Nathanael Yellis

This week, we're returning to some of the topics that have always popped up in this email: tech and politics.

Peggy Noonan's column on Prince Harry, published last week, ended with a broader thought about privacy. It has all of the pearl-clutching and "back in my day" of a good Noonan column, but I think her point is worth quoting at length:

After taking a few years off, I got back to badge-earning by finishing HubSpot Academy's Revenue Operations certification on September 16th. This course was almost as wide-ranging as my HubSpot consulting role: it covered everything from strong sales process definition to the Lean SixSigma definition of waste to accounting basics to hiring. Any role in operations, whether you're a team of one or dozens, is similarly wide-ranging.

Every time we think email is dying, it returns.

Marketing success requires knowing your business and how to reach your customers. The secret sauce for digital success adds an eye for the opportunities in the evolving digital space. For example, when I was a digital marketer for a political non-profit, I generated good results by borrowing ideas from B2C digital (emails like Apple) and political campaigns (Facebook like Obama).

I’ve picked CRM systems a few times. Some flopped immediately, others worked at first but were outgrown, and only rarely did the CRM provide long-term value. But it’s those CRMs that stuck around that were the best: CRMs only add value if you keep them!

After starting my career in the family business (taxes!) and then shifting to non-profit work, I now work in technology. I’ve noticed a thruline: everyone complains about how little they make. The most common reason my friends have had for switching jobs is to increase their salary.

This is my third try at a podcast. In 2004-6, I hosted a short-lived podcast (MindPlacebo) with my brother Andrew. It was really fun for us to record. I'm not sure why anyone listened. But listen they did: we reached about 60 people per episode and began a regular listener mailbag, where people wrote in and we made jokes about their emails.

The Importance of position and place.

My career has taken me to three cities, working for four companies in at least four distinct positions. It has been a bit of a sojourn, but there are through lines to each place and position and even in the pivots in between. I come back to these pivots and lines when talking to others about their career choices. When it goes well, it's usually because we've learned something, when it goes poorly, it's usually because we've ignored the same lesson. Thus, I thought my story and an exploration of the good and bad reasons behind each pivot may help your career planning. Thus this essay is my attempt to tell the story of a career in pivots.

It was a big launch meeting: here’s the new CRM! My pitch was polished; the screenshots and demos were airtight. We gathered in the conference room, but then the whole thing landed with a thud.

When I’d finished the first part of the presentation and was about to switch into the demo, the first question was, “do we have to use this?” Followed up with a senior partner musing, “yeah, why do we even need a CRM?”

We hadn't even launched, and the CRM implementation was about to fail.

When starting a consulting call these days, the first thing everyone discusses is how COVID-19 and its self-quarantine impacts our lives. But, aside from now working from home, the COVID-19 quarantine doesn’t disrupt my life all that much.

Why? I live a calm lifestyle, constructed from simple, repeating patterns. With work and home, parenting and hobbies, my life alternates work and rest. It’s a life to be lived consistently for decades. The kind from which you don’t need a vacation. It’s a calm life: valuing simplicity over complexity, time over speed, limits over stimuli.

Image: Phil Roeder

Jonah Goldberg has a great podcast. It’s a great reflection of the traditionally conservative but Trump-skeptical. He’s a center-right pundit who’s maintained some sense of true north and a modicum of straight talk amidst the recent turbulence. That’s rare. Now he’s launching, along with two partners, a media company called The Dispatch.

A friend wrote:

I’m neck-deep in planning for a migration to Salesforce, which has exposed some fascinating differences in philosophy. Salesforce is, in principle, infinitely customizable, which leads to this dispute: leaving intact the system’s core data structure (based on B2B), or gutting Salesforce’s data structure to power the simplicity of future usage.

How should you approach structuring a new Salesforce instance? If, for example, your company doesn’t think in terms of leads, opportunities, and accounts, would you use those as the default objects or would you use something custom? On the one hand, a custom CRM architecture feels both simpler and better, but on the other hand you’d end up losing a fair amount of any CRM’s interoperability, extensability, and, likely, outside expertise.

From the beginning, I’ve been impressed with Michael Marinaccio’s work. The latest chapter in his writing promises to be the best yet. People Over Product puts technology in its proper context.

Acton taught me how to be an entrepreneur: in the classroom I learned to make the critical decisions required to lead my own company.

Rejecting conventional wisdom to leave vendors out could result in operational leverage and a competitive edge.

As I prepare for a short trip to DC this weekend, I culled a few essays on cities, how we govern them, what we find in them, and how we grow them. There’s something really cool about DC or Boston or New York. Just below the surface lie intractable challenges. From expensive housing to expensive infrastructure to expensive salads, cities are expensive. Many are left behind by soaring costs. In the articles below, you’ll see liberals, capitalists, environmentalists, and rich people all blamed for the problems of cities. Most of this is probably wrong, but some good ideas start out with a wrong idea. Enjoy the reading and enjoy your city!

Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

We started with an outline: a set assumptions about who the audience was, what they needed, and the message we wanted them to hear.

I use Buffer to schedule some of my social posts. (I'm special, but for other reasons: 2.4 million people also use Buffer.)

People seem to think my presentations look nice. They sure don't start out that way. The ugly phase is critical to getting it nice.

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics by Ross Douthat
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Rossetti: his life and works by Evelyn Waugh

In our latest episode of Own Your Platform, the podcast I host with Isaiah McPeak, we talked about the way I launched a website. We'd gone through the whole process: ideation, alpha and beta tests, and now were ready to launch the Sentinel Hub. Sentinels gathered in Atlanta for an annual conference, and I had ten minutes to present the site and motivate them to use it.

Human upper class work has evolved, in the 21st century affluence of America, into something most closely resembling worldwide leisure. We talk, send messages, argue a bit, peer into screens, and read. Why do we get so frustrated? Why do we rarely relax after a long day, basking in the afterglow of hard work done well?

Over the summer of 2014, I started readying a new blog: Mr. Money Mustache. His style is pretty fun--way more readable than most frugality and personal finance blogs. His tips are actionable and he's entertaining.

Calculating basis for securities, for tax purposes, is difficult when you reinvest dividends. So it's a feature for brokerage statements to show the total number of shares owned and one's basis in those shares. They're doing the hard math for you.

Don't read a masterpiece like this when you're on vacation. Just don't do it. As you smell and taste summers and early autumns in the French Atlantic coast, you'll think that buying a summer cottage is a good idea. And why wouldn't it be, in August when you're in Maine for a long week?

Unlike many of the books in my 50 in 2014 project, this is a classic Yellis read: non-fiction with an attitude of zen.

Simplicity Parenting was worth reading. Instead of adding more layers of rules and guilt and responsibility, the authors give you things to forget about doing. In a culture that wonders if leaving your kids with a sitter when they are 15 months old will cause them as 55 year olds to be slightly sad, surely our parenting needs some editing, and this book is a good place to start.

This review has been in my queue for a while. It's seems more vitriolic than I remember feeling about this book. The Dirty Life was enjoyable to read. The author was good.

My theory, emerging during this 50 in 2014 project, is: Great literature both motivates you to read and makes you think for a long time afterwards.

Jordan is living a life that intrigues me. A politico and digital guy, he started a real company.

Good authors are fun to read; great authors' words resonate for months.

Baseball. Summer is about listening to, talking about, and sometimes watching our national pastime.

While in high school, I worked at Wallingford Farm, a somewhat touristy food and garden store. My coworkers were an odd mix of local workers: people spending a lifetime in dead-end jobs along with some high-school students like me. As a fairly privileged and definitely homeschooled kid, Wallingford was quite the learning experience.

When a book becomes a movie, watching a few trailers gives away the plot. This is usually enough to keep me away. When I saw Life of Pi on the side of the road, I almost didn't pick it up. But, free books. The movie didn't tell me the best part of the story: the first hundred pages or so are all about how a spiritually inquisitive teenager finds religions.

There's great baseball and then there's great baseball stories. I'd put Ball Four up there for both, because both the story and the way this book is written are reminiscent of what makes baseball great.

I haven't read much about the unglamorous transitions of history. That's one reason, in retrospect, that I found Macaulay incredible. For all of the words written about 1775-1800, 1840-60 in Europe aren't routinely in my thinking.

Even weeks after reading Jesusland, I still can't wrap my head around it. My brother Andrew had a great theory, which he introduced via a bizarre theatre of the mind text conversation loosely based on what the author was trying to say to him and I through her ending to this book. And that theory is that just as the author was deeply and irreparably injured by her parents via her childhood, she delivers a blow in this book that you can't recover from.

Sad, but in a riveting way. One of those "fiction" books that you know it's real. Too real.

I've spent this week almost catching up on the reviews I owe my 2014 resolution. While the full review below was a fun one to write, I think I missed the most important point: honest religious writing by an unreligious person is worthwhile reading.

Another great nonfiction read. Many lessons to learn from the revolution in TV. Not the least of which: if I'm so deep into the daily grind of an industry, will I even know if I'm part of a universe-bending trend? (No.)

This tale of ranch life in California brings me back to the classic Little Britches. There was a world that seemed to intersect with mine--a self-important twelve year old (check) who had familial connections to Maine (check) and was raised in a pre-modern era (what?). Yet it transported me to another dimension. Here, Steinbeck did the same.

As you can see below, this was a hard one to review. Mostly because, while it had a point, it was an exceptional story. Rare is the book that can both deliver the entire plot in the first page and then place a riveting hold on your attention throughout.

I may have read to many business autobiographies, but this one was better than average. It continues the theme of learning history through biography, an emerging trend in my fifty books effort.

It's no surprise to my regular readers: I'm behind. The goal for 2014, which Andrew inspired me to set, is to not only read fifty books, but also to write about them, here. Thus this series of posts. I've read eleven books, putting me over 20% of the way there, but have four or five read but not blogged, thus putting me further behind. Here's a book I read in January, after picking it up at a used bookstore in Alexandria. This is the placeholder I wrote to remind me to make the full post:

Another weekend, another book. Read this great, short story in a few sittings yesterday morning. Aside from increasing my usual premonitions of guilt and lingering doom, not bad for a weekend. We found this book on the sidewalk Saturday afternoon. Another reason to love Capitol Hill: we have erudite, generous neighbors that just leave old books on the sidewalk for us to read.

This book was more personal than I expected. My grandfather, great uncle, and others of that generation in my mother's family were religious leaders. Life Magazine profiled my great uncle, Rev. Dr. Robert Emery Baggs, in his pastorate in Illinois. He and three others led a large mainline Baptist church. My grandfather led efforts around Boston for the Salvation Army. Both contributed to the grand social visions of the postwar church.

This book is well worth your time: online advertising isn't fundamentally different from offline. Internet marketers, I'm talking to you: take a lesson from 1927.

Learning history through biographies is a lost discipline. I hope to regain it during this 50 in 2014 effort.

The Sea is My Brother by Jack Kerouac
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

While you have to endure several characters whose role is to preach Eggers' views on the Internet, this is an inspiring book.

The phone rang four times.

I entered a contest to win a Chevy!

My last post recommended The Power of Habit, which I recently finished. At the end of the post, I proposed a set of questions that connect the habit loop with marketing. Here's how we the habit loop guided development of our legislative scorecard website.

Humans are creatures of habit.

And then I realized my incessant news reading helps me win:

What's more American than Memorial Day and baseball?

Number of the day: 0.59. That's the correlation coefficient between an MLB franchise's rank in spending and power ranking.

My brother had a short-lived Tumblr called the Sunday Evening Post. It was a good piece of internet: a few links, some commentary, and regularly published on Sunday nights.

Jim Messina sent this to me:

Nat Ward has a helpful post on combatting web page friction, the stuff that causes people to click away before converting.

Hey everyone: yesterday we crossed a threshold: over 20,000 pageviews in the lifetime of this little blog.

Acton taught me how to be an entrepreneur: in the classroom pit I learned to make the critical decisions a small company needs for success.

Now I work in a 15 person affiliate of a 250+ person non-profit organization. Does what I learned at Acton apply to my current work?

I remembered coming to the Loaf with Pat to ski back in Dec1985. Happy B'day my love. U would be so proud of everyone. Miss you so much.
— Mark Yellis (@myellis) December 17, 2012

Gotta love his Twitter picture:

Technology's Role

Jim Collins, in Good to Great, said companies use technology well when they use it to solely accelerate their momentum. Only when it makes what is already happening better can technology help make a good company great.

Gorgeous:

I agree with Gizmodo. This could sell a lot of two hundred dollar tablets.

Yesterday morning, I received an email from Facebook's person for DC-area political organizations. The message previewed a few things that political page managers would like, but one is huge change for Facebook.

View from Saturday's seats:

I used my Capitol Bike Share membership for three quick rides this morning:

Source: frugaldad.com

I love getting email. This one not so much:

Thanks to my new favorite person, I'm using Google+.

It is no good then behaving as an arm-chair critic and disputing the issue, for that is to refuse to face the facts. Nor is opportunism any help, for that is to...

I've talked a lot in public; I'm good at talking. But this time, I could barely make myself audible.