Hey there,

In this edition of monthly meditations:

• My beginner's journey in swimming
• A business update and how we might've set our goal too low
• A workshop where I taught a skill that accelerated my career
• A friend I’ve enjoyed watching grow his business

1. On my mind: The joy of being a beginner

When I think about learning, I intentionally go beyond professional and career development.

I want to also develop skills outside of what I do for work. It keeps life interesting.

People who know me well know I’m not a strong swimmer. I’ve felt insecure about it for most of my life. I’m a strong athlete on land. I love running, lifting weights, and jumping over things, but remove me from solid ground and I’m flailing.

So I started taking swimming lessons in 2019. It was rough.

I started my lessons comfortable standing in water and being fully submerged. I could swim freestyle and do a few strokes but I held my breath and I freaked out when I realized I was going too far from the edge of the pool. So naturally I'd try to stand, but I’d be too far for my feet to touch the ground. That resulted in me scrambling to get back to the shallow end.

I was afraid of drowning.

I felt fine swimming laps across the pool with the help of styrofoam noodles and kick boards.

But eventually we removed the floaties and moved to using fins to practice our kicking. Fins felt like a cheat code.

Eventually during one session, my coach says, “Okay I think you’re ready to remove the fins and floaties.”

My remember taking a few seconds to process what she had said.

The narrative in my head continued looping, “I’m not a swimmer. I’m not a swimmer. I’m not a swimmer.”

How the hell was I supposed to swim across the pool without any floaties?

Well, the worse case scenario was I’d start struggling, then my instructor would save me. So there’s no way I’d die unless if my instructor somehow slipped, fell, became unconscious, and left me for dead.

But there’s also a life guard…

Wait, what am I doing?

Oh yeah, I’m about to prove to myself that I don’t need floatation devices to swim across a pool.

So I positioned myself, kicked off the wall and started my freestyle strokes.

One, two, breathe. One, two, breathe. One, two, breathe.

I stared at the bottom of the pool and realized I continuing to move forward.

My excitement almost got the best of me as I felt my pulse accelerate.

Then it happened.

I hit my head on the concrete wall… on the other side of the pool.

I made it.

Forget that I was lightheaded and probably bruised the top of my head.

I made it.

I swam across an entire fucking pool by myself.

The self-narrative I held for 3 decades was now completely shattered.

Lessons stopped during the pandemic but I picked them back up the moment the pool was open again.

Even though I knew I could swim across the pool on my own, I felt the same nerves as I did from my first day of class.

“What if I lost it? I’m not a strong swi—nope. None of that. I’ve already proven that narrative wrong.”

I was back to swimming across the pool on my own again.

Last went, I went scuba diving in Hawaii.

I freaked out for the first 10 minutes as I got used to being fully submerged in the ocean, but eventually got a little more comfortable.

Looking back, it feels surreal and it’s a little hard to believe I actually did that.

As we become more settled in our career and lives, it's easy to stick to what we know.

But there's an unmatched joy in being a beginner in something and feeling yourself improve.

What are you currently a beginner at?

2. Business Update

Something happened in the last month. It seems like all the long-term bets we made like producing a podcast, writing blog posts, building backlinks, and developing partnerships are starting to pay off big time. Our sales pipeline grew really quickly.

Alex (who heads up our sales) had 9 sales calls with new prospects in one week! I guess this means we’re out of the summer slump. Though I'm remaining paranoid and reminding myself this might just be temporary.

Things are ramping up faster than I anticipated and we’re gearing up for scale.

That means hiring.

We’re hiring for an SEO Content Strategist. Know anyone? I’ll pay you $2000 if we hire the person you refer.

Now let’s talk numbers. We had a target of $1M in revenue this year… that ended up being too easy and we hit that goal in June. So we raised our target to $1.5M. It looks like we’re going to exceed that too.

Now we're starting to plan for 2023 and figuring out what our goals should be.

We have a team offsite this week in Boston and will be attending INBOUND.

Will you be around?

3. Created

Things I’ve produced:

• Workshop: I was excited to teach a workshop on how to build a growth model for content and SEO strategies. I believe my career growth was accelerated because I learned how to use data to tell stories and pitch executives on projects. It also helped me develop my executive communication skills by being able to map my projects to business impact. I’d like to see more of this in the content marketing and SEO space. Rather than just talking about content quality or keyword rankings, let’s talk about business opportunity and impact.
• The Long Game podcast: Interviewed Thomas Smale, CEO of FE International, a leading advisory firm for mergers and acquisition.
• Case study: Published a case study with Jasper.ai, about how we helped them grow organic sessions 415% and blog-attributed signups 121X (not a typo), resulting in over $1M in blog-attributed annual recurring revenue. Forreal.

4. Consumed

Things I’ve been enjoying:

📚 Reading: Scaling Up. As part of Entrepreneur’s Organization, we attend quarterly day-long workshops with prework required. This quarterly I read the “Cash” section of Scaling Up (we previously went over the “Execution” section).

🎧 Listening: In the spirit of my recent trip to Hawaii, Somewhere Over the Rainbow. This song tends to put me in a nostalgic mood and gets me to zoom out from the day-to-day of life. I first heard it when I watched the TV show Scrubs as a teenager and heard it again in the movie 50 First Dates. It stuck. So it was a special moment hearing this song playing in Honolulu.

👀 Watching: I’m not watching anything right now so I’ll take a different approach here. I’ve enjoyed watching a friend Adriell Mayes, aka everygotdamndre, grow his business over the years. I learned about him from another friend, tried some of his programs, then trained with him for a few months. We’ve continued to keep in touch and it’s awesome seeing more people follow his programs and him get interviewed on the Mark Bell podcast. Highly recommend his Barbell and Kettlebell Functional Muscle Building program.

Cheers,
David

P.S. Find out what I'm up to on my blog and reading list and connect with me on Twitter.

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​​About me: I'm a co-founder of Omniscient Digital, a content marketing agency helping B2B software companies turn content into a growth channel.

P.S. Check out my reading list or blog to see what I'm up to and connect with me on Twitter.

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