Hey it's me Tom Critchlow your favorite blogger, weirdo, and indie consultant. There's a new look for the email because I moved the newsletter to Buttondown - a lovely little indie email service.
For those following along, the past 18 months have been about finding new operating rhythms. Launching the SEO MBA really messed up my daily cadence and internal gyroscope as an indie consultant - and I've been trying to get my sense of balance and rhythm back ever since.
Between Two Cohorts
The last 18 months was dominated by the self-paced SEO MBA course, and reflecting back on that experience I realized that I needed to invest in more live learning experiences. So far so good - 2023 has been dominated by live cohorts!
March was dominated by running the first beta cohort for Figma Thinkers. This just wrapped up and I'll have more to say about that soon - but the experience was really wonderful. Dropping into a Figma canvas with a bunch of folks and jamming is such an expressive, fun way to use the internet!
May is going to be dominated by the first live cohort for the SEO MBA Executive Presence course (still time to join if you want to). I'm designing the experience for that right now but I'm excited to build live learning environments, interactive exercises and more.
Beyond May? I'm still figuring that out... Suggestions on a postcard please!
More Interactive Wacky Internet Please
I'm excited by some mad weirdo internet energy right now - I recently redesigned by homepage with an interactive clickable map of links, designed and built using Figma!
It's super easy to make one of these using SVG files and I wrote how to do that here: Building an Interactive Blog Map.
Related - two great links with weirdo internet energy:
- An internet canvas from mmm.page founder. I love the vision for a paper-like internet here. It's what keeps drawing me to Figma.
- Essays the size of Cathedrals from Henrik Karlsson (a great subscribe)
The Roadmap is not the Territory
My latest blog post is a kind of stream of conciousness in which I introduce the idea of a "total business review" workshop that I've been developing for clients - along with some notes and ideas around "prioritization" and why roadmaps feel comfortable and familiar, but are often not that useful.
It also contains this mysterious diagram:
Read it here: The Roadmap is not the Territory
Some links on Education
I'm thinking more and more about education these days. I'm especially interested in ways the internet can enable our interests to turn into deeper learning journeys.
Two great resources:
- Otherinternet recently hosted Campus Complex, a new kind of educational network, physically spread across NYC. (and what an incredible micro-site for the project!)
- Shannon Mattern has curated a lovely (long!) list of Extra-Institutional Schools which is a treasure trove of ideas!
Play us out Sam
Some great music I've been listening to recently:
- 6s to 9s by Big Wild - Hello summer!
- Esja by Hania Rani - melodic piano, if you like Philip Glass you'll love this!
Ok, that's enough. What are you working on? What's in your drafts folder?
Sending you blessed weirdo internet vibes.
Tom