You may have noticed that I’ve moved this blog.
Or rather I am in the process of moving it. Because it is all taking so much longer than I anticipated.
I thought at first of moving to a platform like substack, or ghost, or medium, but it proved impossible to move the 1200-odd existing posts over easily.
Then I thought of using Hubspot. Same problem, except that this time I was able to partly import nearly all of them via their ‘smart import’ tool then export them again to a more generally usable format – the good old comma separated values file.
So in the end I decided to go with a basic WordPress site and a new domain.
It’s still not straightforward to import all my previous posts, but I can at least write new ones while I’m working on it. Although even that’s not perfect, as I haven’t yet worked out how to get the pictures in the email.
There is a moral to this story:
None of our businesses do things ‘the standard way’. Even if we start off with standard tools, we soon build our own quirks into the system, to suit ourselves and our clients.
So the trick is not to aim to be standard, but to go beyond the standard on purpose, and document it so that anyone new – client, supplier or team member – can quickly get to grips with it.
Even better, we can specify what has to happen in our businesses without reference to specific tools, so that if the tools change, our specification needn’t. That way, we can take advantage of other people’s ingenuity, without losing the benefits of our own.
Discipline makes Daring possible.