Doing What Works

Depending on the size of your community, it can be challenging to keep up with current events. Rob Blatt knows. He’s the founder of The Briefly, which Katie and I devour with more enthusiasm than breakfast. “Without local news you’re essentially lost one mile from your home,” Rob says. And in this edition of Doing What Works, you’ll find out what you really lose when a business closes, for example -- and what a community gains by even failed attempts to keep it open. Rob notices and appreciates where he lives, and in The Briefly he’s built a community of people who do the same.

Here are your show notes…

You don’t have to live in New York to find The Briefly [https://www.thebriefly.com/] fascinating!

The Briefly is a passion project for Rob Blatt [https://www.robblatt.com/].

The Grand Prospect Hall’s commercial is a classic. Want to take a look [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYDsZY3Ns-g]? Here’s a summary of the fight to save it [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LTHlTO0bEg].

It was in The Briefly that Katie discovered the Subway Social Club [https://www.instagram.com/subwaysocialclub/] -- “normalizing conversation on public transit” -- and now she and Subway Social’s Claire Feuer are friends. Hi, Claire!

Want the local news where you live [https://patch.com/]? Want to be a more informed voter [https://ballotpedia.org/Main_Page]? Want a story about a baby goat that made its way to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway? Stick with the show all the way to the end for that one!

You don’t know what’s going to make you happy until you try it. The job or the relationship that looks good on paper may not feel so great at, say, ten o’clock on a Tuesday. That’s one reason to say yes to more things, so you can get a better feel for more things. Saying yes is a habit and a mindset. If you practice saying yes to smaller things with low stakes, you might find yourself more willing to take bigger risks. That’s what we hope to inspire in this edition of Doing What Works.

Here are your show notes…

Irresistible author Adam Alter [http://adamalterauthor.com/] was one of Katie’s professors at NYU Stern and “say yes” was his advice.

“I wish I might go back and do the little things you asked me to” is from a poem by Alice E. Chase [https://www.scrapbook.com/poems/doc/860.html] entitled “To My Grown-Up Son.”

Saying “yes” (and “yes, and”) is a rule of improv [https://medium.com/the-improv-blog/the-first-rule-of-improv-is-yes-and-30e5954240d6].

“If you can’t imagine any other explanation for a set of facts, it might be because you are bad at imagining things.” That’s from Dilbert creator Scott Adams [https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays].

“Marriage is a big bet. It’s the only bet of its kind, one in which you say, ‘This feels right; I think I’ll change everything.’” That’s from Jerry Seinfeld [https://www.today.com/popculture/seinfeld-turns-25-read-jerrys-best-real-life-lines-1D79884423].