THE HOOK
You may have noticed that last week, in the issue asking for your feedback, I said I would share what comes back in a November issue, not in the next one. That was not a slip. It was the first quiet signal of a change I have been weighing for a while, and this issue is where I explain it. After twenty weeks of landing in your inbox every Wednesday, The Wider Lens is going to start arriving once a month.
THE LENS
I started The Wider Lens to share my perspective on living well across health, wealth, and intentional living, with no real idea how it would be received. For twenty weeks the response has been more generous than I had any right to expect. I regularly get texts, emails, and DMs from people telling me an issue spoke to them, or handed them a perspective they had not considered. That response is exactly why I want to be careful about how I run this. A project only helps anyone if it keeps going, and the honest truth is that weekly is not a pace I can hold at the quality you deserve.
I am never short on ideas. Time is the constraint. If you read the issue on the five types of wealth, you already know where this lands: of everything we are handed, time is the one account we cannot add to, only spend. Between work, family, and a handful of other projects, the weekly cadence had started quietly borrowing from the very parts of life this newsletter is supposed to be about.
So moving forward, The Wider Lens will move from weekly to monthly. I think you come out ahead in the trade. Fewer issues means more thought behind each one, and something more worth your time to read rather than one more thing competing for attention in a crowded inbox.
It also makes room for work some of you have already seen mentioned here. The Deer Creek Local project I wrote about in “The Neighbor You Never Knew You Had” is one of them. There are others I am not ready to name yet, arriving in 2027. Monthly is what keeps all of it sustainable at the same time, instead of me doing several things at half of what they could be.
I am looking forward to continuing The Wider Lens, to building this community alongside you, and to sharing what I see in the hope that it helps you navigate your own life across health, wealth, and intentional living. Same lens. A little more room to focus it.
ZOOM OUT
Three questions worth sitting with this week:
Where in your own life are you running at a pace you could not sustain for another year, and what would it actually cost to slow it down on purpose?
If you could only do the thing you care about most half as often, would the quality rise enough to more than make up for the frequency?
What are you doing weekly out of habit that would lose nothing, or maybe gain something, by happening monthly instead?
THE VIEW
Three things worth your time this week:
📚 Read
“The Tortoise and the Hare,” Aesop (yes, the fable). The oldest productivity lesson we have, slow and steady wins the race, and the entire case for monthly in about two hundred words. Worth re-reading as an adult, when “the hare” is usually us.
🧠 Concept worth knowing
Sustainable pace. The tortoise’s lesson in engineering terms. Drawn from the Agile Manifesto (2001): the right speed for any long effort is the one you can hold indefinitely. A sprint you cannot repeat is not progress, it is borrowing against next month.
📊 Stat worth sharing
The cost of an unsustainable pace, measured. In a survey of a thousand creators across the US and UK, more than half (52%) said they had experienced burnout as a direct result of their work, and nearly two in five had considered walking away from it. An unsustainable pace has a measurable cost.
Zoom out. See what’s possible.
— Chuck
SOURCES
“The Tortoise and the Hare,” from Aesop’s Fables — public domain; free full text via Project Gutenberg or the Library of Congress. No purchase link needed; optionally point to a nicely illustrated edition worth keeping.
Sustainable pace — Agile Manifesto, “Principles behind the Agile Manifesto” (2001), agilemanifesto.org/principles.html: “...sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.” General reference.
Creator burnout — Billion Dollar Boy (creator agency), “Over Half of Creators Face Burnout”: survey of 1,000 creators and 1,000 senior marketers across the US and UK; 52% experienced burnout as a direct result of their career, 37% considered leaving. billiondollarboy.com/news/over-half-of-creators-face-burnout (also covered by netinfluencer.com).
