👋 Good morning from Los Angeles! I'm Nate Kadlac, and this is #90 of Plan Your Next. A Sunday newsletter that connects design, creativity, and how you prepare for your next thing.
💡 What’s new this week?
🎤 I was a guest on Cohort Captains, a new podcast my friend Jonathan launched recently. We chat about design and some simple steps to finding your own style. He launched with some great guests, so I recommend checking it out.
👽 My friend Nick deWilde—of his popular newsletter The Jungle Gym—recently launched a new Web3 education-focused community called Invisible College. If you’re curious about building in this space, but don’t know where to start, check it out.
📕 I’m close to finishing the book, The Courage to be Disliked. I’ll do a write-up on this afterward because it’s affecting me deeply, and how I think about raising Rowan.
I miss travel
As my friends Matt, Vanessa, and I walked up to the Delta counter at the Minneapolis International airport, we slid our passports to the tired, older gentlemen stuck working the night shift of the airport ticket counter.
His eyes swiftly scanned all 3 passports, knowing exactly which line to lock his eyes onto, as I do standing at a hot counter loaded with pizza slices.
Holding one passport, he looked back up at us without a change in expression and said, “Well, one of you isn’t headed to London tonight.”
Our hearts sank as the attendant flipped a passport towards us with his cranky finger fixed on Matt’s expired date. I felt sick as I realized Matt wasn’t going to fly out with us on our first friend’s trip abroad. A trip we had been planning for months. A trip we had cobbled together our dollars to find the cheapest ticket to a gloomy city in the middle of a rainy spring.
I think about this first trip all the time. I arrived home from that trip in full euphoria and immediately made my first travel video.
It’s what set in motion a motto I had in my head: Always have the next trip planned.
I’ve carried this line with me since that moment, never not having a trip on the horizon.
From there I would bounce between cities and countries, as often as I could replenish my bank account or convince a friend to split the costs with me.
That motto inspired this newsletter, even though it’s not about travel.
To me, having the next thing planned doesn’t need to be the right thing. And it certainly doesn’t mean planning out your next five years. But I’ve found having something to chase keeps me motivated, because it’s easy to find yourself in a slog without it.
Starting this newsletter was my next thing for a while. Now it’s my thing. It blossomed and grew into a door that opened into other worlds. It gave me a new path to chase, which wasn’t visible from the highway I was speeding down.
It’s branched out into new paths and friendships and strengthened existing relationships. You could say it stemmed from that first trip. Always wanting something next.
Back on my first trip abroad, Vanessa and I landed safely in London. Matt was quickly renewing his passport in Chicago, and flying to meet us in less than 24 hours. The adventure had started and I was already addicted to this uncomfortable feeling.
Every time I travel, I think about this first trip. I’ll think about it as we jet back to Europe next spring, hitting new cities for the first time in over 2 years.
Damn, I miss travel. Where are you going next?
⚡️ Two creative hits for next week
Web design in 4 minutes: A quick lesson in how to make a web page go from plain text to nicely formatted in just a few steps.
How 77 Metro Transit agencies design the letter M: Try taking 4 lines and making them distinct from one another. This is a fun comparison of how they try to make their M look distinct.
👋 See you next Sunday
If you’ve forgotten who I am, here’s a little bit about me. As always, my calendar is open to chat about your next adventure, crazy idea, or if you’re feeling creatively stuck.
Have a great week,
p.s. If you enjoyed this letter, would you please let me know by tapping on the heart below?
I miss travel