Hello!

Welcome to the monthly update for the Insights, Innovation, and Economics blog. This is where I’ll discuss the current progress of running a blog plus some goals and initiatives for next month, ending with a sneak peek at the next blog post.

Blogging is about Consistency

As you may expect, blogging is decently difficult. Especially early on in the process when you’re not used to having a blog, finding and building consistency is difficult.

The new college semester started this month, so my life recently has been mainly figuring out how everything works together, which has put the blog on the backburners.

But, that’s not necessarily the best thing. I could have more consistency (did you see that transition–crazy).

Almost everything we do in life can be done better with consistency. That includes homework, cleaning, working out, interacting with friends, etc.

Let’s talk about building habits.

You may have commonly heard the notion that it takes 21 days to build a habit. Actually, research shows us that it takes closer to 66 days on average (ouch). But, I think there are valuable lessons that can be learned here.

Lesson #1: Building a habit on something you’re passionate about is easier than something you’re not passionate about. Consider this experiment with my blog. It’s a lot easier to accomplish since I am passionate about it. If you’re trying to form consistency around something that you aren’t passionate about, for instance, if you don’t like running, trying to run every day could be a horrible experience.

Lesson #2: Building consistency in small steps is much easier than doing large leaps at a time. This is a large reason why many people fail their New Year’s Resolutions, they simply dream too big. If you approach a goal (say for instance a New Year's Resolution) in smaller pieces (say smaller monthly goals), it’s much easier to accomplish.

Changing your lifestyle or behaviors isn’t easily accomplished quickly. Whether we like it or not, humans are creatures of habit. We’re used to living our lives as they currently are, so when we choose to make a significant change, this isn’t so easily accomplished. But, smaller changes are easier to manage (and from my experience they’re easier to keep in the long term).

Lesson #3: Inconsistent habits are better than no habits. If your goal is to work out every day and you only manage to work out once a week, you haven’t failed. You’ve actually made a lot of progress in the way your mindset and lifestyle approach your goals. In a way, you’ve actually still built consistency, even if it isn’t to the level you want.

Circling back to the concept of small steps above, one way to make progress on your goal is to participate in the entire goal, but for a less stringent time period than you potentially may want it. Consider the thought of trying to shake an addiction (let’s use alcohol as an example).

Say you’re a person addicted to alcohol so much that you have some every day (no judgment if that is you). In our scenario, wanting to shake your alcohol addiction can be restated as trying to build a consistent habit of not drinking alcohol. Your goal could simply be to drink less every day. However, I pose an alternative method:

An initial step in this process could be not drinking on Mondays. Granted, you still are drinking the other 6 days of the week, so you haven’t accomplished your entire goal, but you’ve still established a consistent habit that you can build upon.

I hope you are starting to see the value of consistency (or if you already value consistency then this can be a good reminder).

I’m a big quote person, so here’s a good one to wrap up this section:

“We all have to start somewhere, and doing something is better than nothing at all. Start small so you don’t get discouraged and give up. Remember it is all about consistency”

-Khloe Kardashian

(Yes I totally just used a Kardashian quote in a formal context but hey it’s a good one.)

What’s Happened This Month

Refining.

After I figured out how everything worked last month, I’ve been able to use this month to go back through and improve processes further. So, what’s happened specifically?

I added a cute little blurb to the front of each blog post to serve as an introduction to new blog people (thank you new blog people – and thank you old blog people too).

I created a new blog logo (certified AI generated - shoutout to DALL-E). The logo isn’t perfect, but it’s a better representation of the blog (we’re pretty official around here now (or so I like to think) so let’s brag about it a little).

If you want to take a peek at the new logo just refer to the top of this post (crazy I know).

I also went through and redid my process for selecting and analyzing the quality of new blog ideas which will help me plan out topics and conversations in the future. Why should you care? You don’t necessarily need to care, it simply means that blog posts in the future will be better and more thought out (as of writing this I have over 90 different ideas for blog posts).

I also rewrote my “About” page on the homepage of the blog. You can view it here if you’re interested. It’s a good way for newer readers to understand who we are and what we’re about here.

Stats This Month

Our Twitter page gained some traction this month, with way more impressions on average per post which was great to see I’m continuing to reach an audience that’s interested in my content. For the second month doing social media advertising for the blog, the performance is great so far and I hope to continue making an impact.

281 people visited the blog this month! That’s a crazy amount. Thank you for viewing and being a part of this community! I’m glad the blog has continued to impact people and I hope that my content continues to provide a great environment for learning and growth for myself and others.

For the 2 subscribers that joined us this month, thank you. I hope you’ve enjoyed your time reading the blog and hope that it continues to be enjoyable.

Progress on Last Month’s Goals

Woah! It’s a new segment to the monthly update post (which makes sense as I can’t give you progress on last month’s goals the very first month I have the blog).

This segment is purely to discuss how I performed on the goals I set out last month, so I’ll disclose the goal and some commentary associated with it.

1. Continue having fun writing blog posts and running the blog

Don’t worry this one happened. It’s been a fun month of running and writing blog posts (10/10 would recommend).

2. Set up a website for the blog

Complete fail (let’s go already failing goals and it’s only 2 months in). The brother refused the outsourcing of website development for purely educational purposes (maybe if the blog makes money later on I can pay someone–probably him–to go through and make a website). It’s not a big deal at this point as my life is already too crazy to handle more things, but this one will reemerge in the future.

3. Maintain the same level of analytics for the blog

This month we performed decently well on blog analytics in comparison to last month. Total views were down, but we did have some of the largest viewed posts so far, which bodes well for the future.

The open rate and number of new subscribers were quite down which isn’t my favorite, but hey, I’m going to keep repeating myself here, but this blogging experiment is mainly for me, so this doesn’t totally matter. However, I do hope those of you who do read these can get something out of them, however small that may be.

4. Increase followers and interactions on Twitter

As for followers, we’ve almost doubled the following on the blog’s Twitter account. As for interactions, we did almost 1.5x times what we did last month which is crazy as last month was a huge month. It’s better than consistent, which as I monologued about above, is a good thing in this case.

Overall, it was a decent month for achieving blog goals (like a 7/10), but there are always things to improve, which leads me perfectly into the next section (It’s almost like I planned it this way on purpose):

Goals for Next Month

This month has seen success better than I would have thought, and I hope to continue building on this momentum. So, here are the goals for this month:

1. Continue having fun writing blog posts and running the blog

This will continue to be the first goal every month. It’s a good reminder that this blog is purely for enjoyment and education, not to make money or grow a following (become an influencer). If I can make someone’s week a little bit better by reading my blog that week, that's a successful week for me.

2. Make an Instagram account for the blog

To be honest, I don’t truly know about this one. It may happen, it may not. The story behind this is that my little brother suggested I should have an Instagram account for the blog. I’m not sure it’ll be productive. I create content–with words– and Instagram is all about pictures (duh) so I’m not sure how that’ll figure into everything. You’ll see next month if this actually happens.

3. Continue learning more about new topics I’m interested in

Hopefully by now you’ve been able to see that I’ve built this blog on topics and sectors that I’m interested in (Energy, Intellectual Property, Economics, Venture Capital, etc.). I hope to continue learning more about these sectors that I didn’t know before and even learn about some new sectors that I’ve never learned about before (hint hint March 20th blog post).

4. Drive subscribers from Twitter engagements to the blog

If you haven’t seen the Twitter account, you’re missing out. I post daily content on there (I’d say it’s pretty cool but I’m biased) and many people see it, but I’m having trouble driving them from Twitter to the “real” content that is the blog. So, this month I hope to drive more people to the “real” content on the blog itself so they can appreciate it along with you.

5. Continue to produce high-quality blog content

This one is interesting and I’d like to spend some time discussing it (I wrote this thinking there would be lots of thoughts but if you see there are only three tiny paragraphs). My content is just that, my content (gasp). It’s full of topics that interest me. It’s in a writing style that nterests me. It’s my “unique” take on certain subjects. And….. that won’t ever change.

I’m not going to cater my content to my readers because ultimately this blog is for me. If you get enjoyment out of it (which hopefully you do) that’s just an added benefit, but not the goal.

So this goal of continuing to produce high-quality blog content isn’t necessarily referring to how I’m revamping my content to be more reader-friendly and interactive. It’s referring to how I want to continue doing my thing the way and the style I want to do it in–which to me is high quality and worth every second.

A Little Thank You

Thank you for sticking around. For anyone new here: thank you too. I’m excited to see what happens this next month and see how the whole project grows and develops. Like always, this is purely for fun, and so far it’s been great.

Tease for the next post:

If you try to stay rigid, or even worse, if your company tries to stay rigid, you will be punished. Simple as that.

Anywho, that’s all for today.

-Drew Jackson