Seth Godin wrote recently that everything costs and it reminded me of my personal philosophy that everything is hard, you just get to choose your hard.

Everything is costly, everything is hard, you jsut get to choose, and some things are more costly or hard in the short term, some only in the long term.

The collective freakout that computers, robots, AI, will take all our jobs and ruin everything is somewhat founded in a misunderstanding of what computers are good for. In jobs requiring the upmost precision in measurement or calculation, get a computer. That's what Wimbledon is doing.

But if you want beauty in chaos, organised fury, messy love, feelings and emotions, get a human like you and I. That's what we're the best at.

You might have noticed I'm back and publishing. There has been no great change apart from the simple fact that I missed writing every day, and I guess the framework opened up for me to do so.

So I'm starting small, not committed to every writing every day, but committed to reaping enjoyment and satisfaction out of the process, like Greg McKeown wrote:

When we start small and reward progress, we end up achieving more than when we set big, lofty, and often impossible goals. And as a bonus, the act of positively reinforcing our successes allows us to reap more enjoyment and satisfaction out of the process.

What if the storms in life weren't that bad, you just needed to step outside of them and take a wider view? Sometimes its the only way to see the beauty in the chaos.

A few years back, our family spent six months living in a fishing village in Baja California Sur. So many experiences from that time still define us, but there’s one that I can’t stop thinking about.

The locals—mostly Mexican fishing people, farmers, or hospitality workers—lived a very different life to Britt, myself, and our two girls, who were three and one years old when we went.

And this letter is one of the reasons I haven’t spoken a lot about this experience: their lives were very different, and I didn’t want to be just another gringo talking about how people from other places were different to me.

But: The main way they differed was in their approach to busyness. They refused to hurry. On the pyramid where good, fast, and cheap sit on the three corners, but you can only pick two, "fast" was scribbled out.

I've got to be honest about Jimmie before I share his message. His burst onto the wedding scene was the first time I felt old as a celebrant. Before I saw Jimmie on Instagram I identified as young/cool, after, I felt old/ancient.

Luckily for us Jimmie a complete pro, a gent, kind, and generous, and I loved his encouragement today:

My friends, when it comes to being a creative, it boils down to the very essence of the word: create. You are endowed with the skill and know-how to form and express ideas or imagination. Remember, nothing worthwhile comes without effort. I encourage you all to continue doing what you always do: trying your best. Embrace the uniqueness that makes you stand out, even if it means colouring outside the lines.

Do not be afraid to be who you are, for many are searching for the unique light that is you. Allow yourself to be seen as you truly are, and celebrate all that makes you unique. Create funny ideas, write bold claims, and discover new ways to express that part of your brain that has brought you to this point.

Some of my favourite podcasts come from a podcast network named Relay, and that network/company just celebrated its 10th birthday (congrats!).

I had tickets to the show in London but travel schedule changes meant I couldn't make it. However Widgetsmith developer and writer David Smith attended and made these comments on how a business like Relay lasting for 10 years and more is special:

While nothing in business is ever certain, I firmly believe that Myke and Stephen didn’t reach this anniversary by accident. They have been careful and deliberate in their approach to building Relay, maximising the chances of its enduring over time.

Going on to liken Relay's growth to dry stone walls

My friends at WedShed surveyed 600 different wedding venues and vendors and crafted together some narrative and understanding about where the wedding industry is at mid-2024.

There's good news and bad news. You'll find it for yourself in that report, and in your inbox, and your accounting software, bank balance, your heart.

That's where I've found it, that's why I haven't written for a few days - because I had nothing positive to say so I decided to say nothing at all.

But today I'm back to work, back at an airport flying to a wedding, back to bringing my best because that's what we're called to do - to bring our best regardless of everything else, regardless of the survey, regardless of the lack, regardless of the feeling that in 15 years this is the quietest I've ever seen the wedding industry in Australia.

I couldn't help but get Jeff back on the letter again:

Sometimes the thing isn’t the thing. Everyone is focussed on providing a better thing, but I’m here creating a different offer altogether, taking me out of that over saturated red ocean of hyper competition.

It’s easier to compete in the blue ocean (plug for Blue Ocean Strategy).

Two more book references, because they drive so much of my process and I read them often, Pressfield’s "Do The Work" and Sivers’ "Anything You Want."

We do not exist in a vacuum. It's impossible to not be affected and influenced by all around us.

So enjoy this podcast episode of Tim Ferriss interviewing Seth Godin on his podcast.

If you listen clearly you'll see that my life has Seth, and Tim, written all over it.

Kiera is the girl that made me respect the art and craft of wedding planning. In my career, before meeting her, wedding planners had been stylists given control of a beautiful human moment, since meeting K and others like her, I'm a champion for booking a wedding planner with heart.

Here's her Friends on Friday letter:

Don't underestimate the power of showcasing your talent through effective messaging and marketing on social media.

Too many vendors hope their ideal clients will just find them by chance, but in today’s competitive market, you need to actively reach out and connect with them.

The guy behind the software I use to send this letter, Buttondown, was asked

How do you make the time to reply to a request in under 24 hours?

By Sav Tripodi and Justin replied:

I think the answer might be a little unsatisfying, but it’s a true one: emails and newsletters are a pretty commoditised space, and it’s very easy (because emails and archives are so portable) for customers to switch providers whenever they want. Time and time again when I ask people who have stayed around for years why they’ve stayed, a big reason is support and service: they’ve never had a company treat them with the respect and attention that we do. I don’t take it for granted, and I structure my days knowing that answering questions and helping folks onboard is the single most important use of my time!

Painter and visual artist Chuck Close on inspiration:

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to do an awful lot of work.

All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case.

Our clients'/couples' families and family-dynamics are changing, as this CBC article documents on the decline of cousins, so it's far-less likely that the people sitting in front of you look like the old nuclear family you might have expected fifty years ago.

How have I adapted my ceremonies to not say the wrong thing or a stupid thing? I say less things that could sound like a stupid thing to say.

Saying more - correctly - is a great option too but the less you say about specific family and the more you say about family in a general context, the less likely you are to put your foot in your mouth.

It's why I greet a crowd of wedding guests as "friends and family" or "everyone" instead of "ladies and gentlemen", if only because recent statistics show that a certain cohort of the males in that crowd are not at all gentlemen - but that's another letter for another day.

Joseph Joubert:

To teach is to learn twice.

Which is why I write this letter every day.

The second I stop learning is the moment I start dying.

The problem with automations is that if you don't set them up with care, it will become blatantly obvious that you don't care.

Like this email from Easy Weddings received recently:

Caring isn't hard, it takes maybe a few more minutes than not caring but the payoffs are immensely better.

My current obsession is figuring out how the different AI systems know what they know, then working that to my advantage.

It's not as simple as it sounds though. Look at this screenshot of something someone getting married near me might ask ChatGPT.

Two of those celebrants are not celebrants at all and one is a lovely celebrant a few thousand kilometres north. Finally, Janelle is in the north of Tasmania, not the south where Hobart is.

The nicest guy in the wedding industry for a decade running is Jake Smith. If you ever manage to tie him down for a coffee or a meal, you'll be better for it:

I am inspired by the thought of always making my next wedding my best wedding.

Now, every wedding I do isn’t necessarily my ‘best wedding’, and the majority of factors are out of my control so I’d be a bit conceited to think that it’s ’My’ wedding or that everything about that wedding being ‘good’ is because of me … however I’ve found at every wedding there’s something I can work on.

The most common ones for me have been things like:

From a World Without Time:

Albert Einstein used to say that he went to his office at the Institute for Advanced Study “just to have the privilege of walking home with Kurt Gödel.”

I'll sometimes choose a later or earlier flight just so I can share a meal or a coffee with someone who inspires me.

Walking with someone I respect and admire will bring me more than any book could.

A celebrant just emailed me and all the links in her email signature don't work. They're mistyped.

You can't build greatness without a good foundation, and that means running a broken link checker on your website every now and then, checking that your social media bios, links, and information is correct, and the links in your email signature actually work.

Jimmy Carr, one of the greatest comedic minds in the world today, said in an interview:

Everyone is jealous of what you've got, no one is jealous of how you got it

Study, love, obsess over that process of how you get 'there'. Being there will feel nowhere near as good as getting there.

This graphic resonated with me not for the a-word, but for the fingerprint.

Authenticity, as a word, is starting to become heavily diluted and abused.

Authenticity in business could mean that you're just not feeling it so you don't come to that wedding booked this afternoon.

The most common question I receive from celebrants is about what to say in a ceremony? Where do we get inspiration and words from?

I get almost all of my ceremony content inspiration from outside the wedding industry.

Here's today's pot of inspiration: John August and Craig Mazin's Scriptnotes podcast with Christopher Nolan.

Kurt Vonnegut told a story about his friend Joe,

Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer now dead, and I were at a party given by a millionaire on Shelter Island.

I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel ‘Catch-22’ has earned in its entire history?”

And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.” And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?” And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.

Glenn was one of the first people I ever met in the wedding industry who ran the kind of operation I could aspire to run. Not in size or staff, but in professional operations and generosity. I still remember the first time I worked with him over a decade ago and he was helpful, complimentary, and just lovely. He's still a gem today, even more so.

So you'd think his Friends On Friday post would be something touchy/feely. But here's Glenn on how he stays calm:

I think the biggest thing wedding service providers need to know is how important data tracking is to their business.

By knowing what metrics to track and then tracking them weekly, monthly, quarterly etc, they are then able to make decisions based on data and not emotion.

Josh Knox's dad has been retired for almost 20 years but everyday he consults a notecard with five activities.

1. read
2. write
3. take a walk
4. practice chess
5. study a language

My five daily's are

1. write
2. read
3. take a walk
4. give my time to my family
5. empty the email inbox

There are two movements you can take in growing your business today: floor raising and ceiling raising.

Floor raising is increasing stability in your business, refining the basics, reinforcing your core offering.

Ceiling raising is about increasing your potential, increasing your offering, dreaming, experimenting, trying.

Choose one, then do it.

A guy named George Strait who apparently is a country music star has broken the record for the largest-ever ticketed concert in the U.S. with 110,905 people in attendance. It sounds like everybody went but it was less than 0.001% of the population of the planet.

I'm happy for George. I also have no idea who he is or why that many people went to a stadium to listen to him. I'm just simply reminded that "Everybody" does not exist, everybody is a false construct, and everybody doesn't know who you are, or I am.

And when everybody is a nobody it's an opportunity to be a somebody, and that somebody is you because you don't need 1% or 0.01% of the world's weddings to run a sustainable business. 0.0001% is probably enough.

Scroll back through the archives of this letter and you'll find (I hope) nothing terribly new or outstandingly wise, but it will be encouraging and helpful.

If you and I were smart enough to act without encouragement this letter would be useless.

Thankfully we're all barely smart enough to put the correct legs in the right holes in our pants this morning, so this letter lives another day.

Please do me the favour and the honour of telling someone else about this letter, tell them to go to www.aisleauthority.email to subscribe for free today.

My least favourite time of year in Australia are the final days of June. Advertisers are celebrating with EOFYS (end of financial year sales) and small businesses are rushing around freaking out about the fact that the books are closing for another Australian financial year.

The thing I dislike is how every single year a large cohort (of which I am a member) freak out like we haven't had an entire year to plan for this silly change of date.

I hate how emotionally stupid I/we can be.

But we are. It's important for you to see this in yourself, and your clientele.

My goal at a wedding is to take the individual happiness of each guest and get them to share it with the rest of the audience and the couples.

Happiness held is the seed; happiness shared is the flower.

The people I want to listen to most are the people who want to listen to other people the most. It's an admirable trait. That's why I could listen to my friend Jeff forever:

One of the best things I’ve learned is someone else’s roadmap doesn’t necessarily have to be mine. What worked for them may not work for me, and it may actually be the wrong direction for me entirely.

There’s risk in carving out your own path, but once you’ve cleared enough of the trees, you can start to see a bit further ahead to where you’re going. I didn’t mean to create some visual for that, but it’s the best way I can explain it.

A number of things I’ve tried that have worked are almost the opposite of what everyone else said to do. Maybe I’m just stubborn and hate being told what to do or whether or not I’ll succeed (that’s a big percentage of it, guaranteed) but I’ve enjoyed figuring it out myself, while applying some generally understood tried and true methods.

Friends of mine recently lost their website because the domain name expired. They claimed it was stolen. I would claim they didn't take the responsibility required to be in business today.

• Know who your domain name/s is/are registered with.
• Make sure auto-renew is enabled.
• Make sure the credit card details are updated.
• Know who your web hosting is with, and do the same.
• Know who your email is with, and do the same.

Finally, check your spam folder on the regular. Often sitting alongside diet pill emails and someone selling SEO services is an important email that my mail provider has marked as spam.

If you leave your wallet open on the street out the front of your house it may well be stolen, but you dropped the ball by leaving it there in the first place.

Naval Ravikant writes:

Your goal in life is to find the people, business, project, or art that needs you the most.

Where are you most needed?

Which weddings could not exist without you and your talents?

If you've been on Facebook, Threads, Instagram for more than a week then you might have no idea how the platforms work today.

The whole deal has changed.

Each piece of content we create lives completely on its own. It's not for our followers or people who have liked our page.

When you create today that content could come from your account with thousands of followers, or from a brand new account, it doesn't matter. Hashtags don't matter. All the things we think matter, do not matter.

You can't start on step ten, you've got to start on step one.

The Apple Vision Pro is on step one. The step ten version will be amazing, but mathematically Apple can't skip step one.

You wouldn't have booked step one Josh Withers wedding celebrant. I'm maybe on step 15 now and I'm barely at a place I'd book me. If I was getting married today I'd want, nay need, someone on step 20.

The curse of self-employment is having to wear all the hats: bookkeeper, janitor, salesperson, tech support, CEO, delivery person, and be the product.

Luckily for us today many of those hats can be at least partially worn by computers, robots, AI.

But there are still two things you need to master.

Naval Ravikant distilled it down to these two:

Writing a marriage ceremony is like any other form of writing, with one big difference: in a few weeks, you'll present it publicly just once, never to be repeated. Gutsy work.

Stephen King, in his book On Writing, said, "When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story."

Rewrite those ceremonies a few more times until you've distilled them to their essence, their brass tacks.

That's a wedding ceremony that packs a punch – not a snooze. All bang, no fizzle.

Shaun Tolhoek from Lemon Tree Film House on building heritage in the wedding industry:

Be a good person to everyone you meet.

The longer you are in the industry the more you realise how much people talk about each other. Good stuff and bad. But it’s got to the point that people are literally asking ‘ tell me your horror stories, who sucks out there? Who should I stay clear of’

I think being easy, being respectful, sharing work is wayyyyy more important than your actual skills. No room for divas.

"The days can be easy if the years are consistent," writes James Clear.

I think about that every day as I wrangle toddlers, a marriage, and a global celebrancy practice (Hi from Italy!), along with writing this daily letter, and the weekly Rebels Guide To Getting Married letter, and the Celebrant Institute and its monthly letter.

That's why I'm writing and publishing this letter every day, it's me trying consistency in a wild world.

How are you aiming for consistency?

I felt sick when I saw my brother's wedding photo, the two of them are the middle of their first kiss and there's my big fat head right in the middle.

I made rookie marriage celebrant mistake number one: not moving out of the way for the first kiss.

That moment was 11 years ago and I haven't done it since.

Enjoying the work is a form of wealth.

I know plenty of rich folk who constantly complain about their jobs. The hours. The responsibilities. The stress. Their boss.

It’s hard to put a price on an enjoyable work environment but I do, on every invoice.

In an interview, Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos said of a letter received from a client, “When I read that letter, I thought, we don’t make money when we sell things, we make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.”

When do you make your money?

James Clear wrote:

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

You're a big kid, hopefully you're smart enough to research systems for yourself, but on the chance you recognise the value in having good ones, this is the kind of work I do with people like you every week. Hit me up if you're keen on getting nerdy.

Nassim Taleb believes that the following list is true wealth:

1. Worriless sleeping
2. Clear conscience
3. Reciprocal gratitude
4. Absence of envy
5. Good appetite
6. Muscle strength
7. Physical energy
8. Frequent laughs
9. No meals alone
10. No gym classes
11. Some physical labor
12. Good bowel movements
13. No meeting rooms
14. Periodic surprises

Nowhere in there does he mention money or bank balance.

Josh Mikhaiel on being human and also being a wedding business person:

Balancing the human and commercial aspects of wedding creation can be challenging. Many of us started in this industry out of passion and later discovered the business side.

I've found freedom in adopting a "person first, business second" approach. This mindset makes my work more fulfilling, especially when decisions conflict between empathy and efficiency. Constantly switching between these perspectives was exhausting.

Prioritising human connections and creative fulfilment has transformed my decision-making. At weddings, I face requests that might clash with my artistic vision. By focusing on the human element, I provide a better experience for myself and my clients, ensuring they get a good human experience and an amazing end product.

Twelve years ago this week I shared this infographic about the data being transferred around the internet:

How have things changed in the last decade?

• ChatGPT (less than two years old today) receives 7,000 prompts every minute
• Google now processes over 6.3 million searches per minute, triple the number
• Even in its currently hobbled/failing state, X (formerly Twitter) sees 360,000 posts per minute
• Instagram users send over 694,000 reels via direct messages every minute, and 69,000 photos
• Spotify users stream 24,000 hours of music every minute
• Streaming video viewers watch over 40 years of streaming content every single minute
• Amazon's sales have skyrocketed to over $455,000 per minute, almost doubling the total ecommerce space
• YouTube users upload over 500 hours of video every minute, up from 48
• Over 204 million emails are sent every minute, maintaining email's status as a primary communication tool, which is how you most likely got here
• Facebook sees 240,000 new photos and 510,000 comments every minute
• Foursquare, Tumblr, and Flickr have paled or faded
• Over 1,500 Wordpress blog posts are posted every minute

Kevin Simler's essay 'Here Be Sermons' reminded me of where I received my training to be a celebrant, in a Christian ministry college. I was that dude "training to be a pastor" but I took a different direction.

Kevin identifies that the difference between a lecture and a sermon is the former is speaking to individuals, the latter the audience as a community. A 'mass moralising' of the community.

Putting church, religion, faith, and preaching aside, I was struck by the idea that the sermon - as a format - is my method of communication at a wedding and how much I enjoyed it. I enjoy not lecturing the guests (or the couple) like they're in some weird marriage school, but instead, fanning the flame of encouragement, joy, and celebration among the witnesses so as to create a bushfire of a wedding overflowing with awesomeness.

A 'mass moralising' in convincing the couple's community to celebrate, protect, and uphold them.

Our everyday jobs (wedding-creating and magic-delivering) can become rather "every day" pretty quickly.

But the couple you're creating for, this is quite possibly their first, and last, wedding.

If you're going to make anything, make it magical. It's the easiest way for your every day to not become "every day-ish".

There's a large chance that most people don't know about the 2024 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference - WWDC for short - that occurred today, and rightly so, it's not of interest to most.

I'm not even here to report on WWDC, smarter people than me can, and will, do that on websites like sixcolors.com, macstories.net, and theverge.com.

On my flight from Fiji to Sydney just now however I watched the 100 minute keynote film and found it so entertaining, informative, helpful, and most importantly: shareable.

Not just that it looked aesthetically pleasing but that every minute of the presentation was something I wanted to share with different friends about how that Apple iPhone feature could help them, or the MacOS feature that would change their business, or the Apple Vision Pro that I desperately want to buy and now can (in a month) but really struggle with paying $6k for something I don't think I need.