other thing I did is Manage Your State, and this is something I wrote about in the Pressure Test piece on Joe Rogan, and that you’ll see again in the Phil Parkinson one: treat each setback as information. Not as a verdict.
When you see it that way, it stays external. It doesn’t say anything about who you are. It doesn’t pull me back into the old pattern. It just tells you that one approach didn’t work, so go for the next one.
The third thing was Practice Rapport. There was a neighbour’s party I really didn’t want to go to. I wasn’t feeling it at all, but I didn’t want to let him down, so I went. I just practised rapport with a few people there. Nothing more than that.
The oxytocin released in that kind of genuine human connection works both ways, and I came out of that party, right at the end of that four-day period, feeling good again. If you’ve read about IMP in Part 2 of my book, you’ll know exactly what I mean by that.
As I write this, it’s a cold grey English morning, drizzle is running down the window, and when I’m done here, I’m heading over to my mum’s flat to clear some more of her things to get it ready for the market.
And I feel good, quite cheery, actually. I love writing for you.
Thanks so much for reading.
Mark
The book is free to read. If you haven’t found it yet. Jacqui’s story is the best place to start.
