Hey folks,

Happy Friday! Looking forward to a Saturday w/ literally nothing on the calendar this weekend. Amazing how pumped that makes me vs. when I was younger. A couple things on my mind…

1. Are you designing landing pages in Claude yet?: We’ve reached a tipping point on most of the businesses I’m working on where, at least for landing pages, it makes more sense to design and code them in Claude than to work with a designer. If nothing else, design in Claude first and then hand it off to a designer to build from if you need it integrated into your stack. If you haven’t done this yet, I want to assure you that you 100% can. Here’s the process:

I did this with Chandler for our site in less than 1hr: https://theallsmiths.com/ Reply with your landing pages, would love to see what you’ve built!

2. Pray your disappointments: I’m not a complainer. I can be actually be borderline delusionally optimistic at times, and I think that’s a strength. This week I was talking with some guys and realized the downside: it makes for shallow prayers. In Christianity and Judaism, there’s a strong tradition of taking your complaints (your disappointments, discouragements, frustrations) to God in prayer without a nice bow tied around it, exposing them and letting God work with you through it. I’ve been trying it and I think there’s something really big here. If prayer isn’t your thing, skip to #3, but if you want to try out a prayer practice this is a game changer. I just don’t think God is that interested in entering our cleaned version of our inner life.

3. “Hey, what happened?” I think I saw this on Matthias Barker’s Instagram this week. He was talking about a small shift you can make as a parent when your kids are acting up: rather than coming in with immediate correction (“hey, stop that”), let your first sentence be an inquiry (“hey, what happened?”). It doesn’t mean you don’t eventually correct your kid. It establishes a pattern of understanding–>correction. Personally I think this applies more with kids 5+. At a younger age you need concrete correction of right and wrong. But especially as our kids get older, the biggest danger is hiding and distancing out of fear of being misunderstood, instead of inviting us into the discernment process in life. In adulthood, this pattern can create distance between adult children and parents. I’ve tried it this week and it’s slowed down the process and created more openness between me and my older kids.

That’s it for this week!

Best,

Blake

P.S. Chandler and I have run a weekly family meeting for 15 years and it's the single biggest reason we're on the same page as parents. We made a short course showing exactly how we do it (not just talk about doing it): The Weekly Family Meeting. $24 for newsletter readers.