WIG Framework, Against Monk Mode, Coining Terms, Subtle Signals, and why I did not like 4000 weeks
Hey!
Why you’re getting this: I'm Jakob Greenfeld. I run Sales.co and this is my personal newsletter. I send this every month or so to interesting people I’ve connected with and friends I want to keep in touch with. You can unsubscribe at any time, and I won't be mad. I won't even be notified!
Here’s what I’ve been up to recently.
I wrote about why Monk Mode doesn’t work, the weird proxies for wellbeing I’m using, and the one thing everyone gets wrong when optimizing cold email campaigns.
I read 4000 Weeks and did not like it at all. My best theory for why it is so popular is that that it makes lazy unambitious people feel good about themselves. There’s clearly a huge market for that and kudos to Oliver Burkeman for tapping into that. Wrote more about it here.
Something we’re testing at Sales.co right now is the Wildly Important Goal (WIG) framework. I first learned about it in this book summary. The idea is to define one WIG (positive replies for us), create a scoreboard around it, then do weekly WIG sessions.
WIG sessions are fast-paced, 1-1 meetings, where each team member reports on individual commitments made the previous session, we review the scoreboard together, learn and problem-solve, and make new commitments for the upcoming week. We previously did something similar in a weekly group call but less structured and focused.
Screenshots of our WIG scoreboard that I built in Airtable below.
😌 Dope stuff
Some of my favorite things since the last newsletter (note: I don’t get paid to recommend anything here):
👨💻Cool App. I’ve started using the Matter app to save articles I want to read later. I love that it allows me to subscribe to RSS feeds and that I’m able to shake my phone to shuffle the articles that are shown in my queue. Extremely useful to find new interesting things to read and resurface articles I saved a while ago.
🧨 Recaps. A few end-of-year recaps I enjoyed reading: Fred Rivet’s, Corey Haines’, Ryan Doyle’s.
🧭 Article. I loved reading Follow The Clues by Paul Miller. One key insight for me is the importance of coining terms. Lots of people on the internet talk and write about the same ideas and concepts. But whoever does the best job at summarizing it in terms of a catchy phrase usually reaps all the rewards. Looking back at my own blog posts it’s obvious that my most popular ones are the ones the ones where I coined a term like “Insight Porn”. It’s not a gimmicky hack but actually a useful exercise to be more concise and express ideas in a way that allows them to be shared easily. One of the goals I set for myself this year is to coin more terms.
Another takeaway was to be more mindful of subtle signals. Most successful projects done have millions of people ready to buy at day one. Usually a tiny number of people that love the project in the early days is all the validation you should be looking for. Paul, for example, had 25 people ask him to write a book initially. That’s a tiny number. But it was a strong enough signal for him to actually write it and it turned into a massive bestseller.🙋♂️ Ask. We’re looking to hire a new Cold Email Concierge at Sales.co. If you (or someone you know) are interested in joining a small team to build the future of cold outbound, we’d love to chat!
Talk soon,
Jakob