Photo by Oliver Yuan.

Hello. Hi. Hi. Hello 2025.

After 3 weeks of quiet. It's tricky to decide what out of the piles in our brains to bring forward and what to keep quiet. That's what the energy in studio feels like right now. So many piles and we need to pick. There's a lot to catch up on. I'm going to focus on Strategy, because that's where we left off in 2024. But first, check these cool glasses CW made for himself when we got back to brooklyn.

We took a trip over winter break to visit family in Japan and Taiwan. We biked with the kids and grandparents from Taipei to Tainan. And spent 4 days in Kaoshiung, where CW's family is from. It was an adventure and left us hungry, which was helpful when you want to eat everything. Highly recommend biking if you ever visit Taiwan.

Our crew on a detour through some farmland.

Strategy continued.

Our trip gave a lot of time away from computers. Away from access to tools. And a reasonable amount of time to think, especially on the planes. I love planes for thinking.

Towards the end, I finished reading Seth Godin's book This is strategy, make better plans. (which we shared a bit about in previous unresolved). CW read it in a day back in December, and I wanted to be on the same page as we create ours. The book is written as a sequence of 298 anecdotes that relate to strategy, but is in no way a "how to" book on coming up with one. As a reader, it's up to you to pull out what is compelling and useful. To be honest, a lot in there felt tedious and I wish I was a better skimmer, but when the gems popped up, and they did, they were no doubt worth it.

One thing I noticed as I read, I found my focus shifting from what needs fixing or what we aren't doing and should be, to, this is a thing that is going well, this is how the system you operate within works, and see you actually have a tool you didn't know you had. Use it in a new way and see what happens.

An example in the book was about momentum. How it is hard to get things started, but once you are moving, even if it is super slowly, that inertia, makes it easier to test out ideas and try things. I imagine a flywheel that we can kinda throw things at and see if they stick, respond quickly if it acts like a cog, keep going if we produces something new or exciting.

We've been doing this for 16 years now, and yeah, we're lucky to have some of this steadyish momentum in our spice rack to play with. I never thought of momentum as a tool.

With the book finished, we spent part of the plane ride home writing our strategy. We have a working draft and it's broken up into these sections:

Facts (what we do)

Values (what is sacred?)

Assertions (personal statements about how we are with our work)

Goals (things we want to make happen, how do they align with or reinforce values?)

Assets (what we're working with, superpowers gone unnoticed).

Style (how we move forward in time, what that looks like... for CW&T I imagine our style as a big old tortoise cruising the landscape, half smile, mouth open, chomping grass)

Strategy (this is really long and takes all the above into account, all possible actionable items)

The hard part right now is going through all the strategies, flushing them out and finding the ones to prioritize in terms of our goals.

Simple dimples.

ha.

Office hours.

THis afternoon we hosted our 3rd virtual office hour session. These happen once a month for an hour on a Friday. We limit attendance to 7 people, which feels like a good number. Also, we'll host IN PERSON office hours once every 3 months. Feel free to sign up for a spot in upcoming sessions.

Sign up for office hours.

Pau spent the trip gathering tiny parts and first day home cobbled together hotdog man.

We didn't go here but I wanted to.