My paternity leave recap

Good morning!

Welcome to Social Studies Edition No. 10

If this edition looks wildly different… it’s because it is. I was going to tell you all about how my old ESP sucked and why I’m going with a new one… but I figure you’ve got better things to do than to read about my beef with Kajabi and my newfound love for Beehiiv.

All you need to know is that these emails will look different (hopefully much better).

Here’s the agenda for this week:

• my paternity leave recap (I promise it relates to social media marketing)

• creators I like

• 🚀 Take Off 🚀

MY PATERNITY LEAVE RECAP

I had a baby!

This is my wife and I’s third kiddo and third baby girl. Pray for future Jacob who’s gonna be footing the bill for all these weddings.

If you’re the type of person to hem and haw over babies, email me and I’ll gush over her for pages and pages. She’s perfect.

But if you’re not baby-obsessed, I’ll just skip to what my 7 lb 8 oz bundle of joy has already taught me about social media marketing.

First some context…

When baby girl was 3 days old, we rushed her to the ER.

When baby girl was 10 days old, we called 911 and the ambulance took my wife to the ER.

I promise this is going somewhere.

Both mom and baby are doing great now and are healthy (PTL).

But… in those moments when we didn’t yet know that everything would turn out ok, I realized something.

I suddenly gave zero craps about how my content was performing on social.

My full time gig, my side gigs, my personal brands… none of it mattered.

The only thing that mattered was my family.

I think as social media managers, we have a tendency to be incredibly hard on ourselves.

We beat ourselves up and get so down when our content bombs.

If that’s you… that’s actually a good thing. It means you care about your work. You take pride in what you do. You realize your obligation to give your all, and you follow through.

At the risk of being slightly offensive, I’m going to step out on a limb and say, “You’re probably not curing cancer.”

apologies to my subscribers working at St. Jude, Sloan Kettering, and MD Anderson who are quite literally curing cancer

That doesn’t mean your work doesn’t matter. It just means that maybe you need to broaden your perspective next time your post bombs.

Yeah it stinks when you spend 6 hours on a post that gets 7 views.

But instead of acting like your puppy got ran over (how I react every single time, without fail), what if we learned from it, moved on and were grateful for the health of our family, the stability of our job, the food in our fridge, etc.?

Don’t beat yourself up.

A social media post underperformed.

Nobody except you will remember in 6 months.

You probably won’t remember in 6 years.

Maybe this is a helpful perspective.

Maybe I’m just running off 17 minutes of sleep and a case of C4 Energy and I’m spewing my newfound fatherly wisdom.

Next week I’ll ditch the sappy stuff and dive into a case study of a social media account that has skyrocketed from 0 to over a million followers in a matter of weeks.

CREATORS I LIKE

I’ve been reading Marketers in Demand and The Funnel. I’m a big fan of both of them.

Check ‘em out below.

🚀 TAKE OFF 🚀

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