bwagy, the blog of Ben Young

Runners face this dichotomy.

In a race you need to be aggressive, ambitious, push yourself to the limit, give it all you’ve got.

But to train well you need to push hard and take down time to recover.

I was listening to this interview with Malcolm Gladwell, he was saying it’s half the battle for coaches to encourage runners to rest as by nature they want to keep training! Makes sense.

The great runners are good at both.

The great runners know when to pull back, rest recover and when to swap modes.

It’s a skill that you develop – and a valuable one at that.

Whenever I get hung up on a piece of work, it’s usually because I’ve focused too much on what others are writing about or what they want you to write about.

I get back in sync by reminding myself, what is it you want to write about.

As that’s the easiest part – and also the most interesting.

I just got an email this morning from someone I follow Kevin Rose.

And I wanted to shine light on the quality mantra he is embodying.

Kevin does a monthly newsletter sharing cool stuff called The Journal. Now he made a promise early on to cut out those that weren’t reading. In doing so, he can figure out what his core audience is really in to and give them the best experience.

It’s such a great example.

This is the opening line of todays email:

Let me repeat that:

Member update: We’ve lost some newsletter subscribers.

We dropped from 61,823 members to 55,787.

I purposely removed 6,036 people that hadn’t opened the last four newsletters.

^ Amazing.

Now the data he is getting and the feedback is only from those that are truly in to what he’s up to.

Also it incentivises him to keep at the top of his game.

He can’t just let another email slip out. It has to be up to the standard of the four – because if it’s not…