OMD Ventures Newsletter Update

Hi Everyone,

It's been a while. It's been about a month or so since I last published a newsletter. I had never intended it to be so long. But a number of factors contributed.

I was living in a Portugal for a month for the first time, just living out a dream from 2018. It's been a mix of learning to balance working while in another country and trying to set up my "system" while at a new place. As it turned out, it took more effort and tradeoffs had to be made.

One of the tradeoffs was writing more newsletters. The newsletter had to evolve but I wasn't sure what that evolution would be. So, instead of pumping out random thoughts, I decided to stop and think for some time.

Then, when I thought I was ready to make time to write something, I got sick and injured my spine. None have been serious and it'll be a matter of time before I'm back to proper form, I hope.

I know. These are all excuses for why I have not written. It's true. Part of the truth is that it's been difficult to write. Though, I admit, writing has always been difficult, and I'm not talking about writing well. Writing always takes work. There's no muse. Her visit is a bonus, a surprise earned from writing all through the times when I didn't want to write or didn't know what to write.

Throughout the years I've been able to fight through and write. Maybe I've grown fat, figuratively speaking. But I knew something was off with the newsletter. There were decisions I made in the past because I was desperate and I needed to survive. Decisions I made because I didn't know what else to do and I was figuring things out.

I'm still figuring things out. I don't know what the answers are but I know the newsletter, once again, has to evolve. 

I want to take my time. I've written with all kinds of self-imposed deadlines over the years and it's done wonders for me. Throughout the period of angst and screaming anxiety trying to meet the deadlines I set myself, I was able to write a lot and put a lot out in the world. Whether the quality was enough or not was left up to the readers like you and, for the most part, it seemed to be fine.

But every piece of writing I've published was published because I had a feeling that the piece was ready. I would then press publish. Sometimes, I didn't think it was great but just good enough to meet the deadline. Either way, I trusted the deadlines and the sweet relief that would come from meeting it.

I know that a weekly deadline won't work for me anymore. I'm also in a position privilege now and I want to push that advantage. By that, I'm referring to writing at a pace that I like. A pace where writing continues to keep me happy.

It also means I would like to prioritize my writing so more people can read it. I'm not going to have the premium newsletter anymore. My plan is to make the premium newsletters available to everyone now because I'd rather have more people read it than not.

The idea is to combine my free OMD's ABC newsletter with the premium OMD's Journal newsletter to just one newsletter. I'm going back to writing essays for everyone.

But I'm not going to speak much about investing. I will continue to keep an investing journal for myself but given the evolution of my work, I'm more subject to compliance rules and it's easier on my mind to just not make anything investing focused.

Now, I plan to continue writing about business and investing as the art form. I'll just withhold from speaking about specific company research. Though, I would love to continue to share how I'm working to improve my wealth system.

After all, I think everything I've written over the last few years have been about systems of one form or another. It's not set in stone yet but I think that's going to be how I'll update OMD Ventures...to a place where I write about systems. Culture and business are systems of different sorts. How I think about a business would impact how I think about getting wiser and wealthier. Sometimes it can even impact how I try to get healthier.

With that, I'll have just the one newsletter again. I don't know if I'll have the categorical splits like art, business and culture. But I'll have a series of essays of various flavours.

As for the cadence...I'm not sure on that either. I think every month would be a good cadence. It would give me enough time to think and write while not loading up your inbox with junk. But, like I mentioned earlier, there is power to having tighter deadlines and forcing myself to write and publish with more frequency.

So I don't know. Maybe I'll follow Tim Urban's path and publish whenever something of value is ready. For that, a monthly schedule appears to be a good bare minimum for someone that likes having cadence to things.

I'm starting up my writing engine again. But the coals have gone cold and it takes time to start the train up so I appreciate your patience. If you have been waiting to here from me, I'm touched by the support as well. I hope to have some essays in your inbox soon. Maybe in a month.

Until then, I'll be cleaning up the website, updating the archive with all the essays I haven't posted, cleaning up categories and everything that clean up the mess that was reflective of my life at a point in time.

Thank you.

Daniel