My first weekly email newsletter: Starting from Zero

Hello!

Welcome to my first ever weekly email newsletter.

This may the first time you’ve heard from me for a while; I’ve had email sign-ups at multiple locations but haven’t actually been sending many emails! I’ve decided to change that by sending out a short email newsletter each week, starting now.

It’s highly likely that you signed up in relation to one of the follow things:

So, my first challenge is to write and share things that are interesting to the different audiences I’ve attracted.

In order to do so, my initial plan is to share:

I expect this will evolve over time, but this is the rough idea at this stage.

If that sounds like your cup of tea, then great – let’s crack on! :)

If this wasn’t really what you were looking for when you subscribed to the mailing list, feel free to click the ‘unsubscribe’ button at the bottom of this email – no hard feelings!

This week I wanted to share a short reflection about starting new projects:

I’ve thought about starting an email newsletter for some time.

However, when I look to successful* newsletters for inspiration, I’m often overwhelmed by how good they are, and in comparison, how far away I perceive myself to be. This makes me feel less confident about my ability to start something myself and feel more inclined to “leave it to the experts”.

I’ve seen this in other projects as well. When I was writing my book for medical students a few years ago, there was a period where I got hold of all the similar published books that existed and read them. This was probably a bad idea, however, because I felt overwhelmed with how “insufficient” my book was at that time, and it temporarily became much harder to write. Eventually, I managed to get over that mental block, continued to make slow-and-stead progress, and was very happy with the end result.

My personal take-aways from these experiences are that often the most important thing is just to start, and to avoid comparing with others (particularly in the early stages).

Every project, company, skilled person, etc that we see today must have started from zero at some point. At one point, Amazon didn’t exist, David Beckham couldn’t kick a football and Seth Godin hadn’t written a single blog post.

So this is the start of another project where I’ll be starting from zero. I hope you enjoy being a part of it.

That’s everything for this week.

This is still new to me, so any feedback or suggestions would be appreciated - please hit ‘reply’.

I hope you have a fantastic week!

Chris