OMD's Journal is Evolving...Again
Dear Friends,
I’ve elected to take one of the four annual breaks for OMD’s Journal to round out this quarter with a special message.
OMD's Journal is evolving—once again. The new changes will take into effect starting April 2nd 2022, the last day of the March publishing cycle after the March Powerlifting Journal is published.
Unlike previous iterations, this will be a major shift and with more subscribers on board the journey since previous shifts, I wanted to explain everything in greater detail. Context will be provided in the following:
What’re The Changes?
What Spurred the Change?
Change in Pricing
What does this mean for Current OMD's Journal Subscribers?
What does this mean for Future OMD's Journal Subscribers?
Closing Thoughts
What’re The Changes?
The newsletter will move from 48 articles a year to 23 articles a year. Instead of four essays a month, it will be two a month from January to November and one in December. They will look like this:
11 Powerlifting Journals
11 Investing Journals
1 Powerlifting + Investing + Writing Journal to reflect on December and year
The Powerlifting Journal will stay on its current schedule of being released at the end of the month on Sundays. The Investing Journal will follow afterward to recap the month.
The Powerlifting Journals will continue as they were as monthly assessments. The evolution is coming to the investment essays. I will no longer be writing company-specific essays.
Instead, I will write a monthly essay on my investing journey that will resemble the reflective tone of the powerlifting journals. They will dig into the investment decision journal just like how the Powerlifting Journal’s source material is literally the training journal I write in every day.
With a reduced number of issues and the evolution of the topic from intensive research to one of journalistic reflection, the price will change as well. The newsletter will go from $500/year to $100/year with a $10/month option as well.
The Investing Journal will focus on my practice of becoming a better investor for the month. It will share a variety of thoughts on the companies I learned about. This will include my pursuit to become a better business owner of the companies that I already own and those I am learning about (some might be brand new and some might be something I might talk about for months or years).
To give you an idea of what I may write about, it may include:
Deeper thoughts on books reviewed on the OMD's ABCs newsletter on Tuesdays
Investment decisions made in the month
Reflections on historic decisions made/not made
Learnings from studying private companies or reading academic research papers
Building an effective investing practice for who I am
My investor psychology
General thoughts of self-discovery spurred from investing
The Investing Journal will be a journal of my pursuit to become the best investor I can be focused on who I am and my own unique goals, which will still cater to my investment philosophy of investing in culture and people. It’ll be written with the intention of showcasing how I put into practice the thoughts and learnings I share in the OMD’s ABCs Newsletter. This evolution will be my way of going deeper into my journey as an investor.
What Spurred the Change?
Context is everything. The catalyst that put the changes in motion was an opportunity that arose in early March. It was an opportunity I didn’t know existed. But, in hindsight, it looked like the opportunity I wanted to create for myself for the last four years—I just wasn’t able to articulate it.
Over the last few weeks, a rapid succession of conversations led to preparing to take on the opportunity and reflecting on the future of OMD Ventures. I haven’t signed anything so I won’t comment on the specifics. But I will be working part-time for an investment fund focused on the culture-specific research I had been writing on OMD’s Journal. With possibilities it becomes a full-time opportunity, this brought on the need to make time and adhere to possible compliance-related restrictions.
Time
Writing the business research was a full-time task. Each weekly article took ~60-80 hours a week to research and write. The caveat here is that a far more capable person than myself might’ve taken less time. But I am all that I have and I’ll have to make do with that.
I should also add that not all hours are equal. The ~60 hours of writing was by far the most difficult thing I did compared to working in equity research, consulting, or accounting.
Writing is the most power-law-related task where I could feel the exponential speed of ideas colliding the longer I focused on a problem. The first half of the writing period is slow. The facts and ideas swim around my head and they start connecting bit by bit. Then, I write. It starts agonizing from sentence to sentence. Then, I hit velocity where I’ll type for 4-5 hours straight and everything flows out nonstop I can feel my body shaking and sweat pouring down my body and it’s only with the final period that I feel the thumping of my heartbeat.
At least, that’s been my process. Having the Sunday deadline helped pump out such adrenaline as well. But, that won’t be sustainable if I were to take on this new opportunity. So, I needed to make time, and that not only meant publishing less frequently (I will still write every day as it is a practice) but also changing the type of content itself. This leads to the next reason.
Compliance
As I would be working with an investment fund, I was informed there would be various compliance-related restrictions. I don’t know the extent of it but as I understand it, it would be less of a headache for me to avoid any company-specific investment-research-sounding essays.
That was an easy thing to switch off given the necessity to make time for the future work. Now, you might wonder “Isn’t this jumping the gun a little bit? You said you haven’t signed anything.” This brings forth the most significant reason for the change. I evolved too.
Effective > Effort
What this new opportunity presented was a way to do the culture-focused research in a far more effective way with others who shared my passion. I wouldn’t be alone and could learn from veterans and be far more effective in my research, as I was made aware through our conversations.
It was such revelations such as the limited scope and depth of my writing that made me question my own integrity of charging for what I wrote. I don’t think this is imposter syndrome either.
The fact is, I will be far more effective working with the investment fund than by going at it alone. I can’t go on in good conscience selling and producing work that I know is great in effort and low in effectiveness when there is an opportunity to do it the right way.
What this opportunity presents is an avenue to build mastery at the intersection of culture and investing. That also revealed an opportunity to look back at OMD’s Journal and what I hoped to achieve with OMD Ventures.
Back to Basics
What gave me solace over this evolution with OMD’s Journal was that I was going to make these changes regardless of whether this opportunity panned out. The job opportunity might’ve played the pivotal role of forcing me to reflect and playing my hand but I have no qualms on it being the right decision as far as doing what’s within my control.
My obsession with company culture stemmed with my obsession with the individual. My fascination with human performance—what one person could achieve—pushed me to powerlifting, investing, and now to writing. They’re all pieces of the same puzzle for me.
I think the best cultures help every individual within to become the best person they can be, to pursue their own form of self-mastery. That pursuit is the function of OMD Ventures.
I built OMD Ventures to be a reflection of my pursuit of self-mastery. With hopes of building a business out of this passion, I wanted to invite those who cared into how I was pursuing it through the practice of investing, powerlifting and writing. That’s why OMD’s Journal formed as a premium newsletter.
But it was an iterative process. OMD's Journal evolved from only investment-related essays to incorporating the Powerlifting Journal. Now, I’m iterating to make the investment part focus on the practice of investing.
I thought the practice of investing was learning about companies. That’s what I was taught when I worked as an investor and the standard then was to research a company a week. I imported that standard to the framework of the newsletter and hypothesized it would make me a better investor.
Writing in-depth, company-specific research articles was also the predominant practice for all profitable newsletter businesses as well. So, like all beginners, I copied what others did. That’s how the format of writing about investing and powerlifting weekly came to be.
However, while the Powerlifting Journal reflected on my monthly progress and forced me to think about what I had done to get where I wanted to go, the investing articles did not do this. The conversations with the pros at the investment fund made me reflect further on the format my culture research would be better suited for and it wasn’t a newsletter.
But the Powerlifting Journal that depicted the monthly progress fit well with what I considered the purpose of a newsletter to be. That is, to be current to the subscribers reading it. With that, I wanted to write the Investing Journal the way I would want to write it.
Maybe this is the evolution where I am moving away from copying the investment newsletter pros that came before me. I wanted to write about my investing practice before but I never thought people would read it. It just…didn’t make sense.
Yet, as I’ve been learning, doing what doesn’t seem to make sense when compared to what everyone else is doing has made the most sense for me. I decided to follow this feeling and change the investment research into a monthly Investing Journal as a result.
The purpose of OMD Ventures was (and is) to share my pursuit of self-mastery in the hopes that I can help others do the same and it seems right that I continue to iterate my writing to fit what makes sense to me.
A Second Note on Time
A separate note on time—in addition to making time for a possible new role—is that I will have far more of it as well. The fact that I would be publishing about investing once a month means I’ll have a month to think.
Combine that with what will be a more intensive job digging into culture and investing, I will want to take moments of my day to let the ideas congeal and that will result in a far more meaningful set of insights than pumping out research every week.
It will also give me the time to read longer materials like an entire book on a company culture or 50-page research papers that might lead to absolutely nowhere. But the relinquishing of the weekly publishing schedule will provide me with the space to think and write about the insights I think will actually contribute to my development as an investor.
It’s come to my attention that while quantity has a quality all its own, I need time to think. This time helps me decided to dig deeper when something is interesting and stop when something isn’t. Some companies might be worth listening to one or two podcasts about while some might be worth reading 1-2 books about and that range requires greater blocks of time to digest and process. The monthly publishing schedule gives me greater flexibility in this regard.
Change in Pricing
A number of writers talk about “properly” valuing their time and knowing their “worth.” As weird as it may sound, I was afraid I wasn’t doing that. But I was also afraid not enough people would find what I was writing interesting. I assumed a small readership base of maybe 100-200 subscribers and priced the newsletter at $500/year accordingly.
I ran the newsletter with this pricing for nine months at the weekly schedule writing the essays I had intended. The result? It didn’t become a financially sustainable business. Now, I know it’s too short of a time frame. But there was a clear lack of traction.
I also don’t think it would’ve made it another couple of years because I was getting burnt out. There was a mismatch. Actually, there were mismatches everywhere.
I felt like a fraud charging the prices I did for what I was writing. I felt the research I was doing wasn’t well suited for the newsletter format nor the cadence. But I was afraid, desperate and I just pushed on.
Deciding to publish twice a month instead and lowering the price to something I thought fit what I was writing, well, it gave me a sense of comfort with myself. That’s a rare thing and I think I’m making the right decision when I feel that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still scared.
How did I arrive at $10/month? I figured it’s the same as meeting twice a month for coffee. I meet you once to chat with you about my systems for powerlifting, becoming stronger, and healthier. Then I meet you with another time to explain to speak to you about investing the way I practice it, how I’m striving to get better at it and you can take it and think about how you will in your own way. But if you’d like to book me for a year because you love chatting with me so much, I figured you earned yourself a discount so that’s the $100/year.
Result for Current OMD’s Journal Subscribers?
It means you will get a refund on April 2nd, 2022. It will be a prorated refund from your date of subscription. If the new format and focus excites you and/or you’d like access to the archive of the previous iterations please do subscribe to the new pricing that will be available later.
The archive will still be available for all future subscribers of OMD's Journal. If there are articles that interest you and you don’t plan to resubscribe to the new OMD's Journal that will commence on April 2nd, 2022 but are sad I am no longer continuing the company-specific essays, I would recommend printing a PDF of the articles you’d like to read in the future.
I can’t thank you enough for supporting the venture and I hope you’ll continue to go on the adventure with me in this new format.
Future OMD’s Journal Subscribers?
For all you subscribers of the Tuesday OMD’s ABC Newsletter, this evolution might be more to your liking as I wanted to bridge the gap between the two newsletters. It will also give you a far lower price point to read the archived research papers that were generously funded by the premium subscribers who came before you.
The first publication of the Investing Journal will be the recap of the month of April and come out the week after the April Powerlifting Journal entry—probably the first week of May 2022.
Closing Thoughts
I’ve read this message over and over again. And it sounds weird. I can’t help it really. It’s weird that I think people will want to read someone who is entering his 30s going on about trying to become the best powerlifter, investor, and writer he can be.
By the standards of the culture around me, I’m supposed to have figured out my path to self-mastery and everything by my early 20s. But alas, I’m a slow one. Life was just too exciting, finicky, and weird for me so I took the detour—the scenic route if you will.
I never thought I would write such a message on the near eve of turning 30 years old. But, I thank you all for the support and if you’d like to see this man continue to pursue his form of self-mastery come along on the journey. I’m going to spend the next week de-programming the culture in my head that makes turning “30” a significant thing and updating OMD Ventures to reflect the evolution.
The adventure continues.
Thank you.