Welcome to the Friday Wrap-Up for July 3, 2026. This is a short newsletter where I talk about 3 things: What’s on my mind this week, Recommended Reading, and Something Fun. Here's what's on my mind...

On My Mind

Getting Distracted: I almost re-joined IG this week. I was told in no uncertain terms that it was hurting my business not being there. This is a group of people I trust and they made some compelling arguments. My business has been slow lately, and I don't feel like my mailing list is growing the way it should.

Wondering if this was a largely singular view I was getting (this group is creators, after all), I took the question to some trusted friends who've known me for a long time. They unanimously said I shouldn't, making the argument that my audience might not actually be there, and if I don't like being on the platform, then I'm not going to try to do it well. That would make it an incredible waste of time and resources.

Taking both of these arguments, I sat back and thought about what actually grows my mailing list. I am on LinkedIn, after all. Is that social platform growing my mailing list?

It's not. More on this in the Automation of the Week segment, but first reviewing my analytics, and then with the help of Claude, I realized that most of my good subscribers are coming from my own content on YouTube and my Podcast, as well as speaking events. This could be talks or webinars...and it makes sense. I both love teaching, and I'm good at it.

Instead of getting distracted with a social platform I know I'll hate, this is where I need to double-down: YouTube, my podcast, and OPA — other people's audiences. Speaking and providing real value is how I grow my list.

Good thing I'm speaking at a bunch of events this year.

The point is this: we're going to get a lot of advice. A lot of it will be coming from an honest, genuine place from trusted people. But ultimately the advice is one factor in the decision. You need to figure out what's best for you, consider the source of the advice, and do small experiments to see what works best. In my case, getting back in IG wouldn't be a small experiment. The small experiment would be making more of an effort on LinkedIn to see if social works for me.

But the data tells me no, not really.

A Smaller On My Mind

I've been thinking a lot about the point of these Friday Wrap-Ups. I kind of say it in the intro: "hopefully this curation will help you think more about your systems." But I've been missing the mark. And honestly, it's not actually about that at all. It's about spending our limited time wisely.

So I'm reasserting that mission, which you may have caught in the intro. And I'm doing 2 other things:

Changing "Recommended Media" to "Something Fun." There was too much overlap between reading and media. But beyond that, something fun should be a reminder that there's more to life than working. You started your business for time freedom. Something Fun will remind you to take it.

Adding Automation of the Week to the podcast. My near 2 month experiment of using that as the carrot to get people onto my mailing list didn't work. I think I have a much stronger lead magnet now.

Recommended Reading

​I watched Disney’s next-gen audio-animatronic transform from a pirate to a skeleton | TechRadar: I'm going to be honest; there was a lot of good stuff I came across this week. But I picked this, not only for my affinity for Disney, but because it's legitimately cool for a number of reasons.

Disney has always been on the forefront of audio-animatronics. When Walt himself revealed the first one — the closest thing to a living, breathing Abe Lincoln in 100 years — it was a marvel. And within the last 10 days, Disney did it again.

I'm sharing this because I think it's really easy to get down on technology right now. AI is a vapid, soul-sucking industry that's eroding work quality and human connection. But this is really, really cool tech. And it's all serving an important purpose. From Leslie Evans, Executive R&D Imagineer at Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development:

Telling great stories. Something that has connected us as long as humans have existed. This is a truly great use of technology, and something more of us should lean into.

Something Fun

​LEGO Gameboy: As we go into a long weekend, I want to share with you my latest LEGO build: the Nintendo Gameboy. It was an easy one, but super cool. It's complete with working buttons and switches, a way to insert games, and even cards that mimic the game screen.

If you're looking for a relatively cheap, fun activity this weekend (especially if you're in the oppressive heat of the Northeast US or parts of Europe), this is a fun one.

Automation of the Week

Using Claude with Kit: Not an automation per-se, but lots of automated things. My mind has been on my mailing list for the past few weeks (if you couldn't tell), and this week I wanted to get some computer-assisted data-crunching done. Thanks to the Kit MCP, I was able to do a bunch of clean-up:

• Mark low-engagement, likely spam or fake emails, which I deleted
• Guess 1st names based on email addresses, which goes a long way towards personalization.
• Split first and last names for anyone who used both (and save the last name in a custom field). Again, better personalization.
• Using the previous two tasks, write better code for personalized emails
• Find my high engagement subscribers based on the signals I have so I can interact with them more.

...and finally, crunch all of my data from the last two years to figure out where my subscribers are coming from. This was a much better task for the Kit MCP, because the Kit Dashboard doesn't make it easy to expose this sort of data, even if you're on the Pro account.

Using my findings, and circling back to what's on my mind this week, I can make a concerted, data-backed effort to growing my list in a way that works for me.