👋 Hello! I'm Nate Kadlac, and this is #57 of Plan Your Next. It’s a newsletter that connects design, creativity, and how you prepare for your next thing.
If you’re one of the 11 new subscribers, welcome! And, if you might know someone who might like this letter, there’s a large button below to do just that.
What’s new this week?
🎙 In episode #17 of It’s Gotta Be the Mic, Reza chat about two of our favorite books, Conspiracy, and The Four Agreements. They couldn’t be more different, but there’s a lot to take away from them.
👶 Welcome Rowan Kadlac into the family! Alie and I are first-time parents, so every single experience is new to us, but it feels great to be a dad.
Good morning from Los Angeles!
Friday afternoon at 3:33 pm, inside Cedars-Sinai Medical Center is a day I’ll never forget.
In the nine months anticipating for this day, the questions dancing around my mind have been sparring back and forth in a ring, like heavyweights Ali and Foreman.
Will I be ready for a child before she arrives?
Will I still find time to be creative?
How can I be a selfless dad when most of the decisions I make are selfish?
How can I help cultivate her creativity early on?
Will I completely fuck it up?
To me, these all completely normal and valid questions for a first-time father. A first-time father who doesn’t hang around kids.
And many times when I did notice—and judge—kids around me, it was out of context with reality. My own experience lines up with an essay Paul Graham wrote, “Having Kids.”
Paul says:
Of course the times I noticed kids were when things were going wrong. I only noticed them when they made noise. And where was I when I noticed them? Ordinarily I never went to places with kids, so the only times I encountered them were in shared bottlenecks like airplanes. Which is not exactly a representative sample. Flying with a toddler is something very few parents enjoy.
In fact, as we drove along Hollywood’s long stretches of silvery cement roads towards the hospital, we reflected on how long it’s been since either of us held a newborn. How is it acceptable that a couple of people like us with almost zero experience with children are allowed to bring one home?
Then just 15 hours later at 3 am—in the midst of changing my third diaper—any anticipation I had built up was killed by the immediate reality.
The reality that this new life looks, feels and smells completely different than the car ride to the hospital hours earlier.
I’ve been anticipating this moment now for nine months, but now that it’s died off, I’m anticipating getting home and beginning the next chapter of life with Alie and Rowan.
One thing for sure, reality will quickly set in and it will be on to the next thing soon enough.
⚡️ Inspiration for this week
💸 Make smarter financial decisions
My friend Daniel has created a weekend workshop for personal finance. Think Approachable Design (my course), but for your future. You walk away with a system to help make smart financial decisions for your future. I can’t recommend Daniel enough. (I wasn’t even paid a single cent to recommend this, which is a horrible financial decision.)
🎨 Find your aesthetic
I believe that your aesthetic is not discovered by looking at outward inspiration, but instead by looking from the inside out.
But dammit if we just want to click on fun pictures and label ourselves. Trashcore anyone?
👶 We’re a Snoo family
Since we began researching bassinets for our girl, we entered into one of the greatest online debates about getting your kid to sleep: Should you use a Snoo bassinet or just roll old school method of putting your baby to sleep?
It’s a heated debate amongst online parents, but we couldn’t pass up the chance to test this out. The Snoo helps soothe the baby by safely rocking her to sleep on their back. The #1 factor for us was safety, as there haven’t been any cases of SIDS when using this product.
We decided to throw down and see if this hi-tech contraption was worth it or not, so I’ll let you know.
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