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CJ Chilvers

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Personalization is creepy.

File these rules under “totally obvious advice that almost no one follows.” 1. Don’t be creepy. 2. Treat everyone online as if you’re talking to them in real life. 3. Long-term relationships build long-term businesses. 4. You are never automatically entitled to track a person. You wouldn’t

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RIP: The External 🧠

Last week, while everyone was arguing over who the next social media giant was going to be, Evernote laid off its entire U.S. staff: “Evernote, the app that has sought for two decades to find a large paying audience for its ‘external brain,’ is moving its operations to Italy,

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Thanks for the advice!

I don’t like analyzing personal newsletters. They’re whatever their creator wants them to be. There’s no rules. That goes for mine as well. But I am interested in looking back every year or two to check in on what you think. I don’t nitpick. I don’

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Opens Wins

RSS is still the way. I’ve written about the utility and idealism of RSS in the past, but I think enough time has passed for us to reflect on whether the anti-RSS decade we’ve just been through worked for anyone. Were consumers better off? Were publishers better off?

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Don’t mess with librarians.

This weekend, I helped my wife in her booth at the American Library Association Conference (my wife helps libraries with fundraising). I’ve been to the ALA conference a few times in the past decade, but this time felt different. The conference is usually overshadowed by authors, big publishers, and

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Publish or perish? Document or die.

I don’t believe in goals. I believe in process. I believe in process because I used to believe in goals. What I’m about to reveal to you is far more boring than goal setting, but far more effective. Goals tend to get further away the closer you get

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Why would you write a book in 2023?

It doesn’t make much sense to write a book in 2023 — especially a nonfiction book. In fact, your readers would likely pay 10X as much to get the same information in a video-based course. But, for many reasons, some of us still prefer creating books over any other medium.

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Do Personal Brands Matter?

Many of you have asked me about the differences between personal and business newsletters, websites, and branding. There must be something in the air, because I’ve seen a lot of content spring up around the subject lately, including from Gary Vee, Seth Godin (in multiple new interviews), and Copyblogger.

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Want a Do-Over for This Month?

Some of my experiments aren’t as Earth-shattering as others, but I wanted to share one small update I’ve made to my routine that might improve your life by 0.5%. For the last few years, I’ve been keeping a note called, “Month notes.” Every month or so,

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The Books of No Excuses

I buy books to dissect their strategies as much as to read. A sub-genre of these purchases is the “no excuses” book — a book that exists to show you why you have no excuses not to publish your next book. Kevin Kelley’s new book, Excellent Advice for Living, is