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Solange's "Cranes in the Sky" took me back to a season I don't talk about much. She tries everything to make a feeling go away. None of it works. The cranes stay.
All that building, and the cranes never left.
For a while my sky was full of them. A startup I believed in didn't make it. A podcast I poured hours into went quiet. Friendships I thought would last forever ended. And grief hit me nonstop. Disappointment, hurt, and if I'm honest, a little shame.
My way of making it go away was work. A new idea, a new plan, one more thing to build. From the outside it looked like I had it together, and nobody stages an intervention for the guy who's being productive.
What do you reach for when you don't want to feel something?
For me it was the work. For you it might be your phone, your calendar, or making sure everybody else is okay so nobody checks on you.
Here's what I learned. The work never healed anything. I'd finish the next thing, feel a little relief, and a week later I'd be right back under the same cranes. What I needed was to stop long enough to feel it. Call the disappointment what it was. Let the hurt be hurt before I turned it into a plan.
And once I did, the cranes started coming down. Not because the losses got smaller, but because I finally knew what I was building for. The startup that failed taught me to never go into business with friends. Find people who share your mindset and your grit, even if you start out as strangers. That lesson shaped everything I've built since, including reimagining what The Excellence Factory would be. The podcast that went quiet made room for the show I actually wanted to make. Grief taught me who my people are.
So name one crane this week. Just one. Say what it was: a loss, a no, an ending. Sit with it for an honest minute, then ask what it's been trying to teach you. The feeling and the lesson come in the same package. You can't take delivery on one without the other.
This week's mini with DJ Menifee is called "Hard Work or Busy Work?" He asks a question I wish somebody had asked me during that season: "Is it hard work? Is it just busy work? Or is it actually producing the outcome that's intended?"
DJ is talking about getting promoted. Find out who's holding the yardstick on your work, and line your effort up with the outcome that matters. Watch it with this letter in mind, though. A lot of what I built back then was busy work. It kept me moving, and the hurt stayed exactly where it was.
So when you watch it, ask DJ's question about your work and about yourself. What is all this effort really producing?
Your 1% move before Wednesday: look at your list and pick the thing you stay busiest with. Ask yourself DJ's question about it, then add one more. Is this keeping me from feeling something?
Then hit reply and send me one word for how you're really doing. I read every one.
Know somebody who's always busy and never gets asked how they're doing? Forward this to them.
If somebody forwarded this to you, you can get The Invisible Letter free every Sunday at derecco.com.
the extra.
This whole letter started with a song, so here's the song. Cranes in the Sky by Solange. She wrote it in 2008 and sat on it for eight years before she put it out in 2016, and it won her a Grammy. The cranes were real. She was in Miami in the middle of a building boom, a crane everywhere she looked, and she said later that all that building wasn't really dealing with what was right in front of them. Put it on this week, no multitasking. Just listen.
