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Hello there!
We hope you’re well.
This month, we’ve been thinking a lot about purpose. In business as well as in life, being clear on our purpose can be challenging. When we’re tangled in the day-to-day running of our lives and businesses, it can be easy to get distracted and lose sight of the why at the heart of what we do.
We’re lucky to continue to work with brilliant businesses to clarify their purpose and build strong brand stories that communicate this. As Simon Sinek said, people don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do.
Something that drives us at Tidy Content is helping brands that do good do better. And at the same time making the web a better, more accessible and inclusive place - even if we have to do it one website at a time.
So we’ve pulled together some great reads that deal with finding purpose, crafting meaning, and creating engaging stories and experiences people can get behind in 2021 and beyond.
1. Newsletters; or, an enormous rant about writing on the web that doesn’t really go anywhere and that’s okay with me - Robin Rendle
In this beautiful, scrolling essay, Rendle argues that the web doesn’t have to be the ‘embarrassing, ugly and ad-ridden’ place we’ve learned to love. They explore what it means to write to strangers you’ll never meet, and why the humble newsletter is a perfect form of writing for the web.
2. The End of the Inconspicuous Purple Cow - Ivan Gurkov
The days of shouting louder than your competitors have passed, and advertising on the web has become a type of spam that serves only to interrupt browsing. Gurkov argues here that it’s no longer enough for you to talk: you must give people a reason to talk about you. By communicating your purpose, you’ll create stories and experiences your audience want to participate in and talk about, essentially marketing your brand for you.
3. The slow content manifesto - Contentious
We’ve all heard the saying that a little thought can go a long way. But in order to think, we sometimes need to hit the pause button. The slow content manifesto is a commitment to do just that: to choose quality over quantity, enrichment over transaction, and purpose over profit. Slowing down enough to give ourselves the headspace to really think.
4. 50 ideas that changed my life - David Perell
As well as pausing for thought, sometimes we need to look at the things we do through multiple lenses. View things through the other side of the telescope, look at different angles, find new viewpoints. This wonderful collection from David Perell is a treasure trove of ideas that can help us analyse and inspect the things important to us in new ways.
5. 21 reasons to hope in 2021 - The Fast Company
Working on the present would be pointless if we weren’t driven by some sort of hope. ‘To hope is to give yourself to the future,’ says Rebecca Solnit, ‘and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.’ The Fast Company gives us just that: 21 reasons to be hopeful this year.
Did you find anything interesting you’d like to share or chat about? Just reply to this email and let us know!
Stay safe,
Nia and Adrián
Tidy Content
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