A Life Update and What's Next

Hey friends. It’s been a while. After taking the last couple months off, I’m back and more energized than ever!

There’s been a lot going on in my personal life, so I’ll give you a quick update on what I’ve been up to… as well as what you can expect from Growth Meditations moving forward.

Let’s dive in.

At a Glance

• Nicole and I got married and spent several weeks traveling

• A glimpse into Japanese culture

• Death of the middle (a framework to differentiate)

• How long should a newsletter be?

• The case for curation + synthesis

• What you can expect from Growth Meditations v2

Wedding and Honeymoon

The last couple months have been unreal, and I couldn’t be more thankful for the time Nicole and I were able to spend together.

It started with a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico where Nicole and I got married on March 3, 2024. Seeing so many of our close friends and family members come together for us and celebrate — many of whom were meeting for the first time but hit it off — far exceeded our expectations and was a magical experience we’ll remember forever!

As we get older and time seems to move faster, it’s moments like this that remind me of life’s beauty and the importance of living fully in the moment to experience it with those you love.

If you haven’t traveled to Oaxaca, I can’t recommend it enough. We loved exploring the city — including the amazing food, mezcal, and diversity of people that make it the cultural heart of Mexico.

After a couple weeks at home to reset, Nicole and I flew to Japan where we spent a week in Tokyo and another week in Kyoto and Osaka.

Nicole was happy to see the sakura (cherry blossoms):

… and I nerded out on the design of the Japanese Gardens:

But the best part was just wandering around and exploring together:

We absolutely loved Japan and will definitely be back! (Anyone want to go skiing or snowboarding 🏂 there in the coming years?)

… but after a couple weeks of spring weather, Nicole and I were ready for some heat so we split our last week between Singapore and Bali.

I couldn’t be more grateful for the time and experiences we shared together. But I’m equally excited to get back into a routine at home.

As Nicole frequently reminds me, “it’s the little things that matter most.” And she couldn’t be more right.

A glimpse into Japanese culture

Here are a few of my favorite things about Japan (from the limited time we spent there):

• Cleanliness. Despite being significantly larger than NYC, Tokyo was insanely clean and safe. Some of this is definitely cultural, but I’d love to double click on the other interventions they’ve taken to see what we might be able to adopt in the States.

• Technology. It seemed like everywhere we went they were experimenting with new technology, or had already implemented new inventions at massive scale. Japan felt like a glimpse into the future.

• Respect. The people were so welcoming. Not only were they polite and respectful in personal interactions, it also extended to how they behaved on trains and in public places. To be honest, I’m not sure how they deal with all the tourists. I apologize in advance.

• Baseball. As a kid who played baseball growing up, it was refreshing to see parents playing catch with their kids in a park, little league fields in the cities, and stadiums full of people watching a ballgame on a Sunday afternoon. Shohei Ohtani has to be such an inspiration for Japanese kids, and I’m excited to see the impact he’ll have on the next generation.

• Attention to Detail. Kodawari (こだわり) is a Japanese word that means the pursuit of perfection. I’m not sure how often they use it in everyday language, but I saw how it permeated every aspect of their culture. Whether you went to a Michelin star restaurant or a mom ‘n’ pop shop, the quality was so freakin’ good. The comedian Andrew Schultz described it perfectly in this clip:

Death of the Middle

Death of the middle is a common pattern in technology and a useful framework for predicting how markets will evolve.

The idea is that you can analyze products in a market according to different spectrums (e.g., length, quality, cost, etc.)

… and the most opportunity is often at both ends of the spectrum (i.e., the extremes), while those in the middle fail to differentiate and get disrupted as the market evolves.

Chris Dixon describes the concept in this thread using an example about how the internet fueled the growth of Amazon and LVMH (the extremes), while disrupting department stores like Sears and Kmart (the middle). He also talks about it in more detail on this podcast (watch for 3 minutes starting at 1:12:13):

Death of the middle has been playing out in media over the last 10-20 years too. On one end, short-form social content has exploded and attention spans have decreased. But on the other extreme, books have stayed relevant and there’s been an increase in other types of long-form content like podcasts.

While newsletters/blogs fall in that messy middle, they are not all created equal. To break it down, I used the framework to compare the length of my newsletter to other content creators I’m inspired by.

Here’s what I learned from a quick retrospective.

My first 12 issues of Growth Meditations varied quite a bit as I experimented with different formats. The longest post was 4,100 words, and the two shortest posts were 216 words and 432 words. When I remove those outliers, my average post length was just over 1,100 words.

For additional context, today’s issue is just over 2,000 words.

How does that compare to others? It was square in the MIDDLE!

Let’s break it down…

Average length of newsletters

I did a quick analysis of 50+ newsletters/blogs, and the vast majority of them were between 750 and 2,000 words each.

Here are the exceptions at each end of the “length” spectrum (e.g., the ones that are most differentiated / defensible):

Long-form writing. Most of these posts were between 3,000 to 5,000 words, but quite a few were in the range of 10,000 to 15,000 words each. For context, the average non-fiction book has ~ 50,000 to 75,000 words.

• Paul Graham’s Essays.

• Tim Urban’s Wait But Why.

• Packy McCormick’s Not Boring.

• Lenny Rachitsky’s Lenny’s Newsletter.

• Ben Thompson’s Stratechery.

• Matt Levine’s Money Stuff.

… which leads me to the other end of the spectrum:

Short-form writing. There are quite a few newsletters that try to be short and sweet, but few are able to consistently provide value in under 500 words. Here are a few I like that inspire me:

• James Clear’s 3-2-1 Thursday

• David Senra’s Founders Notes

• Brian Johnson’s Heroic +1’s

• Chamath Palihapitiya’s What I Read This Week…

• Josh Spector’s 5 Ideas For The Interested This Week

• Startup Archive’s insights from the world's best founders

• Shaan Puri’s 5 Tweet Tuesday

• Jade Bonacolta’s The Quiet Rich

The case for CURATION + SYNTHESIS

1) The amount of content on the internet will continue to grow. We’re still in the early days of content creation, and more people will get off the sidelines and begin creating. While it’s easy to feel overwhelmed from “information overload” today… it will get worse.

2) AI is accelerating this trend by making it easier to generate content. Notice I didn’t say “good” content. In the near-term, it will become more difficult for individuals to cut through the noise. Note: while AI will lead to more content, it can also help to curate and synthesize it (more on that in a future post).

3) Social media is making it worse. The incentives are misaligned (they want to keep you on their apps as long as possible), and without control over the algorithm that drives your feed, it’s difficult for individuals to be intentional about what they consume.

While I’m optimistic we’ll create better solutions in the long-term, I anticipate the near-term result is that consumers will gravitate toward brands they trust to help curate their information diet.

This is not a new concept. For ages, we’ve relied on media brands to do this (e.g., magazines curated the best articles and essays). But as consumer preferences and business models evolved, we were left with a gap.

That gap is starting to be filled by new age media companies like Turpentine and Workweek. I love what they’re doing, but I believe this is just the beginning.

Prediction: As the world gets more complex, we’ll see more individuals and companies step up to help simplify and curate better information diets… and that gets me pumped!

In conclusion…

We don’t need more content… we need the best quality content.

Growth Meditations 2.0

This is a turning point for Growth Meditations, and you can expect it to be more dialed in and focused moving forward.

Reflections on starting Growth Meditations:

• The most important thing is that I got off the sideline and started creating content.

• It felt liberating to put myself out there.

• I was more focused on finding my voice than putting myself in the shoes of the reader. This will change.

• Despite that, I’m still proud of the first 13 blog posts I created, and I hope you found some of them helpful.

• The format, topics and length were different every week — which I’m sure made it hard to know what to expect (and if it was worth reading) when you received the email.

• Scope creep. Without guardrails on the newsletter structure, each issue ended up covering more topics (and going into more detail) than I anticipated. I’d get excited, go down rabbit holes, and keep adding to it without having the time to synthesize and trim the content.

• Synthesizing and editing writing takes time and multiple iterations. But it gets better with every pass.

• It took me longer to write each newsletter than I anticipated. Because of that, it was difficult to stick to a consistent delivery schedule (day of the week and time).

• Despite being time consuming, I experienced first-hand how writing can help me synthesize my thinking.

• My longest streak of writing consistently was 6 weeks in a row, and I did that twice.

• Since each newsletter issue covers multiple different topics, it has been difficult to navigate the blog as an ongoing reference guide.

What to expect for the next 8 weeks:

• Shorter articles. Targeting under 500 words for each issue.

• More focused. It will highlight 3-5 key ideas (from a single person or on a specific topic).

• Consistent delivery. Starting next week on May 1, you can expect an email in your inbox every Wednesday at 7:00 am EDT.

• Expanded social presence. I’ll experiment with repurposing bite-size pieces of the content on my different social accounts (LinkedIn, Instagram, and X) to expand distribution.

• A podcast. I’ll explore turning the content into a short podcast you can listen to, with the vision to expand it to longer-form audio and video content over time (potentially with guests or a cohost). I’m targeting to drop the first podcast episode sometime in June.

By focusing consistently for 8 weeks, my goal is to demonstrate what a simple “product” looks like.

At that point, I’ll be reaching back out to you to get more detailed feedback on your experience which will help me evaluate if and how I move forward with this project.

While I don’t envision I’ll ever focus on Growth Meditations full-time, I’m really enjoying the process of creating it. In addition to building new skills, it’s helping me develop my personal brand, expand my network, and holding me accountable to continuous learning — which I’ve found really energizing!

Said another way, I’m building my Binge Bank (click the link to listen to a 1-min clip describing what it is — I had never heard of it, but the concept perfectly described what I’m trying to do).

Thanks for reading!

Until next week, keep growing »

Scott​

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