A snarky person could call the title of this post “the tagline for Facebook and Twitter.” A bitter person could expand this to mean all of media. I’ve got a cold (it’s a bummer to end the year with a cold, but if it runs its course by January 1st I’ll be happy) so it’s been hard to concentrate this morning. Instead of working on the final draft of the Second Edition of Startup Opportunities: Know When to Quit Your Day Job (being published by Wiley in Q117) I’ve been surfing the web, looking at Twitter and Facebook, responding to email, and drinking apple cider.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that my dad Stan is one of my best friends. So is my brother Daniel. Over the last decade we’ve been doing regular things together like an annual trip (me/Dad, Daniel/Dan) and monthly dinners (me/Daniel). Last month I proposed a new idea – a monthly book club between the three of us. We’d rotate choosing the book of the month. We’d read it separately but talk about it over the course of the month. Then, the next person would pick the next book. We’d iterate on the process – maybe we’ll end up doing a real book club video call for 30 minutes once a month to discuss, maybe we won’t.

I woke up this morning thinking about people who have a desire to please. This is not my personality type, but I encounter it regularly. Amy often describes herself as an “approval-seeking people pleaser” and I’ve learned a lot from my 30 years of interacting with her. With CEOs I often notice the pleaser personality in the context of employees. The pleaser wants everyone around him to be happy. This creates a positive reinforcement dynamic for the CEO – if everyone is happy, things must be good. If employees aren’t happy for any reason, that becomes a priority for the CEO to solve.

I had a great digital sabbath yesterday with Amy and my friends Dave and Maureen. I had a cold so I took a three hour nap in the middle of the day. For the rest of the day, I sat around in my PJs. I read Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Amy and I loved Season 1 of the Amazon series but struggled with the first episode on Season 2 (I’m sure we’ll fight through it and watch it this week.) Since we got off to a slow start on Season 2, I decided to read the book, which I had resisted reading because I didn’t want it to confuse the TV series with the book.

Thanks to the 75+ people who have reached out about being willing to help me with writing and WordPress stuff. I’ve read all the emails, answered some of them, and will get responses out to the rest on Sunday after I have a nice digital sabbath starting in a few minutes. On my run today, I thought more about what I was looking to do and decided that my approach wasn’t right.

I’ve decided to hire two people for 2017: a full time writer and a full time WordPress Goddess (or God – I’m good with either gender …) I’ve been very reticent to add people to our team. However, at this point it’s clear that I can get a lot of leverage from two very specific people. Writer: I’m looking for a full time non-fiction writer. This is not a research function, but rather a writing / editing / coordination function. The amount of writing I do is significant, but there is 5x more to do than I can handle. I’m turning down a lot of stuff that I’d like to write and putting off stuff into an infinite backlog which doesn’t feel good. So, having someone writing first drafts, editing stuff I slap together, writing some primary content, and helping get it posted in the right places would be a big help.

Venture Deals v3 (the third edition) is now shipping in both hardcover and Kindle. If you are looking for a last minute holiday gift for your favorite entrepreneur (or lawyer, VC, or angel investor), we’ve got you covered. Jason and I wrote the first edition of Venture Deals in 2011. When we were updating it for v3, I read every single word several times. It’s pretty cool how much it has held up over the last five years and we are delighted that it continues to be at the top of the Amazon bestseller list for Venture Capital books.

It’s Sunday and it’s -8 degrees in Boulder. Egads. As I sat in my warm office catching up on email from the week, I sent links to our Foundry Group videos to a friend that had never seen them. I realized two things: (1) I’m still annoyed with Ryan for accidentally deleting our Youtube account and resetting the counters on both videos from > 100,000 views to 0 views and (2) A bunch of people in my world have probably never seen these videos.

I had a great digital sabbath today. I was wiped out from the week so I slept until 10am, had breakfast, and then crawled back into bed with Amy until 2pm. I spent the afternoon on the couch reading March by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell. It’s a comic book trilogy that is the story of the Civil Right Movement through Congressman Lewis’ eyes.