👋 Hello! I'm Nate Kadlac, and this is #60 of Plan Your Next. It’s a newsletter that connects design, creativity, and how you prepare for your next thing.
Good morning from Los Angeles!
There’s not a more perfectly apt newsletter title like Plan Your Next to collide with what happened this past week.
HomeSpotter, the 50+ person company I’ve been helping build for the past 7+ years was recently acquired.
It’s a significant part of my life that’s been attached to my ankle like an electronic monitoring device. Talk to me long enough, and HomeSpotter is a topic you’ll end up hearing about. Talk to me longer, and you’ll hear about how fucking hard it is to work on something that long.
When you end up working on an idea for this long, it inevitably becomes part of your identity. The time and the energy you have starts to concentrate into one bucket, forcing all other decisions to revolve around it.
It’s like having an unbalanced portfolio that is too heavily weighted in crypto. It’s risky, and the opportunity cost can be difficult to see if you’re too tied up in one asset class.
What kept me from pursuing other activities like writing, building an audience, or working on side projects was the idea that I needed to keep adding sweat and equity to the one asset class. That, and guilt plus shame. All of it.
But over the past year, I realized it doesn’t have to work that way.
“Make your desired behavior your normal behavior.”—Polina Marinova
When I heard Polina say this out loud in a live session, everything switched for me. Looking inward to listen to what you want is difficult. Spending time uncovering what drives you, and how to make space for that takes real fucking work.
And as soon as I started to chase some of these things, life became a lot more interesting.
Soon I would find myself with a writing group, co-hosting a newsletter mastermind, writing a weekly newsletter, drawing more, writing more, keeping an open calendar, co-hosting a podcast, meeting my heroes, supporting independent course creators, and now teaching design workshops.
For too long, I identified as a designer who was helping building HomeSpotter. The truth is, I had no one to blame but myself. No one was saying I shouldn’t do these things, or that I couldn’t. But I got entirely locked up into my own head about what others might think, so I pushed them to the side.
I’m excited for the future, and already feel more engaged with my own interests.
This acquisition couldn’t have come at a better time—not because I want to leave—but because I’m in a better state of mind to live a more blended and creative life.
Once you know what your desired behavior should be, work towards it everyday.
⚡️ Inspiration for this week
👨👩👧 Relationship resentment
Khe Hy on how to recognize and avoid relationship resentment. Having kids is like having to redesign your life, and I’m more sensitive now to how this affects my relationship with Alie.
✉️ Batch your email
Mailman’s promise is to help tame your email inbox by surfacing only the most important emails, and scheduling the delivery of everything else. I’m trying it out right now and it allows you to continue to use whichever client you want. (I use the Gmail on the web)
📕 The Fourth Turning
Van Neistat details the book, The Fourth Turning, by William Strauss and Neil Howe in a wonderfully visual video. The book describes the four turning archetypes, and right now we are in the fourth turning, crisis.
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