Nathanael Yellis

In my years as a consultant, I cooked up lots of interesting concepts for people to use their software tools to work differently. The work of identifying the root cause of solvable challenges, finding the conceptual ingredients for a solution, and then demoing the new way kept me busy. It's really engaging work! But coming up with a new (easier!, better!, etc.) way of working wasn't enough. You had to make the ideas resonate. It takes work to translate cool new solutions into real world language. Using demos, interactive proofs of concept, etc. go a long way in landing new ideas in a way that makes people want to adopt them. But even with the best communications and change management, new ways of working often failed to stick. A quick example: a short few months after configuring everyone's Outlook to talk with their CRM automatically, I'd learn the sales team returned to using whiteboards to track conversations and emailed Excel sheets to project new sales.

This Fall, I'll spend a few weekly evenings collecting kids from soccer practices and most Saturdays watching a youth soccer games. It's interesting to see how kids learn soccer. It's certainly not how adults would learn it. Adults might start running in mid-summer to get in shape and watch soccer on TV and tutorials on YouTube. Kids play soccer in the street. One of them has decided that, new for this year, when he plays goalie, he'll use his hands. The other let us know that he's observed his coach sometimes telling the boys, at the end of practice, that they didn't really pay attention and probably need to get clued in more to make practice useful, but other times the coach doesn't say that. The kid found this curious, because he thinks all practices are about the same.

I've spent the week in the modern marketer's paradise: a convention center temporarily dedicated to HubSpot's software. Everything from the billboards to the floorboards has been emblazoned with HubSpot's advertising. We've had all twenty thousand eyeballs on HubSpot's leaders, as they told us what's the latest in the wider world of go-to-market and how the HubSpot software will respond with new feature after new feature. Even the colors are new: HubSpot's brand underwent a redesign. It's been a totally new week dedicated to totally new things. All eyes forward.

In 2021-2, you couldn't escape Pretend It's a City. Or, at least, when I opened Netflix, I couldn't escape its auto-playing trailer. (Netflix autoplay! My kids still recognize Michael Scott as the guy who says, "Please say, I'm the best..." from the autoplay before they switched to kids mode.) Fran Lebowitz's titular joke tries to get people to behave like they're in a city, like not stopping in the middle of a busy sidewalk to take a picture. It's funny, like much of her humor, because it's obvious: the people she's yelling about are literally in NYC. "Pretend" does an interesting job, asking us to think about what is obviously all around us. I think about the joke whenever I encounter the common bits of antisocial behavior in suburban life. Examples abound. What if the guy running a video call without headphones on the commuter rail would pretend it's a train? What if the the guy complaining about all the other cars on the road, holding up his progress, would pretend it's a busy street? What if the guy who's lost patience with his kids (it's me) would pretend they're little kids? Pretend is a lot more playful than my impulse, which is to yell at the trivially antisocial that they are terrible.

I last wrote a weekly email when the long days of June were still lengthening. Now, it's dark before 8pm

My company sorta takes the week of July 4th off. It started as an almost-everyone being offline for a week; it lingers as we tend to take the week simultaneously. Coming back not having missed much is a small gift. In the explainer for this practice, the HR people wrote, "taking time off is productive." The crank in me wonders, is it, really?

It takes a while to understand the meaning of events. It seems to me that it takes even longer in the places where our immediate knowledge of the facts is the quickest. The relentless updates from ESPN on the tv in my office breakroom probably have the lowest signal to noice ratio, even though, if you want to know the latest about sports, you'll want to watch ESPN. Journalism may be the first draft of history, but it's not that great of a draft. What makes the first draft so rough is its vastness: immediate and omnipresent reaction from all journalists (and pundits) to everything in real time. With the basic facts of events seemingly up for dispute, it can take years for the dust to settle and our understanding to become clear.

When I started at HubSpot, I joined everyone newly hired to the customer success team for a two-week stint of product training. The culmination was a presentation, where we had to demonstrate a fully built marketing effort for a fake business using HubSpot's marketing software. We had to configure a website, set up forms, create some email automations, and, if I recall, publish some social posts. The big boss of product training would review our setups and pass (or fail!) us at the end of the first two weeks. Nothing focuses the mind like a real deadline—when we learned that we had to pass the test, we focused intently on the product training team's workshops.

What if the more strongly you react against an idea, the more that idea comes to define you?