Why rebrand after a decade? I'll answer that in a moment. But first, let me rewind.

Why rebrand after a decade? I’ll answer that in a moment. But first, let me rewind.

I’ve worked on every version of Pathwright’s brand for the last 11 years. Even back when we were called Coursebook! In retrospect, updating our name to Pathwright in ’12 was the most clarifying brand change we’ve ever made.

But lately, I haven’t felt the clarity. So I’ve been drawing new logos for Pathwright for a couple years. But none of them stuck. We knew it was time to refresh, but I didn’t have the guiding star that tells you where and where not to go with. A brand needs a big idea.

I started chasing the next big idea in earnest late last year. ’21 was a special year. I got to see so many thoughtful and creative customers use Pathwright in delightful, wholly unexpected ways. They’d moved beyond our brand’s academic adventure tone to innovate within academia and far outside it. So I made it my goal for our brand to follow them. I think none of my previous sketches stuck because they were all about us—a mistake.

I adjusted to follow the universal thing we and every one of our customers have in common: Paths. Paths are the core of Pathwright. Making a path with Pathwright should turn a task, program, or topic into something as simple to use as a road in front of you. But, of course, the thrills don’t come just from making a path. Like a road, paths are meant to be travelled!

But what about the folks behind the paths? I set out to follow our customers. After all, they’re who we made up the word “pathwright” for. That silent “w” makes all the difference, as do the makers behind every path.

Then a funny thing happened on the page as I sketched. If I rounded the silent “w” in “Pathwright”, it looked an awful lot like a winding path.

With simple lines and half circles, I had a logo, one that let me emphasize what Pathwright is for and who it’s for at the same time.

People who make paths made them long before they picked up Pathwright. They’re the “who” at the center of Pathwright, not us. We think they deserve the best possible tools, which is what we hope we’re making with every update. Great tools don’t replace craftspeople; they multiply every ounce of their effort.

A logo needs a word and a color. After tossing out dozens of fonts that didn’t fit, I drew the word myself. I can’t even tell you how many different r’s and p’s I drew. Dozens, definitely. Making the type myself was the only way to match the angle and tone of the logo. After spending weeks on it, I can say: Don’t go this route unless you have to. But in this case, it seemed like the only way.

Then I added red. That’s a big change after eleven years of gold. Why red? A few reasons.

Red, black, and white remind me of Swiss Modern, the style of choice for saying more with less. Pathwright exists on the increasingly crowded, complex internet. We’re saying “simplify” about more and more challenges these days.

Red also makes me think of high performance, like a race car. If you’re looking for the best designed, most powerful tools for making paths, you’re looking for Pathwright.

Red could be a spark of understanding that grows into a flame when you have someone to show you the path. Red signals heat.

For us? Red helps us, a group who puts a lot more time into our work than into talking about it, use our outside voices. Important things are good to be loud about. Red is undeniably the best color for speaking up.

So why rebrand after a decade? Because we understand things better than we used to. And we see where you want to go—where you’re already going!—more clearly.

And we know the most important thing we can do is make a Pathwright that goes with you.

I've talked about my work a lot in this article. But nothing to come out of a team is a solo effort. Big thanks to Mark and Paul Johnson for helping me shape these ideas, and to Lindsay Ramler and her team who took my Figma files and made a real website out of them. In the end, it took our whole team.

If you'd like to design a course, we invite you to try out Pathwright for free.

You can also send questions, comments, or topic suggestions our way on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram or email lydia@pathwright.com. We'd love to hear from you!

When it comes to creative work, why is it so hard to get down to business? In this blog post, Justin shares what he's learned about productivity in creative work over the last 10 or so years.

When it comes to creative work, why is it so hard to get down to business? You just have to outline the bare bones of the course, write the campaign strategy, or sketch a few logo ideas. You know: It won’t actually take very long. Just a few minutes! Maybe ten (fifteen tops). But you can’t seem to find that time.

Or is it you? Have you lost your edge? Usually the pressure works in your favor. The squeeze makes your best work emerge (are you toothpaste?). But not this time. And, really, not the last few times. What changed?

I’ll tell you the secret at the top. Creative work takes a really long time. You think fifteen minutes, but in truth you have to feed it hours. Wait, that can’t be right. Right?

Let’s start at the end and work backwards to tally up what actually goes into the “real work.” You know the to-do you’re thinking of takes fifteen minutes. But you had to write two bad drafts before this great one (it happens), so say forty-five minutes.

You managed your coworkers’ demands on your time today. Guarding your calendar kept interruptions away. As your mother wryly used to say, you don't need peace and quiet all the time, but a piece of quiet would work wonders. Making the space in your day took five minutes ten different times.

Maybe you took a walk too, which really helped you see today’s true priorities and get your metabolism going. Walk: fifteen minutes.

You had the energy because you ate breakfast, not just coffee. Even if breakfast came from a cereal box or a freezer, it took an extra ten minutes to prep and eat.

You felt clear-headed when you woke up today, which means you slept better last night. That took an extra hour of eyes-closed time. To get to sleep, you read in bed for thirty minutes instead of clearing your inbox for tomorrow. You made dinner a balanced, unwinding meal too—that cost another hour and a half, even if you left the dishes for later (they need to soak, right?).

The motivation for last night’s dinner came from the self-care you did before it. You squeezed in a short run, meditated, read a novel, or caught up with those friends you’ve been playing calendar tag with for weeks even though you really do like them (you do!). It only took an hour. These conscious actions told your inner kid—the one who’s coming up with these great ideas out of nowhere today—that you care for her or him, too. They paid it forward at crunch time.

So, the real work only took fifteen minutes. But making it possible required an additional five hours and forty-five minutes. Just for those fifteen minutes! The grand total comes to six hours.

Your creative work itself formed the tip of a ginormous temporal iceberg.

Knowing that this is how creative tasks work means the end of your guilt about not getting to that to-do before. Instead, acknowledge the hours of work and self-enriching time you must give to the true task of creating your own optimal conditions. Lay the groundwork. If the real work only took fifteen minutes, anyone could do it all the time, including you.

Going to yoga? Catching a matinee? Reading a book? Suddenly, that’s time very well spent. Give yourself credit for all those hours being part of the process, even part of the work itself.

We at Pathwright build our platform to be a clear, pleasant place to do your creative work when you’re ready. We can’t create more hours in your day, but we can make sure you don’t waste any of the ones you do have. We’re all in this together.

You can probably design your way to any outcome. But let’s compare coffee and little kids to see.

Why I Believe in Design and Design Believes in Me

The 3 Phases of Design Every Project Encounters

Today it’ll be 85º. When I got to work this morning, I put fresh, hot coffee in a mason jar with a lid and put it in the fridge. Through the magic of good planning, after lunch, it’s a wake-making iced refreshment waiting for me. I’m certain of the outcome, barring power cuts or someone leaving the fridge door open. I’ve designed this care for myself.

Earlier this morning, I made breakfast for both my kids. I do this almost every morning. Sometimes they eat, sometimes they super don’t. They’re two and four years old—food moodiness is par for the pre-K course. I hope that, whether they eat or not, they learn how to care for themselves with a healthy breakfast. And that I love them. I’ve targeted these outcomes, though I’ll try many other tactics to solve for them, too.

So, two cases of design. Two cases of self-care.

If you're solving things with design, you could divide your approaches into short-, mid-, and long-term design. Putting coffee in the fridge? Short-term design. Breakfast with love? Long-term design.

But I think you’ll be walking into the mouth of madness if you try to plan mid-term design. Why? Let me explain with another example.

Let’s say you’re going for a walk. Short-term design is you deciding how to take the next hundred steps. Quick pace? Slowly, so you don’t arrive sweaty? Which path works most efficiently for you?

Long-term design is what point on the horizon you’re aiming for, be it self-care or the building across campus.

Mid-term design happens after your first hundred steps, but before you’ve reached your horizon point. Running late, better pick up the pace. Are you tiring too quickly? Does your friend Sarita want to join you? You pick a direction that intersects with her while still moving toward your destination.

You design the short-term; you design the long-term. But the mid-term designs you. When you arrive in the mid-term zone, suddenly you possess performance data on the first hundred steps, new stakeholder input from Sarita, budget feedback from your tired legs, etc.

Now that your walk is telling you some information, you’re prepared to do another round of short-term design in response. You might walk quickly, but take the stairs to Sarita instead of the long way around. You still have the time (and the legs) to reach your destination. All’s well, though you might try new approaches after reaching your friend.

This is why we at Pathwright work in six-week project cycles. We’ve written about that before. Among other things, focusing on short-term and long-term design at work keeps us from neurotically obsessing over things like quarterly profits or overcommitting at the expense of adaptability.

We know our long-term mission. We design our slate of new projects. We wait for mid-term design to kick in in-between.

Great designers of all kinds welcome mid-term feedback. Mid-term exams? Tweaking the curriculum for next semester? Having the team try a different kind of book for the next company book club? Reframing launch instructions for the next conference? All cases of allowing in mid-term design to collaborate with you.

You could call my fridge coffee trick a “life hack”. I’d just call it good design—figuring out what you’ll want and how to get it before you have to have it.

In four hours, I’ll need cold coffee (long-term). So right now, this hot coffee needs a cold fridge (short-term). If it’s still hot in an hour, I’ll move it to the freezer to cool faster (mid-term). I can’t know what the coffee will need in an hour. I could go crazy theorizing or overcomplicate things (or both, yikes).

The coffee will tell me. Design happens between my needing coffee and what the coffee needs from me.

Please, set yourself a moonshot long-term design goal. And take the next hundred well-designed steps to get there. But don’t obsess over what might happen after that. Embrace the mid-term design coming to you. It’ll tell you what to do.

I’m a graphic designer. That’s why it’s weird for me to say that, when you use Pathwright, you probably won’t have to pay someone like me.

5 Design Settings That Transform Your School in Seconds

What If You Didn't Have to Pay a Designer?

In my heart (and based on two degrees), I’m a graphic designer. That’s why it’s weird for me to say that, when you use Pathwright, you probably won’t have to pay someone like me.

For years, I’ve worked with our team to make Pathwright pretty from your first login. But you may not know that you can take your school to the next level totally on your own.

Truly intuitive? So beautiful it blows your hair back? Tweak five simple settings to throw just the right mood in seconds.

When you create online courses with Pathwright, each course is automatically given one of 72 different colorful course covers. These course covers act like book or album covers. They give learners and staff alike a visual cue by which to remember the topic or content.

That’s a great start. But when you’re ready to really make courses your own, adding custom covers makes a big impact on how learners perceive them. You may have brand assets already at your fingertips, or you may want to turn to resources like Flickr Commons or Unsplash for great, free images.

We wrote detailed guidelines for adding custom covers here. Here’s the 5 second version:

You’ve got two great options. First, reusing your course cover with blur turned on makes the most sense for course backgrounds. Most course designers do this. But second, if you turn blur off, you’ll see a nice banner appear across the top of the path where the general info is.

Going the banner route takes a bit more planning not to render the course title unreadable. In most cases, you likely won’t encounter that problem. But think of it as more of a pro move.

To me, the best course backgrounds share three qualities:

Use mostly midtones, not bright highlights or deep shadows that create too much contrast

Don’t contain an overwhelming amount of detail

On the left, we've used an image with one main color. On the right, we've gone with an image that really runs the gamut.

On the left, the image is way too extreme in highlights and shadows. On the right, we've maintained reasonable contrast.

Here’s how to add a course background like that:

Your account icon is what most of your people will think of as the school itself. It’s like a social media avatar mixed with an app icon.

Often, using your logo makes the most sense here. If you don’t have a logo or don’t want to use it, anything memorable will do. Keep in mind that this will be seen during login and in discussions, so it’ll be small but important.

If you’re not sure what to do for an account icon, a memorable solid color or shape (or both!) works nicely. Here’s how to add an account icon:

Account backgrounds show at login for everyone. But if you're staff, you'll also see these special backgrounds on your dashboard. In both places, they fill the entire background, making this a simple way to set the right branded tone.

The most effective account backgrounds are a lot like course backgrounds—mostly midtones, limited detail. But in contrast to course backgrounds, choosing an image with a single dominant color can be an effective unifier.

Here’s how to add an account background:

This is one of those “cherry atop the sundae” settings. Whatever color you choose for your account’s primary color will instantly be applied to almost every link and button. It’s a quick way to really make Pathwright your own.

Brands typically have a main color. Usually, that’s the right color to use for this setting. But watch out: Black, red, and very light colors don’t work best.

Black doesn’t read as a clickable link very well.

Red makes every clickable option look dangerous.

Very light colors won’t even show up on lower-end screens or may look strange on mobile devices.

In these cases, reach for your brand’s secondary color. Using this as an opportunity to carve out a sub-brand for your Pathwright account can be an interesting direction, too.

That’s it! These five simple settings turn Pathwright into your own custom-branded app. We’re always working on more ways to make our platform the perfect canvas for your team, so let us know what we’re missing! Tweet at us or send us messages through Support with any ideas.

If you're keen to explore more, check out our Support article on everything you can brand with your Pathwright account.

We're excited to officially announce the biggest new feature we've built to date: Blocks. Blocks gives you the power to design effective, engaging learning content like never before.

A New Way to Create Content With Pathwright

Over the past year, we designed Blocks "secretly" with our partner educators. As we iterated, developed, and tested with world-class teachers and instructional designers, Blocks became a completely new way to design creative, beautiful, and interactive learning content. And Blocks aren't just new to Pathwright, they're new to education platforms in general. You won't find an instructional content authoring tool like Blocks built into any other education platform.

Blocks is well-tested and ready for you to use today. We hope you'll enjoy using it as much as we have. If you'd like to know a little more before you explore, read on.

Blocks is designed for active learning (not passive consumption)

As we all know, learning is an active, not passive, process. But most web content builders are designed to create content for passive consumption: blog posts, news articles, videos, audio podcasts, ebooks, etc . . .

You can post all kinds of passive content from this ubiquitous web editor.

These passive content builders are easy to use, familiar, and pervasive. Naturally, education platforms adopted them and tacked on quizzes, projects, or discussions to occasionally interrupt the passive stuff. This approach served us well early on, but we began to question its effectiveness. Perhaps learner engagement drops off in online courses because of the dull, blog post-like format rather than the content itself.  What if this "tacked-on" approach was a "hack" built on top of a passive content model? And what if that model is fundamentally built on a wrong premise about learning?

We began designing Blocks for the learner first with the goal of engaging their brains long enough for them to grasp a concept without putting them in screensaver mode. And so far, it's working. Here are some of the ways you can use Blocks to transform passive consumption into active learning:

Instead of a bulleted list to explain a set of facts, use flashcards that picture concepts and engage a learner's memory when they discover new information (above).

Drop a reflection question below a short video or article to help make it stick and encourage application.

Instead of a video demo, quickly create an image with touch-points your learner can use to explore a scene.

We've worked hard to make each of our 30 starter blocks look great out of the box on any device. Even more complex interactions like annotated images or flashcards provide a natural, app-like experience on smart phones and tablets:

With the lego-like Blocks content designer, you can be more creative than ever as you segment your content, show more than tell, and pace the flow of learning.

Blocks provides the best of both worlds: An instructional design tool & education platform all in one.

Currently, designing pro-level instructional content and making it available within an online course requires two big steps of mashing together:

Content created within an expensive, highly-technical instructional design tool like Adobe Captivate or Articulate Storyline and exporting it.

Embedding the export into a "player" within an expensive, highly-technical Learning Management System (LMS).

Hacking these two complex systems together carries more than 2x the expensive and technical hassle, while usually resulting in a disappointingly disjointed, limited, and opaque learning and teaching experience.

But now with Blocks, you can have your cake and eat it too:

Anyone can author instructional content right within the easy-to-use Pathwright platform without having to import, embed, or link to content from elsewhere.

All the content you build is fully integrated with Pathwright's built-in teaching tools, so you'll be able to use stats, grade work, share feedback, and have discussions right alongside and within your interactive content.

While there are still more advanced interactions that specialized instructional design tools offer, Blocks has all the basic tools you'll need to design instructionally-sound and unique content—and we're just getting started. We'll add new blocks and enhancements frequently.

(And as an aside, Blocks enables us to create entirely custom learning interactions for you. So if you have an idea for a block you'd like to build with us, let us know.)

Blocks multiplies your content team's productivity

As you think about using Blocks for your learning content, you may feel a little like a few of our partners did as we began to roll  this feature out  internally: "Well, this is cool, but wow—we've got a lot of work to do to upgrade all this content."

We think you'll discover along with them that upgrading to Blocks is a surprisingly quick—and fun!—experience:

With only a few clicks, Blocks creates great-looking content. You can copy+paste blocks (or whole steps with multiple blocks) to re-use templates across your courses.

Now all of the images and files you use across all of your content are stored in the new Media Manager—that means brand-appropriate visuals are only a search and tap away.

Oh, and Blocks includes one of our most requested content features: Autosave. Your content saves automatically as you edit so you won't lose your work.

Additionally, our own Learning Experience (LX) Design Team is available on a project-basis to help you economically and professionally transform any content you have (whether it's on Pathwright already or not) into the new Blocks format.

You can start using Blocks within your Pathwright account  today. If you don't have a Pathwright account, you can create one to try out for free and start using Blocks in minutes.

Running often is not a comfortable choice. Yet almost every day, I find myself hitting the trail for a run even though it’s much easier to do practically anything else.

How to use “creative endorphins” to foster a healthy habit of making

Running often is not a comfortable choice. Yet almost every day, I find myself hitting the trail for a run even though it’s much easier to do practically anything else. One reason I keep doing this is that I’m chasing that “runners high” (a.k.a. endorphins). I’m literally addicted to running. So if I don’t run for a few days, I start to feel mild withdrawal symptoms.

I find that this dynamic overlaps a lot with fostering creative habits. Great creative work can also be painful and time consuming, but that feeling of making something and putting it out there gives an endorphin-like kick to your brain. Once you’ve done it enough times, you’re hooked. It’s no longer nearly as appealing to spend most of your time on consumption activities when the lure of creating something new is right there.

Quick aside: I believe creative work is any effort that produces something new to increase efficiency in or enjoyment of life. That could be art, spreadsheets, code, etc…

So how do you foster this kind of creative addiction? It’s pretty similar to how you become a runner.

⏱ Put in the time. When it comes to learning new things or creating new habits, there simply is no shortcut for time invested. Don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise (especially if they’re selling something). I don’t get my endorphin hit until mile eight of a run. Similarly, it takes some hours for creative work to give you that same satisfaction.

🚢 Ship it. It’s not done until it’s out there. This is tough for anyone with high standards, but you won’t get that endorphin hit until you do. To foster a healthy addiction to creating, you must ship frequently.

👟 Dress for success. One way I trick my lazy self into going out for a run is by putting on my running clothes well before I need to. Similarly, having a ritual and environment in which you create will allow you to “put on” the proper context for creating. This will help you commit to the hard work and long time blocks.

As a dad and teacher, I think a lot about how I can foster a habit of creating instead of consuming in my children and students. Scheduling blocks of open time, praising them when they “ship,” and creating a context that encourages creative work will help the next generation become creative addicts who just might change the world with what they make.

Whether you’re wrangling your team to reach a milestone this week or psyching yourself up to launch your course this month, you can ride the primo wave of a supportive process to get there.

You start your week with the best intentions. This is the one—you’re going to knock it out of the park this week. But by Friday, a dozen random tasks pulled your attention away from your goal. Exactly what your goal even was seems very, very hard to remember. 

In 5 simple steps, here’s what we’re trying at Pathwright right now:

1. Set your destination for the month, quarter, etc.

Project planning gets a lot simpler if you set your destination before embarking. If you’re not used to filling out a project brief, just try answering these three questions to set your destination:

How would you summarize the project in 2-3 sentences? Pretend you’re explaining the project to a coworker over coffee.

What potentially contentious or high-ambiguity questions surround the project? You’ll need to answer these with someone who’s qualified during planning.

What jobs to be done does this project solve for? If you’re new to JTBDs, here’s a great primer.   

The time frame is up to you. We work in six-week project cycles at Pathwright. After trying week-to-week and quarterly, six week chunks works perfectly for us. Your situation may vary, but I recommend not planning too far out.

Since you know your destination, what strategic goal for this week will take you there in time? If you’re planning to launch a new course by the end of the month, then maybe your goal for the first week sounds like “write a set of learning outcomes for my course.”

At Pathwright, we recently tried pushing ourselves to build a prototype the very first week. For a new feature, that meant developing an ugly but testable version. Prototypes shouldn’t look too nice, but they should uncover problems that were invisible before and would have derailed the project later. So maybe your goal for week one is “outline my course in Pathwright.”

For most of us, goals don’t work if we’re the only ones who know them. It’s too easy to downgrade my ambitions or reschedule the deadline. To prevent those outcomes, tell your team your destination and weekly goals.

Our company uses Slack and IFTTT for this. I set up these automatic questions to ping everyone…

At 9am on Mondays: “🏞 What's your goal for this week that'll help you reach your 6-week destination?”

At 9am on Tu/We/Th/Fr: “💪 What's your goal for today?”

At 3pm on Fridays: “🏁 How'd it go with your goal for this week?”

4. Be public about if you hit your goal this week.

Cheer with each other when you make it, and figure it out together when you don’t. Shame doesn’t belong here; you need to keep the process supportive, or it won’t work. Everyone misses goals sometimes for all kinds of reasons. Patterns of success are great to build on; patterns of failure are great for encouraging experimentation.

For missed goals, try asking these questions:

Was my goal specific and reasonable enough? It’s hard to hit a moving target, or a target that’s a football stadium away—try a tighter goal next week.

Did too many other things get in the way? I won’t always be able to, but I need to say “no” to things that get in the way of my goal—try saying “no” more next week.

Does weird stuff happen every week? Maybe I didn’t define the project enough before starting—try revisiting the brief.

Do I feel behind all the time? Maybe I don’t have as much open time for the work as I thought—try cutting scope.

Show your work from your weekly goal and tell your team a little about it. I’m surprised by how accessible work way outside my own discipline is—development project, sales initiatives, etc.—after a link and a few sentences of explanation. 

A quick screen recording of a new feature Robert worked on.

A Google Doc for a new process Paul spent the week developing.

A link to a beta version of a site Lindsay built.

So far, it seems like if we decide to show and tell about our work every week, anything can be show-and-tell’d. Again, we use Slack for this. It’s amazing to see a digest at the end of the week summarizing the cool things everyone worked on. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised how amazing your own team is when you share your work every week.

That’s it! These 5 steps keep our teams on track at Pathwright. We’d love to hear if it works for you and what you’re trying on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

If you’re tired of not being sure your people are learning what they need to, try Pathwright. We built it from the ground up for ultimate clarity—from powerful outlining to seeing actual faces move from one step to the next. Get started free.

How to reach your weekly goals with your team or for your online courses.

There’s a commonality for designers, whether a product designer or a teacher designing a course. It’s this: Sometimes, even though you know what you want to accomplish, you don’t know how to get there.

This typically builds a lot of unnecessary pressure into the design process. Design isn’t ever easy, but there’s a simpler way to map the way forward if we’re willing to take a lesson from an unlikely source . . .

Bats use a technique called echolocation to map their surroundings at night when they can’t see. Basically, they make chirping sounds and listen for echoes off solid objects.

Because they receive so many echoes in response to their chirps, they have “to differentiate relevant information from signal clutter.” I learned that from this great SciToons video.

The video explains how bats avoid signal clutter like this:

To start, they send out low frequency chirps over a large range.

Then, listen for low intensity echoes from small prey (their goal).

Re-emit sound waves in the precise direction of their prey.

When both high and low frequency chirps return, the bat finds its prey and ignores all of the high intensity echoes.

I think bats can teach us something about designing a product or course here. When things seem hazy, it’s beneficial to spend more time listening to customers and learners and letting their feedback inform the next steps for your design.

Get feedback from a wide array of people.

Tune out the “signal clutter” of their feedback. (e.g. Feature add-ons that don’t align with the values/focus of the company.)

Articulate the most common, underlying problem that you can solve.

In the process, you may have to start ignoring the “high intensity” feedback in pursuit of the gems. Just because some feedback from a customer or learner is loudest in the group, doesn’t mean they speak on behalf of what’s best for the majority (e.g. A learner requesting a time change that’s an inconvenience for the rest of the class).

Whether you’re designing a product or you’re a teacher designing a course, you can use echolocation to map your way forward through the haze.

The first days of class are what I remember best from my time teaching. Covering syllabi, mispronouncing names on the roll, trying to wrap up early to build goodwill with my students.

The first days of class are what I remember best from my time teaching. Covering syllabi, mispronouncing names on the roll, trying to wrap up early to build goodwill with my students. I rarely knew any of them yet.

At the beginning I focused on orientation —not only of students to the subject, but also of students and myself to each other. Getting to know my students activated me as a teacher. I wasn’t really useful to them until I could assess where they were and where they needed to get to.

I’m not a teacher anymore, but I still love teaching. In fact, that’s what our team’s latest project — a new marketing website — was all about.

We’ve made sites detailing what Pathwright can do before, but they started to feel like dry lectures. This time, we tried to understand better both where our customers are and where they’d like to go. In other words, we practiced being teachers. Online education is tough to get your head around, so we outlined the three (only three!) steps involved. What Pathwright can do is only important when it helps you do what you need to do.

I’m not sure if helping you understand your journey (whether you become a Pathwright customer or not) is what you’d expect to find on our front page, but I hope it’s what you actually need. We committed to that approach and launched the new site last week. Check it out if you’re curious.

This project left me thinking, “What else am I working on that’s a teaching project in disguise?” I’m starting to see chances to help folks learn everywhere. And, more humblingly, I’m seeing lots of areas where I need to be taught myself.

Conveying anything new is still teaching, no matter the medium, just as learning is still learning even outside the classroom. The topic is almost inconsequential—what matters more is where someone needs to get to. Helping them just takes observing where they are and finding their path to the next place with them.

What are you working on right now that could put you in the teacher’s seat?

A lot of people set out to start a business. The perception of flexibility, independence, respect, and potential wealth are big draws. The millennial way of expressing this is to found a “startup.”

How I Accidentally Launched a Business/Startup

A lot of people set out to start a business. The perception of flexibility, independence, respect, and potential wealth are big draws. The millennial way of expressing this is to found a “startup.” The underlying motivations for a startup are often exactly the same but with two scoops of trendiness and pretentiousness about “making the world a better place” plopped on top.

Now, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with setting out to launch a business or startup. Pathwright is a little of both. But I think a lot of well-intentioned people have been sold a formula for starting a successful business that looks like this:

What should I do? = gain independence + flexibility + wealth + respect … (And, oh yeah, make the world a better place.)

We’re told that if we really want any part of this delicious pie badly enough and use the right methods, then we too could create the next Facebook, Uber, Apple, or ________. I’d argue from experience (and the research) that this is the wrong equation. It’s wrong in that it leads well-meaning people to approach starting a business with mindsets that don’t usually end well:

🍪 The cookie-cutter mindset leads people to attempt to start a business with someone else’s playbook or ready-made kit. Most of the time, this means that someone up the chain — the people peddling the playbook — are the only ones making the real money. This is easiest to see in multi-level marketing, but it’s pervasive in entrepreneurship books, blogs, and the like.

💡 The genius idea mindset stems from a belief that million+ dollar products are made from brilliant ideas. In startup land, this mindset leads people to focus on honing their pitch for some new, innovate idea and courting venture capitalists to fund it instead of getting good at actually creating something someone would actually pay for. All the successful business people I know understand that ideas alone are worthless.

🔪 The serial entrepreneur mindset is one that many aspire to, but very few people can actually pull off. Sure, there are the rare people uniquely able to start or turnaround just about any type of business, sell it off at a profit, and then move on to the next. But the problem is that the people who buy these businesses tend to be wealthy people looking to maximize their investment. This dynamic morphs the business into the big business stereotype that’s all about maximizing profit for the owners at the biggest cost to employees and customers they can get away with.

Millions of people fall into one of these mindsets, so it’s no surprise that there are billion dollar industries built around preying on their hopes and dreams through multi-level marketing schemes, get-rich-quick style books, courses, seminars, and even many MBA programs.

So what’s a better way to think about starting a business or startup?

Well, I think the first step is to back up and ask a more fundamental question first: What is my ideal work?

Not only is this question less complicated, it also helps determine whether starting a business is the right goal in the first place.

Your trade is the thing you’re well situated to accomplish that energizes you so much that you’re willing to put in the thousands of hours it takes to get really good at it.

From my own experience, Mark and I were fortunate enough to be born twins with big imaginations into a family that allowed no TV/video games but used library cards liberally. That situation taught us to be creative as an alternative to being bored. We’ve been “addicted” to creating new things together our whole lives.

At Pathwright, my best days are still when I get to creatively architect how all the aspects of Pathwright work effectively together. That’s the type of thing I’d do (and have done) even without pay. Mark designs and directs the code that makes software a reality and feels the same way about his work.

While having a clear picture of your trade leads to greater satisfaction for you and those around you, it’s not quite enough to answer the question: should I start a business?

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