I’m not a huge believer in New Year’s resolutions. I support you if you’re making some, and wish you endless success in achieving those goals! But my focus is more on the practice of building achievable habits.

In April 2020, I realized that with the pandemic forcing me to work from home — eliminating my daily commute with the walk to the bus stop, the walk through Times Square to the office, and walking around Manhattan for meetings — that I was getting very few steps per day. My Apple Watch seemed like it wanted to ask me “Hey, Lex, did you die?”

So I decided to try Couch To 5k, having never really run before. And after going through that program, I was running a 5k every day — but I was making my knees hurt. So I decided I should cut back to running every other day. But then I felt too sedentary on the in-between days, so I tried the 100 pushup challenge.

A couple months into pandemic lockdown, I was running a 5k every other day and doing 100 pushups on the in-between days. I’m not really bragging here, though, because, quite simply, I hated it. I liked the idea of working out (which I’d never really done before), but I wasn’t enjoying my activities.

So I bought a Peloton. I was pretty nervous about it — it’s a pricey purchase, and I didn’t know if I’d like the classes or the biking or any of it. But I bought it, and in the two years I’ve had the bike, I’ve ridden about 6,000 miles. I’m on it almost every day, and on the treadmill when I’m not on the bike.

The trick, for me, was making Peloton a habit. This is true for cleaning out my inbox and for my daily smoothie and for other elements of my life that I wanted to make habitual. I didn’t set out on the Peloton to say I would bike every day for years. I said I wanted to bike three times that first week.

(I also did SO MANY beginner classes. “You can move on from beginner classes!” friends would tell me. “One beginner class is enough,” they’d say. I did easily a dozen or more beginner classes. And now, quite frankly, I kick ass on the Peloton.)

“I want to bike three times a week” is an achievable goal. “I want to bike every day for nearly three years” feels like an impossible one.

The reason New Year’s resolutions are so hard is that we’re trying to form lifelong (or, at least, yearlong) habits. My method — and I grant you I’m not the only person to share this advice, but I can promise you I live it successfully! — is to build small habits.

There are days I look at my inbox and think “I’m going to clear this puppy out today.” When that happens, though, I like to pause and reframe: “I’m going to spend the next X minutes clearing out at least 10 messages.” When my inbox has swollen to too many messages, handling all of them can feel insurmountable. Challenging myself to do it all is setting myself up to fail. So I commit to ten, and then maybe another ten after that.

When you think about your growth areas for 2023 and beyond, I’m not encouraging you think small, per se. Rather, I’m encouraging you to make big changes — big new habits — more achievable. Because 580-some words later, I’m getting to the real trick: Habits are WAY easier to develop and maintain when we feel like we’re succeeding.

You can workout one day a week, or spend one hour per week on inbox triage. You don’t have to settle for that volume, though. Once you’ve mastered it, that’s when you add the second weekly workout, or the additional hour of inbox maintenance. And be careful: Making positive new habits can be habit-forming.

Last week, I announced the launch of Lex Friedman Consulting. And earlier this week, the podcast industry newsletter Podnews mentioned me. My own announcement — here, along with LinkedIn, Facebook, Mastodon, and even (sigh) Twitter — coupled with the newsletter appearance unsurprisingly triggered a brief upswell in inbound messages to me.

When you fill out my website’s contact form to reach me, it tells you that “I’ll aim to respond to you within one business day.” And I will!

I told a friend recently that a colleague had mentioned to me that no one replies to Slacks or texts faster than me. My friend immediately reinforced the message, saying this was definitely true about me. And truly, I’m honored to have that reputation!

The trick isn’t that I always have the answers, or that I’m able to respond in full in real-time. The trick is that I contain multitudes: I like to give my apps the power to put badges on their icons, to show me my unread messages — and I hate having unread messages.

So when I get a Slack or text or email, my instinct is to reply quickly to get that badge away — even if my reply is simply that I’ll follow-up in a few days. Just that confirmation that I see you and I recognize you and I will take action for you — even though I haven’t yet taken any significant action — means a lot to most people.

Many years ago, I was the one full-time employee at a three-person diet tracking startup called The Daily Plate. In addition to being our sole web developer and product person, I was also on the front lines with our customers, who would share feature requests (and even bug reports!) in our forums. The people on those forums loved me, because I would respond to them each day. Often, though, my response was essentially — we are taking that feature request under advisement, we’re even committing to implementing it, but it could be weeks or months until it’s live.

And like I said — those members loved me, even if they had to wait a while for their pet feature requests to get launched. But I made them feel heard and showed I valued them by responding.

I haven’t been overwhelmed with emails into Lex Friedman Consulting yet (feel free to pile on!), but as messages have started coming in at a heavier clip, I am indeed replying to everybody the same day they write me. It lets people know I think their message is important, that I’m reliable, and that I’m really there. And in my case, as a new business, it also helps keep me top of mind; if I waited too long, some folks could literally forget who I was or why they wrote me in the first place, by the time my delayed reply rolled around.

I absolutely encourage you to have work/life balance and to set boundaries. But during the workday, when you can reply to colleagues and third-party partners quickly, it’s worth it. “The one who always responds quickly” is a pretty neat reputation to have.

I’m delighted to announce the launch of Lex Friedman Consulting. I’m leaving Wondery and Amazon at the end of the year to start my own business, helping other companies grow.

My aim is to help companies in areas where I believe my experience makes me uniquely suited to provide insight, advice, and direction, including:

• sales and revenue strategy

• growth strategy

• executive coaching

• team building; alleviating team dysfunction; getting teams better aligned

• closing more deals; succeeding in more negotiations

• and, of course, podcasting!

I could go deep on why I’m excited about all of these things, but ultimately the unifying thread for me is that I believe business is personal, and I attribute the success I’ve had to leaning in on the human side of work: Finding the fun and joy in work is essential for long-term success and growth — both as humans and businesses.

I’m especially fired up about the executive coaching and this concept of CRO Office Hours I’m offering. In that capacity, I’ll be available to talk through thorny issues as a virtual CRO of sorts, offering some mix of therapy (spoiler: I’m not a therapist) and strategic business advice. I’m an ear to bend.

In other cases, I’ll get deep in the weeds, helping companies figure out sales compensation, go-to-market strategies, and yield optimization.

And I’m excited that I’ll get to stay involved in podcasting, too, working with companies (and podcasters!) on perfecting their podcast strategy.

It’s bittersweet to leave Wondery, a company with very smart people doing very impressive things. But I’m also pleased to be launching my own company — even if it’s also scary to start from scratch!

After a series of successful startups and acquisitions, I’m looking forward to sharing what I’m good at with companies that can benefit from my experience. If that’s you, of course, please get in touch!

You are not your job. You can love your job, take tremendous pride from your work, and even — if you want it and it meshes with your version of work/life balance — spend a ton of time on your work… But it shouldn’t be everything.

For me, this very Substack is a passion project. I’m not charging for it (yet? Who knows?), and it’s not my day job, but it’s a project I’m enjoying. And sometimes — and I’ve written about this mindset before — it’s a stressor, too: I haven’t written a post in a couple days! I need to put something out there!

Writing here isn’t my only passion project. I also perform with a local improv group in New Jersey. (Shout out to ComedySportz Jersey Shore.) And I recently started working on a web project related to improv. And I love making music with my son.

And not all my passion projects are creative ones. I also love watching great television. It’s not just okay if you’re not making money from all your hobbies. Not everything has to be a side hustle. Not everything has to be work. Some things can just be for joy, and to make your life even more well-rounded. It’s good to have passion projects, even if they’re not lucrative money markers.

I’m sharing all this because I think it’s important to remember that you are more than your work. Well-roundedness is a key quality. The more life you experience, the better you can be as an employee, creator, and human.

Work is like a gas; it will fill up all the available space if you let it. And we can sometimes let work become all-consuming, because we do feel so much pride in scoring big wins. (We might even have a financial upside to company success, too!)

I recognize that this isn’t some brilliant insight from me here, that you shouldn’t focus only on work. But I think we all need reminders sometimes. The best you is the well-rounded you.

Even though we’re squarely in the pandemic? SHMANDEMIC! phase of COVID-19, video conference calls aren’t going anywhere. They’re here to stay.

Whether you love, tolerate, or loathe video calls, there are a few tips that can make you a video call rockstar. Let’s dive in.

1. Your background matters. Don’t get cute. I’m starting off with my most controversial tip. Virtual backgrounds are bad. And most blurred backgrounds are worse. I understand you don’t want us to see that your kitchen’s messy or that your dog’s asleep, but the blur in Zoom and Teams is offensively bad and distracting. The goal is for your video NOT to distract us, and blur has the opposite of that intended effect.
   
   The “light” blur feature in Chime and Meet (and portrait mode in FaceTime) is a different story. It accentuates you and subtly pushes the background further into the… well, you know.
   
   Fake background images have a similar effect. We don’t think you’re in a boardroom or a palace. The weird visual artifacts are distracting.

2. Don’t do other stuff. Look at us. This is the most important tip. Everyone can see when you’re busily reading something else. We can see your complete and total distraction. It sucks. It’s really hard to stay focused on a video call, especially if you’re not a main player on the call. But it’s incredibly obvious when you’re not really present, even though you’re there.
   
   If you’ve never seen folks totally distracted on a video call, it’s probably because you are also distracted and thus not watching.
   
   To make the others on the call feel like you’re really there, actually be present. Hide other windows. And try to have a reasonable eye-line. I like to drag the window around actively during video calls, putting whomever I’m speaking to, or whoever is doing the talking, smack-dab in the center top of my screen — right under the camera. If that person changes position and their head is now to the side, I’ll move the window again. I want your eyes right under my camera, so that when I look at you, it looks to you like I’m looking at you.
   
   If you’re obsessed with knowing how YOU look, drag your own selfie view under the camera instead. Then you can stare at yourself while you’re talking and listening, and you’ll look actively engaged.

3. Lighting matters. It’s annoying but true. If you’re in shadow, it’s weird. Ring lights are cheap. If you don’t have one, dial up your monitor’s brightness all the way. If you have a weird window casting light on your face from the side, maybe close the blinds.

4. Don’t video shame. If folks aren’t on video, that’s a choice they’re making. You can certainly say something like “No pressure, but if anyone else wants to jump on video, I love that extra human connection.” But don’t ask why people aren’t turning cameras on, don’t beg, and don’t perseverate.

5. You’re on mute. Seriously, we have to get better at this as a society.

When I’m joining an existing team at a new job, my favorite way to start is with a listening tour. I don’t always call it a listening tour, but in my mind, that’s precisely what I’m doing: I’m meeting with folks throughout the organization to get their take on … everything.

I want to know what their role is, what their team does, and their view on the company. I want to know what’s working for them. And I want to know what — in the most politically-savvy framing — they see as opportunities for their team and the company at large. (In other words, I want to know what’s broken.)

Most of us are well aware that listening is an important skill. It’s also one that’s hard to master.

Obviously in any listening tour — whether with new colleagues, new teams, or even new friends — the most talkative among us need to resist the urge to talk ourselves. When we hear things that trigger our own insights (which we may well be confident are brilliant, of course!), we want to share them. Right away. At least, I do.

But that’s an urge worth resisting. When you’re first hearing about a challenge or opportunity, you absolutely do have an outsider’s perspective, and you may well have smart ideas to share. The listening tour isn’t when you share those ideas, though. The listening tour is where you — surprise! — listen.

Another challenge with listening — besides shutting up — is, well, the listening. There’s a trap that’s too darn easy to fall into, and it’s simply waiting for your turn to talk again. Once you’re attuned to this weakness, you’ll see and hear it a lot. Too often. And oh man, it is infuriating to experience, even if you’re not quite sure how to label it.

I hear this problem crop up on some of my favorite conversational interview topics. The hosts have ideas of questions they want to ask. They ask one, and their guest answers — and then the hosts dive into the next question.

Did you catch the problem? The hosts didn’t actually listen to their answer, so they didn’t probe or follow up or dive deeper. They didn’t allow themselves to follow the tangents or the flow of where the conversation could take them. They were waiting for their turn to talk again, and then they asked the next question they had on their list.

I’m not suggesting you should treat every conversation — on your listening tour or elsewhere — as a journalistic endeavor. But my point is listening, really listening, is harder than we like to acknowledge sometimes.

I love taking notes. That’s a whole separate topic I’ll cover one day. But I find that the act of taking notes in my listening tour — typically after warning the other party that I’ll be doing so, so they know I’m not distracted when I’m furiously typing away — helps me with the practical side of paying attention, and not just waiting for my next question. I can in real time hit Command-B on my Mac to put important notes I’m taking in bold if I want to ask a follow-up questions.

We humans are flattered by follow-up questions, because it drives home pretty explicitly that the other person is listening, paying attention, and curious about what you’re saying.

Listening tours done well make people feel heard. Once you’ve gathered all the insights and information you can get from those conversations, that’s when you can allow yourself the opportunity to formulate whatever takeaways or recommendations all those conversations may lead to. But first, it’s important to zip it and really listen.

Beginnings are hard.

I’m not talking about the first day of a new gig. This time, I’m really talking about writing.

Professional writers frequently talk about how much of writing is not writing: procrastinating, stressing, exploring social media, doing chores… Writing is awfully hard sometimes. (Also hard: Editing. But that’s a topic for another time.)

But here’s a great skill to learn: Don’t be afraid of a blank page. To some writers — and most of us have to write sometimes in our jobs — that blank page is a nightmare. I don’t feel that way. The blank page is my canvas, and I don’t care how hippy-dippy that makes me sound. When I see a blank page — like this post was before I started! — it feels exciting. It’s an opportunity.

My trick is not to sweat the intro. Just start writing. If you don’t know how to dive in, but you know what you’ll say post-intro, start there. If you know your conclusion, okay, you do you: Write that.

Professional writers tend to work with professional editors. Professional editors not infrequently cut a writer’s entire opening paragraph anyway, because the good stuff starts a few sentences later.

Allowing yourself to feel Introduction Paralysis is a crutch. The trick is to just start writing. If you can’t figure out your actual opener, skip it, and move on to the next part. It’s a lot easier to add an intro when you’re finished than it is to keep staring at a blank page as your stress level rises.

Let the blank page be your friend. Don’t let it slow you down. Figure out something that you want to say and say that. You can color in the rest later.

Not long ago, I wrote about the trick to self-confidence. (Short version: Act confident — fake it — and you’ll seem confident, which has essentially the same effect upon the people you’re speaking to.)

My post was framed as advice for getting business done. But my friend Liz commented on that post, writing “Forget business, I’m sharing this with my kids.”

Indeed, I think of Your Intermittent Lex as a place where I’m both sharing business strategy and life hacks — because, to Liz’s point, it’s all the same advice. If it works in business, it works in the rest of your life. And it’s true the other way, too.

I’ve shared before that one “trick” of mine is following-up well — responding to people and checking in with them appropriately. That also, of course, matters a ton in friendship. People like when you, you know, respond to them and acknowledge their existence!

You know what else matters in both friendship and business? Honesty, and kindness, and being genuine. When I shared advice on writing great emails, I wrote about sounding human. There’s a misfired instinct in business to sound “professional.” I’m not suggesting you should write work emails that say “yo, sup, wanna buy some stuff lol.” But I am suggesting that adopting that overly stuffy tone that doesn’t sound in any way human, that “professional hat on” kind of speech — doesn’t really achieve the effect you want today. Instead, it makes you sound like a robot. (Or worse, an AI.)

That line I alluded to in the sub-headline — “it’s not business, it’s personal” — strikes me as hilariously out-of-touch in the modern era. Most of us take our work personally, because we care about our jobs, and may even (for better or for worse) measure some of our self-worth and success in life on how well we do professionally. We take business personally. We can debate how healthy that is, but it’s the reality regardless.

So it’s important to recognize that the folks you’re doing business with likely think of business as personal, too. Approach them personably. Be human in your interactions. If it works in life, it works at work.

A lot of people hate writing bios. And they hate job interviews and cover letters and resumes.

For many of us, it is no fun to brag about yourself. It feels oogy and gross and just generally unpleasant. Most of us don’t love tooting our own metaphorical horns.

But praising your friends? Telling one friend about another friend’s incredible accomplishments? That’s easy. “Have I told you about my pal Jane? She’s incredibly talented, so funny, and makes the perfect martini.”

The truth is, sometimes you have to see yourself — your business, or whatever you’re pitching — as your friend Jane. You’re Jane-ish, too.

Like many folks, I feel that oogy feeling when I post a self-promotional tweet — or now, more realistically, toot. And these days, I’ll typically share that same promotional messaging on LinkedIn and Facebook. Gross, right?

The truth is, though, your audience only knows what you’re offering if you tell them. If you launch a podcast and tell no one, you’ll get no listeners. If you launch a product or service and don’t spread the word, quite frankly, you wasted your time.

The question becomes whether people are interested in what you have to say, and that can involve where you’re saying it. Put simply: If no one’s interacting with or responding to your self-promotion, it’s misfiring. But if you’re getting Likes and clicks and replies, you’re doing something right.

Know your audience, though. On LinkedIn, it’s probably okay if everything you share is a bit self-promotional. On Facebook, it’s probably not — unless that’s why your friends are friends with you there.

Remember, though: That ooginess is a feeling you feel. If your network is responding positively to the message and glad to learn about what you're doing, they’re not feeling the oogies at all.

I post on multiple platforms about every new article here. I get new followers every time I do so. (By the way, you can subscribe via email, or if you skew nerdier, you can subscribe via RSS with this link.) That means each post is driving new people this way. I have to go out there and shamelessly self-promote, because if I don’t — who will?

So remember my advice on confidence, which is in short, fake it. When you do need to shamelessly self-promote, do it proudly, do it with confidence, and don’t spread the word about the oogy feelings — just share your greatness with a smile.

I was talking to my pal Marko a few days ago, and he told me “I just need your confidence.”

And because I’m a kind person, I told Marko what I believe is the secret to being confident. And because I’m even kinder than the previous sentence led you to believe, I’m going to tell you that secret, too.

It matters. Confidence isn’t just good for you; it’s good for the person you’re pitching/meeting/selling to. It’s easier to trust that you know what you’re talking about — and that you’re right — when you approach the conversation (or presentation) confidently.

Here’s the trick: Confidence is literally indistinguishable from… faked confidence.

Yes. That’s right. The secret to confidence is faking it till you make it, and the truth is that you’ve made it (in the eye of the confidence beholder) the moment you’ve faked it.

Confidence is tone, word choice, and vibe. Confidence is a gut feeling.

You don’t need to be Meryl Streep to pull off a confident vibe. You don’t even have to believe in yourself — though you should, and it certainly helps. But the reality is that speaking in a (faked) confident-sounding tone has no perceptible difference to your audience than speaking with actual confidence. Do it enough, and you’ll see continued success, which in turn should help you build the real confidence you’re faking.

Marko’s been making videos. (He has a cooking series you should check out called Probably Worth Sharing.) Marko told me that making those videos has been great for him and his confidence. When you’re filming digitally, you can effectively have as many takes as you want, and when we see the finished product, we just see all your best takes back to back. And of course we can’t see that this is take seven of that particular line delivery — so you look totally confident, and we’re none the wiser.

You don’t get multiple takes when you’re speaking live, of course, but the same effect applies: Project confidence, whether you feel it or not, and that’s what everyone else will perceive.