A letter to the best wedding creators in the world by Josh Withers
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.
Cafes opened around 8 am, whereas in Australia, the ordinary café has done more than half its day’s trade by 8 am.
A new resort opened up nearby, and in the first month, workers were protesting because too much was being asked of them.
And the modern, white, hard-working, Western, capitalistic business mind of yours truly was blown apart when he found out why: when your well is dry, you’ve got nothing left to give.
In Mexican society, they take proactive cultural action to stop our human wells from drying up. What a blessing to live in such a culture.
In Western society, we set up the whole system knowing full well that your well will dry up one day soon, and when it does, we’ll hang you in public. This is the culture I live in.
Which is all to say that things really came to a head for me over the last month, which is why you haven’t heard from me: my well was almost dry.
A few status updates on how I’m going:
- The way I’ve marketed our business for the last fifteen years needs to change, so I’ve employed a marketing agency to take over the advertising portion. I’ve also adopted a new SEO strategy from a book I’m reading. If and when either of these brings bookings and enquiries back to a healthy place, I’ll be sure to share.
- I want to write this daily; I just haven’t had a lot to give. Honestly, I honestly felt sad about the realisation that some of my business development techniques weren't up to scratch.
- I also realised I'd been harbouring a sense of entitlement as a wedding celebrant of 15 years. Despite my good-natured personality there was a part of me that felt like it deserved enquiries and bookings. That part of me has been scheduled for execution.
We’re in Bali for a wedding and on a family break at the moment—a well-filling activity.
When your well is dry, you start chopping away at basic priorities, and for me, that looks like an adjustment to my core priorities list. My core priorities wellbeing list is:
- my own
- my wife’s
- my children’s
- my core group of friends and family
- my booked and paid wedding and elopement clients
- my Celebrant Institute and coaching clients
- my free content readers and listeners
- everything else in the world
Which brings me to you. That bottom rung of priorities took a hit for my own and my family’s wellbeing, simply because my time, finances, and energy were getting low, and I needed to redirect resources to bring things around. In a way, I’m sorry, but in another way, part of the reason we keep the Celebrant Institute at $12 a month, and my coaching packages are short and sharp—not lifetime memberships to a Zoom or email that I expect you to stay on for life—is because I’ve always held firm that I’ll deliver what I promised, and a free email is an easy promise. Zero dollars given means I don’t stay awake at night wondering if you’ve gotten enough value from me.
An old friend of mine offered to help me with a business problem, and I paid him $750, then he never responded to a message from me. I couldn’t sleep at night if I were him, and it’s the same if you were paying for this email.
That said, I really do enjoy writing this, so maybe I’ll relaunch it as a paid email so it makes its way up the ladder of priorities? Those of you who have reached out are a blessing to me—thank you for caring.