That's a total of 98 email newsletters I wrote for my personal newsletter and Four Minute Books — and those are just the emails! I also wrote and published 52 new book summaries, reviewed, uploaded, and finalized 52 new Youtube videos, and I wrote 25 new book lists, quote lists, idea explainers, and other creations for the website. Some of them ran up to 20,000 words. All told, I probably wrote around 500,000 words in 2023. Half. A million. Words. That's...a lot of work — and that's the kind of effort it takes to hit such milestones as I shared above. But if effort and results were always linearly correlated, we'd all be "billionaires with perfect abs," as Derek Sivers says. Besides all the hard work behind the cool milestones, what you also don't see are all the times something went wrong. You don't see that the piece I worked on the hardest only got 16,000 views and doesn't rank well on Google. You don't see all the emails I sent to potential sponsors that never received a response. And you don't see that, after 9 months of hard work and plateauing traffic, it finally started growing only to be cut down by 30% with Google's next update one month later. The truth is that, often, failure takes just as much effort as success. No one sets out to fail, but sometimes we fail regardless. Recovering from that, working through your anger, disappointment, and frustration, is just as much part of the work as is showing up on a daily basis. Take everything together, and you have one whopper of a package. It's a lot — and that's why it's also important to take breaks when you really need them. After the traffic got hit in October, I saw all this new, additional work unfold in front of me. Figuring out what the problem was. Fixing my SEO. On and on, I kept typing out new to-dos. What I had actually wanted to do was slow down for a bit. Enjoy the fall. Read a lot in December. Ultimately, I couldn't relax as much as I had hoped — but I also didn't completely burn myself into the ground. I realized it was better to take a step back, reassess, and start again than to just grind until I'd be totally burned out. And that's what I did. That, too, is part of the game. And now? Now's a new year. I don't know where we'll end up yet — but I know I'll do what I always do this year: Write more. Write more summaries. Release more Youtube videos. Send out more emails. And maybe, by the end of 2024, we can look back together on more cool milestones. Thank you for being part of the journey! The 4 Most Popular Summaries of 2023If you're wondering which of last year's new summaries were the most popular on Four Minute Books, here are the top 4. Interestingly, 3 of them are fiction titles. I'd love to do more of those, especially the classics, but I like to take my time with reading and summarizing them, so we'll see!
The 4 Most Viewed Video Summaries of 2023Okay, so much for what people read the most — but which summaries did people watch the most? Here are the top 4 videos we published on the Youtube channel in 2023. With 40,000 views, the #1 spot takes the crown with a 4x lead on #2. And the winner iiiiiis...
It's worth nothing here that Dr. Smith caught up fast — her video was only published in August! The same goes for Morgan Housel's new book, Same as Ever, published only in November. We turned around the video super-fast, and as a result of being timely (and the channel's overall growth), it's now only a few thousand views behind Julie's book. Alright. That's all I wanted to share. I hope it was somewhat insightful, and while I can't promise how many behind-the-scenes editions I'll be able to send in 2024, you always know where to find me! If you have comments, questions, or anything else you'd like to share, don't hesitate to hit reply. Until next time... Happy reading, |
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