Note: I wrote the first draft of this in fall 2013.
Earlier this year I started browsing /r/minimalism. I’ve always enjoyed the minimalist aesthetic, and it is calming for me to look at clean, orderly rooms and discuss the attachments to material objects that pervade our lives.

In March, I moved across San Francisco (a whole 5 miles!), and as moving presents the perfect opportunity to go through your things and get rid of what you don’t need, I trimmed down a lot of my stuff.

In fact, I’ve done that every time I’ve moved, which has been around 20 times in my life. Yet every time, once everything was packed, I was still surprised by how much crap I had. I felt like I’d gotten rid of most of my belongings, yet here they were, filling a cube truck to the ceiling.

It’s gotten to a point where all this crap begins to weigh me down. I have always tried to curb my belongings, but I can also be sentimental about objects, so there are things following me around from place to place that I never look at or use. Birthday and postcards from the past 25 years. Dirty, ripped festival wristbands. Notes and letters from people that, while heartwarming, I never read again – or if I do, it’s once every five years, max. Little artifacts from a vacation or a friend. Inherited objects that I keep purely for sentimental reasons.

So I gave myself permission to not feel guilty about getting rid of all this stuff. I’m not going to love someone less because I don’t have the carving they brought me from Egypt or the t-shirt from New Mexico. I won’t stop remembering my grandparents because I don’t hold onto the stuff they left behind. I still have those records I love that were my grandpa’s, the Hunter S. Thompson books that were my other grandpa’s.

I still have the things that matter. They represent enough of the sentimentality to be able to let go of everything else. And if I lost those items, I wouldn’t be devastated. Because I have my memories, after all. And in the case of family members, I have those things I can’t get rid of. The tall genes from both sides of the family. My grandpa’s fine hair. My grandma’s force of will. My grandpa’s passion for the Giants. The love of puzzles, the gifts of opportunity they provided. The curiosity and drive and joy that defined them all.

Another thing I will never let go of are my books. I love to look at them on the shelves and remember the worlds and ideas and empathy that they gave me. One day, when I have my own place, I want the walls to be lined with books. What can I say, I’m a freak. I’ve never thought of getting rid of them, they are too much a part of who I am and what I’ve gone through.

I can look at To Kill A Mockingbird and remember who I was when I first read it, how it has shaped the way I see human nature. I can look at the Harry Potter books and relive the journey of growing up alongside those stories. My books are pockets I have stored my life in, and for that reason they are exempt from the purging.

I wrote this piece almost a year ago, a year that has felt much lighter. Looking back, I can see that purging my stuff was not the most healthy of instincts. At the time, I felt like there was very little in my life I could control, so controlling the things I owned was how I dealt with that. I’m not as obsessive now, I’ve cooled off. But I don’t regret giving away a single thing.

I do feel more in control. I am not defined by the things I own. I do not need all of these things I grew up thinking I needed. I do not need everything that I want, nor do I really want most of those things. Living with just the things I really need, and some things that I truly want, has allowed me to look outside at the world around me, look inside to learn about myself, and focus on what matters most.

Image by Kseniya Makarova

I’ve always been an obsessive reader. Through literature and writing I’ve lived a thousand lifetimes, something that has shaped who I am and how I think about the world.

The most valuable part of reading (and studying writers) is seeing how others process their thoughts and set up systems to achieve success. Being a successful writer is not unlike building a startup: it’s an iterative process, and everyone has their own path to success based on their circumstances and product.

In writing as in growth marketing, having a framework is extremely helpful for getting started, generating ideas, and finding success. I tend to think of the sonnet as a metaphor for this. A sonnet is a style of poem created in Italy in the 13th century, popularized by Shakespeare and the uber-famous “How Do I Love Thee” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Most people say that they don’t “get” poetry (spoiler alert: there’s nothing to “get”), but you can’t deny that this poem is beautiful. Great poetry happens when prose and form come together to express something that is hard to express in any other way, which this poem does flawlessly.

You can probably see that this poem is bound by a rigid structure. There are different sonnet structures, but in a typical Shakespearean sonnet there are 3 basic rules:

1. It is 14 lines long.

2. The rhyme scheme is: a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g.

3. The meter (the way it sounds) is iambic pentameter: baBOOM / baBOOM / baBOOM / baBOOM / baBOOM.

This probably seems dumb. And it is definitely outdated. But I believe it illustrates a point about the nature of creativity perfectly.

In poetry classes, I often had to write sonnets as an exercise. At first, it really sucks. No one writes like that anymore. And at the beginning, it’s difficult.

But I quickly discovered that it actually makes writing a poem easier. The rigid structure saves me from the “I can write about anything” syndrome, which can be debilitating, as anyone who’s stared at a blank page trying to think of something to write knows. The rules give you a starting point, and a challenge to really test the limits of your creativity.

Creativity does not spring from freedom. The world is full of rules and systems and constraints and there is no escaping that. The best innovations in history came from people working within an existing system and finding a way to improve or expand it. They were bound by the rules of physics and economics and society, and within that created something meaningful. An important aspect of creativity is flexibility and adaptation. If anything was possible, we wouldn’t need creativity.

As with most things I think about, this ties back to startup marketing. In the tech world, we often operate under the mindset that anything is possible. And it is, in a way. But thinking about it that way is a mistake. Regardless of the industry or vertical or environment we are in, the world is bound by rules. Ignoring that will always lead to failure.

I’m often asked, “So what tactics would you recommend to grow my company?” It’s a tempting question to answer, but the bottom line is, I do not know anything about your company. I don’t know who your audience is or what your LTV is or what has been working and not working for you.

Graham Hunter says that when asked this question, the first thing he says is, “Well, let’s take a step back to look at the bigger picture.” At Tradecraft, we’ve put together a growth process to guide how we help optimize growth for the products we work on and our growth consultation sessions with early-stage startups. As Brian Balfour says in his recent post on creating a growth process, “Tactics first is putting the cart before the horse. You need a process that will help you build a scalable, predictable, and repeatable growth machine.”

Without a framework to approach growth, your efforts will be sloppy and hard to measure and ultimately ineffective. Having structure prevents chaos as much as it encourages creativity. Once I have the totally unproductive mindset of “I can do anything!” out of the way and I’m operating within a pre-determined framework, I can really start exploring the possibilities. Because without rules, it’s impossible to know where to start, if it’s working, or if it makes any sense at all.

After setting up a process, it’s much easier to evaluate your company’s needs and limitations. For example, if you have a low LTV, you probably don’t want to pursue paid acquisition. If you have a small team, you probably don’t have the resources to build out dozens of landing pages to A/B test, or a new feature that may or may not spur growth. I’m not saying don’t do these things, but the point of having a process is to evaluate whether or not pursuing channels or tactics are worth it. These limitations will help you find a starting point for growth that’s right for you and your company. And much like with a sonnet, when you’ve found a starting point, the ideas begin to flow.

Now you can start looking for practical possibilities to grow your company. Having to adapt to your limitations can often be the spark you need to think of a really creative way to solve your problem. Using your process to guide the quantification of your hypothesis, progress, and results helps to make sure you’re not wasting time and money. The process helps to guide you through finding, implementing, and testing new channels.

When you know where you’ve been, it’s much easier to know where to go next. When you know what the problem is, it’s much easier to adjust your course and iterate on new solutions. When you know what’s not working, it’s much easier to come up with successful solutions.

As everyone in the startup world knows, iteration in product development is the key to success. Not only does it save time and money, but it builds a better product. You generate ideas and you test them and you adjust and you start over again. Growth is the same.

Just like writing a sonnet, working within this system makes things much easier. It’s a lot of work. It is usually not thrilling. But in the end, the flexibility that it requires opens up your mind to think of truly creative ideas and workarounds. And that is where you’ll discover your sweet spot for growing your business.

I’m very interested in how startups and tech companies onboard new users, particularly because it’s one of the places where product meets growth marketing. It’s the first touchpoint with the product, and the first chance to hook the new user. I’m a music geek and when I recently signed up for Rdio, I noticed some areas they could improve the flow, so I put together this slide deck.