I like finding contrasting stories on a similar theme. It's informative to see how similar contexts, approached differently, result in divergent narratives. These twin-bill stories tell us a bit about a writer's biases and they show us ours.
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Looking back, I've sent your attention, through these weekly links lists, to far too many political stories that were of the moment. There was some decent writing in them: nothing motivates a journalist so much as thinking they can move the political needle. But you don't really remember the stories, aside from those that, entertaining as they were, were infamously wrong. Even the best political writers tend to keep their aperture too narrow to write anything that lasts. (This is probably because they're on a recurring deadline.) And, if you wait a few months, most of those of-the-moment pieces turn out to be, if not wrong, woefully incomplete. What kinds of stories last? The aperture needs to be a little wider than what's happening write now. |
This year, as the sun lifted in the sky and Winter gave way to Spring, I read Suzanne Skees's God Among the Shakers. Perhaps it was more the hopefulness of the lengthening days, but she and the Shakers peaked my curiosity. Rather than laughing at the gradual dying out of the celibate sect, I found something resonant about their total absorption into community life and religious practice. When traditional religion leaves so much to be desired, the relative newcomers are interesting.
This week has found me at Boston's Convention Center for another INBOUND conference, my eighth since joining HubSpot. For me, the event is a compressed few weeks of my normal job: meeting HubSpot's larger and more complex customers and helping them understand how to accomplish their goals with our software. For almost all the rest of the fifteen thousand attendees, the event is a hype train.
What is Red Lobster?
I'm back! For the first time in 394 weeks, I took two months of from this Friday email. For anyone following my professional boosterism on LinkedIn, I took two months off from that, too.
This week, I've been off. HubSpot closes its offices for the first week of July each year, so it's a chance to be away without missing too much. We've played the "staycation" game, which for me is like a succession of Saturdays. I have made coffee and fed the kids pancakes; I've played not a little golf; we've seen my Dad in Maine; we've caught a game at Fenway; I've pushed through almost all of a home project. The time off is good—the time at home is great.
In 2017, I started as a HubSpot consultant, advising go-to-market teams on their strategies and how to implement them with HubSpot software. Early on, HubSpot certifications were the critical part of my learning. After I was up-to-speed, certifications helped freshen and broaden my working knowledge. For example, before we launched Service Hub, I didn't know how to talk "customer service." The service strategy and software certifications helped me start on that learning curve. Ditto revenue operations.
The two HubSpot architecture certifications are for technical people what those classic marketing, sales, and service software certifications are for go-to-market consultants: a required 101 to working in this environment.
I would expect that precisely no one reading this email needs my opinion about last night's debate. (The 77 year-old bested the 81 year-old.) Opinions, they say, are like butts: we've all got one and no one wants to see yours. Besides, the good reading I find and send to you isn't often in punditry. The enjoyable part of my weekend paper isn't the opinion section, it's the review section.