Onboarding For Culture | Content Machine Ep.

We believe company culture is key to any successful company. We also believe that that culture is visible and important from the moment any prospect comes in contact with your company. The entire hiring process can help show an applicant how your company acts and thinks. But when the onboarding process begins, you really get a chance to start setting expectations and instilling who you are as a company. A successful onboarding process shows who the company is in three ways: relationally, culturally, and technically. Successful onboarding is relational. We have a small, tight-knit company, so we work to to exercise this in onboarding, allowing new hires to quickly build a rapport with their supervisors and coworkers will help them transition smoothly. At Adelsberger Marketing, we start each new hire and each new intern with a company lunch. This helps them meet everyone and experience the environment of our interactions. We follow those up with each person, spending about an hour with each staff member one on one. This time allows us to get on a first-name basis with each new person and helps them learn about what each team member does and what they bring to the table.

 

These also expose interns to a few different fields of study and may give them a chance to learn about a new discipline that they had not considered before. Having these one-on-one contacts will help us with cross-communication as we get into the real work. Most of our projects are touched by lots of people on the team, so being able to have good communication with everyone is key. Quarterly, I have check-ins with each team member, one-on-one. But when new staff or interns start, I make sure to check in them several times in the first few weeks to make sure that all has gone well and that they are ready to do the work. Onboarding also covers culture. We want to make sure that our onboarding is not just relational, but it also clearly covers our culture. We have been working to define in words the culture that we have built here at Adelsberger Marketing for years. So we take time in onboarding to communicate who we are as a company. We cover the mission and the vision, but we also take time to explain the how and why behind those statements. We also work through our core values and explain how they work out in our day to day lives.

 

This also allows us to set the expectations for behavior at the company. We also give each person some swag to make them feel part of the team. Finally, we cover the technical bits of working at our company. We cover what software we use and what we use it for. This is what everyone thinks about when they think about onboarding or orientation, but we go as far as to explain what modes of communication are for what needs. When should you send an email? And when should you send a Slack message? We additionally cover our AI policy and our communications expectations. Our goal with all of this is to not only set expectations, but to also help a team member or intern be successful and not leave them in the lurch of not knowing how to work with us. When someone comes to work with you, it’s your responsibility to make them successful. We are always working on updating this process to make it more successful. And then we make changes to our checklists. So a question for you, what’s the biggest difference maker you have seen as a new person at a company? I would love to hear some ideas and maybe it’s something we can add to our process.

 

Thank you for listening to the Content Machine podcast. If you found it helpful, please send it to a friend. We hope to see you on the next episode.

Internship Diary #6 – Learning the Language, Raising My Cultural Capital

There’s a concept in sociology called Cultural Capital. Now I’m no Sociologist, so don’t go quoting me on this, but essentially this idea refers to our ability to understand the slang, the jargon, and the little signifiers that say we belong in a place or group. All these things operate as a form of social currency: they purchase credibility.

As the new guy in any place, your cultural capital is almost inherently going to be low. You’re the new guy. This has nothing to do with the kindness of the people who came before you, or even how welcoming they are. It’s just a fact — you don’t know the landscape yet. There’s not a lot of capital in your cultural bank account. It takes time and effort and knowledge to fit into this new environment.

In this sense, adjusting to a new place — whether you’ve moved places of residence, or you’ve started attending a new church, or you’ve joined a new company — is a lot like learning a new language. For instance, when I began my internship with Adelsberger Marketing, I was bewildered by the jargon used in conversation or on Slack.

“You’re managing the Content Machine.” Ok, what is the Content Machine?

“We have a shoot for Leaders next week.” I’ll bite, who or what is Leaders?

“That’s like Alex and Taylor Swift.” I know what all of those words mean by themselves, but I have no clue how they’re connected.

Overtime, and especially as I was taught my new responsibilities, the team at Adelsberger explained all these terms to me. They began teaching me the language.

Unfortunately for me, I have never been good at language learning. It’s my academic Achilles heel. I took Latin for two years in high school — not my choice, please don’t judge — and all I remember is the word “Oremus,” because I would say it as a joke before my family prayed at dinner. (Oremus means “Let us pray.”) I am in college now and taking my second semester of Spanish. Sadly, my language aptitude has not improved. Despite my love for words and writing, I have simply never been able to grasp the grammar, the syntax, or the intricacies of language that a truly fluent person understands intuitively. In my defense, I would tell you that I love words, not grammar. They’re different. I write for the meaning, not the commas.

But as I’m sure you’ve heard, the best way to learn a language is not a class, or a textbook, or a test. You learn by speaking, the same way a child does. You learn by immersion. For instance, anyone at Adelsberger Marketing will tell you that understanding Alex Russell, whether his quirks, his intricacies, or his relationship to Taylor Swift, is not a simple exercise. There’s certainly no textbook. You have to be immersed in the culture of Alex.

Over the past two months, give or take, I’ve gotten a crash course in the language of Adelsberger Marketing. I’m not fluent yet, but I’m conversational, which is a vast improvement. Immersion, simply diving in, has paid off. Hopefully it’s put a few more dollars worth of capital in my cultural bank account, too.

Our A.I. Policy | Content Machine Ep. #42

We have all heard so much about how AI is going to change our world. And most of that really started to kick up in late 2022. Now, fortunately, I was at a marketing, artificial intelligence conference in summer of 2019 that helped me start framing my thoughts on the issue. In marketing, AI is going to be a game-changer. It already is in some ways, and in some ways that we can’t even fully appreciate. And while we are testing it and using it where we can, I felt it was important to implement an AI policy at the company to make sure that we had some guidelines on how to use it well. As more and more workplaces grapple with the effects of AI, I wanted to share our guidelines to potentially help your company think through it too. The first thing is that we, for one, welcome our robot overlords. We know that AI is going to change things, and we want to be inquisitive and use what we can to improve our work while maintaining safeguards from some of the unclear liabilities of the technology. And we have two main unclear liabilities that I’m concerned about.

One, where is our information going and who will have access to it? We are cautious about what AI tools we are using and what information we are feeding it. We are careful to make sure that we are not exposing secret information or trade information to AI bots. Frankly, we do not know who or what might be reading that data and what it might be used for in the long run. Number two, copyright for images and text is still up in the air. Any image generated by AI is generated from other images. The courts still have to deal with who owns what, and we would not want to put our clients in a bad position by creating a liability for them by using an AI-generated image that could end up in a lawsuit. Until there is more clarity on this, we will continue to be cautious. So with those two things covered, here are our 11 rules that we are using as an agency. One, we may use AI to generate ideas and inspiration. Ai is going to be able to help us look for new angles and ideas that we might not have easily thought of.

This is one of its most promising uses as a tool. Recently, I used AI to help find different DIY ideas for a home services industry client. I use those concepts then to write ads for our customers. Number two, we may use AI to generate text. We are willing to use AI to help write portions of content, but as you’ll see later, this is not the last step for anything. This is a starting block. Number three, we may use AI to edit, rewrite, reframe, or otherwise modify text we write. Ai can help us with the tone and examination of a topic that we may need help with. Number four, we may use AI to generate editable images. We are willing to use AI to help us edit our images and improve them. A staff member used AI to remove power lines from a photo recently. Number five, we will fact check any AI text because we know that AI is not perfect and any resources it helps with need to be fact checked. Number six, all AI generated content will be edited and refined by a writer. Nothing generated from AI is completed until it has been edited and refined by a human.

Number seven, the person who uses AI to generate text is responsible for its accuracy and fact-checking. This one is pretty self-explanatory, and it goes back to our core value of responsibility. Number eight, we will not submit or publish AI-generated content straight from the source. This rule spells out some of the previous rules. Number nine, AI does not replace the role of a subject matter expert, editor, or creative in the process of creating content. We value human creativity and seek to use AI as a tool for inspiration. Number 10, we will not use AI tools to generate anything based on the work of artists or creatives that they created that they have not been adequately compensated for. This one is tricky and it limits our use of many tools, but this one is going to be really key to the court’s determination of things moving forward. And 11, we will not use AI to generate deep fakes for content. I think deep fakes are going to be a social problem, and with a lot of our work is in video. It could be tempting to employ these, but we are going to avoid these for good or ill for our business.

These rules are not perfect and they will continue to change, edit as we go, but it gives us a start. I also want to give a shout out to Banker Creative that shared their list in the Agency Builders group that was an inspiration for much of this list. If you have any insight on rules that are governing your business with artificial intelligence, please send us a DM or shoot me an email at kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com. Thank you for listening to the Content Machine Podcast. And if you found it helpful, please send it to a friend. And unless the robots take over before next time, we’ll see you on the next episode.

Internship Diary #5: Growing As a Creative by Saying Yes to Everything

“Never, ever turn down a writing opportunity. Say yes to everything.” My journalism professor told me that last year as I sat in his office debating whether to accept an offer for freelance work. The job was simple, just writing a few press releases for a mayoral candidate. Still, I was busy and taking the title of “Writer” from theoretical to the professional world was intimidating. I recognize the contradiction in that: the whole reason you study something in college is to do it professionally. New horizons are scary, though.

Interning with Adelsberger Marketing represented another new horizon. Yes, I’ve written a lot, but there’s a marked difference between writing for an assignment and writing something that goes up on a company website. I’d never written a blog post before, or helped with scripting a promotional video, or done marketing writing in any capacity. But, “say yes to everything.”

As a part of this role, I’ve said yes to every form of writing I listed above. I did not understand what I was doing, and there are parts I still don’t understand, and I’m sure next week there will be more, new parts I also don’t understand. That’s the whole reason behind saying yes, though: you get confused, you ask questions, you try again, you get better. Rinse, repeat.

At the beginning of my internship, I was told that one of my responsibilities would be helping to write blog content for certain clients. Brittany Crockett, writer and content creator for Adelsberger Marketing, would be the lead on these projects. She reached out to me quickly and kindly to offer resources, examples of work, and easy projects just to get my feet wet. I ran into problems almost immediately, though — the prompts confused me, as I didn’t have a lens for understanding what the client wanted simply because of my own inexperience. Frustrated and a little embarrassed by my own incompetence, I reached out to Brittany. She graciously agreed to meet with me via Zoom to answer my many questions.

Over the course of that call, Brittany patiently answered questions, including not only the ones I asked but the ones I didn’t even know I needed to ask.

You see, I don’t think saying yes to everything is as simple as it sounds. The prescription is not as simple as “become a workaholic in order to get better.” It is, however, about stepping out a little further into roles you’ve never filled before. And asking a million (probably annoying) questions when it turns out you don’t know what you’re doing.

Asking questions, getting answers, and doing a new thing. And then finding another new thing to do next.

So, I’ll make one small amendment to the adage my professor gave me: Say yes to everything, until you understand how to do everything you need to do, plus maybe a few other things for good measure.

Special Guest: Leigh Anne Bentley – Pt. 2 | Content Machine Ep. #41

Kevin Adelsberger
Welcome to Episode Two of the Content Machine podcast with LeAnne Bentley, who’s the CMO for Leader’s Credit Union. All right, so since coming to Leaders, what are some of the things that you’ve learned about marketing?

Leigh Anne Bentley
What I’ve learned about marketing since coming to leaders? I know I talked about getting in the weeds more, but really getting into the data has been great. Because you can really see people what their needs are, how to help them. I think it’s been a lot more smart marketing. And I think in the past, we had a lot of TV campaigns, and I still buy tons of TV. I love TV. But if you’re buying broadcast, you’re marketing to the masses. You’re doing cable, you can market to much more select targeted groove for the golf channel or the fishing channel or common, you know who’s watching those channels. But when you get into even the digital, which is the more trackable now, which is great, or when you’re trying to get to your data, you can really pinpoint what their needs are. I love the fact that I don’t want to send a checking account campaign to someone who’s had a checking account with us for five years. And so you do a TV campaign, you’re targeting people who… Everybody, in a sense. And so I love how deep you can get into the numbers to make sure you’re targeting the right people, that your message is the right, because I always tell our team, My job is to make sure it’s not just pretty, but it’s effective.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Do you have your right call to action on there? Do you have the right headline on there? And they do a phenomenal job. I mean, I’m not… That’s something that comes natural, but it’s being able to really get deeper in the data into the numbers. I love how you can track things now because again, we’ve even been trying to tracking some TV. We put some QR codes on some television. And so they have we’ll say, hey, that came from… We actually had an ad in Super Bowl. And so we had several come back to our ITM tracking and says, hey, this person watched it in Memphis. This person watched it in Jackson. And so it was fun to see where those came from. Now, broadcast is still a little different. It’s harder to track that still. And I wish I want that magic wand. This is how many came through this. Now we do ask those questions. When you join later, our questions at the end. How did you hear about us?

Kevin Adelsberger
Do you think those are accurate statistics?

Leigh Anne Bentley
I think some of the information is. They’ll say, I mean, it shows where they saw it. I think.

Kevin Adelsberger
It’s a magic wand. Or when they self-report.

Leigh Anne Bentley
And.

Kevin Adelsberger
So- Do you feel good about those?

Leigh Anne Bentley
I like seeing them. The ones that I like to see are the ones that we pull in from our Google tag manager. Oh, sure. I love seeing them on our dashboard. We know this media brought in X number and actually seeing the funnel. We were looking at here’s how many people actually may have clicked on our application and this number actually completed it. But what happened in the middle? And so why are they falling off? Where’s the hard spot that… What do we need to fix? Is there something that’s keeping them? So getting in those nuances and those little details is the fun thing that I wasn’t able to do on the agency side.

Kevin Adelsberger
Well, and probably something that’s changed.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Since- Oh, it’s changed quite a bit.

Kevin Adelsberger
What have been some of your big successes, you think? Big successes. That you can talk about here, I guess.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Well, I don’t think I can take credit for any just really big success. I think it’s been such a team effort. I think we’ve got a great leadership team that works well together. I think we’ve got a great marketing team. We do a lot of things that I’m proud of that’s a little different than agency worlds. Like I said, everything was billable hours and so my mind still thinks that way. But every Friday morning we have a marketing huddle. And so we read a book together and try to learn from that, or we have somebody come in from outside and come talk to us about something. And so I think it’s being able to be interested to have continuous improvement, not constantly being right at the computer, constantly productive. So I think we’re being more productive by bringing those things in. By sharpening your ax. Exactly, by sharpening your ax. With the first two hours sharpening your ax instead of cutting down the tree, exactly. So I think the successes have been really coming together. We’ve done a lot of great things. We’ve had great campaigns. We’ve launched our new website. We’ve launched a new CR-M.

Leigh Anne Bentley
We’ve brought in different… We’ve opened up new branches. Merchandising is something that’s fun with us that we do a lot of our places. But I really just think it’s coming together as a whole and seeing a single vision. Our IT department has really enhanced and we work really well with them. And I think the last couple of years, especially operations, marketing, and IT, including analytics, has just been we meet frequently, making sure that right-hand knows what left hand is doing, that we are maximizing our efforts. And it goes back. Instead of a one big success, it’s those small incremental things that makes a bigger difference in the long run.

Kevin Adelsberger
That makes a lot of sense, especially an organization your size. There’s so many things that could go wrong.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Well, I think that’s one thing. That’s something else I’ve had to do a lot with, is there is a lot more crisis management, I guess, in this. You think about it when an ATM goes down or something else happens or there is some data issue. Stuff happens. Things happen all the time. We have to make sure we’re on point that we’re communicating with our members. I think communication is key. I think that’s one thing I love about marketing is the more you communicate, I think it’s just if people know what’s going on, it’s so much less nerve-ing than being left in the dark.

Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah, because if you don’t have a good reason for something, you’re going.

Leigh Anne Bentley
To assume the worst. Our online banking goes down and we don’t have something posted that they can go and go, Oh, that’s what’s going on. Then they start getting on Facebook and then it’s like, Oh, something’s happened. Also my team is really good if it’s nose on a white day and we’re responsible to get up that morning, know, we work with operations on what’s going on. And then we’re putting out those communications, putting out our social media posts, our email, what’s going on in online banking, our in-app messages. So there’s more ways to communicate now than ever. So many more ways. So I think that’s something that’s changed a lot. There are so many ways to communicate. Sometimes there’s too many. Because sometimes I’m like, I know someone sent me something, but is it on my email or is it in my team or is it in my Slack or Facebook Messenger or they text me? Oh, yeah.

Kevin Adelsberger
So we actually… For our team, we have a standard of communication about what you use to communicate about what, because I was tired of getting text messages. I was like, No, only send me a text message if something is on fire or I’m not at my desk. Because yeah, there’s so many channels.

Leigh Anne Bentley
And it just keeps growing. We have 70,000 members right now. So you think, Okay, so how am I communicating with them? And what is their best method? Texting right now is one of the best methods, but you also have to make sure you’re compliant. So the hell goes back. Because one thing at agency world, because I did do bank marketing before, my area that I specialize in was professional services. I basically did banks, insurance, real estate, and then B2B. So I was already used to the compliance side on the banking side, but you still have to dig in even deeper and different things. And can I do this? And we have a great compliance officer that is not a, No, you can’t do it. There’s this. You can’t do that, but let’s find a way that gets you- Which.

Kevin Adelsberger
Is a great quality of the compliance- Fantastic. -is fantastic and not super common.

Leigh Anne Bentley
It’s not common. I’ll go to conferences and they’re like, Oh, don’t you hate working with compliance? I’m like, No, they keep me out of trouble. They’re like, Make sure if you add this on there, if you add this disclosure, then you’re good. I love working with our compliance department.

Kevin Adelsberger
Well, what are some of the challenges that you think you face in your role?

Leigh Anne Bentley
Challenges? Well, things are changing drastically. You have to constantly stay up what is the latest thing. Obviously, TikTok is one of the biggest things. But for security, we’re not on TikTok. You can’t do it right now. There’s different trends from that. I do think I talked about AI earlier, just got back from a conference where the whole conference was talking about AI. And so… And the changes with that. And everybody loves ChatGPT and everybody loves the programs, but people think of that one. But people think of that one, but AI is going into so many different areas. And so I will say the one takeaway, because the biggest question that we kept on being asked over and over again, Well, is AI going to take over? You’re going to have to cancel all marketing jobs because of AI? Absolutely not. But the marketing people who are not using AI are the ones that aren’t going to be long term. You just have to incorporate that and make sure you’re utilizing it in the best uses. And I would say the biggest threat to us coming up in a good and bad way is AI because so much fraud can happen in the AI aspect.

Leigh Anne Bentley
We’ve already talked about that. How can we look for different ways to thort fraud through different services. It’s very prevalent. Every day text messages going out, people spoofing emails. It is so prevalent that we’re actually doing a fraud campaign as we speak. We’ll be launching it. We’ve already launched it digitally. We’re actually even doing postcards. We understand this is not a money maker for us, obviously, but we want to make sure our.

Kevin Adelsberger
Members- increases trust with.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Your members. Well, I hope so because we want them to be taken care of. We want the ones… We don’t want them clicking on a link in the text that’s going to a fraudulent aspect. We don’t want people getting phone calls from leaders that didn’t sound like us, but they’re saying, Hey, I need your username and password. We will never ask for your username and password on the phone. We tell our members, and I hope everybody listening here, no matter what institution you’re using, if you get a phone call from one and you’re not sure or even if you just want to be careful, say, You know what? I’ll hang up and call you from a number I know. And what’s your name? I’ll ask for you. We tell our people that all the time. If you’re concerned about who you’re speaking with, hang up. Don’t call this number back, because they spoof our number. And they said, Just get online, find a number that you know is us, and ask from me. And so we try to do that all the time, making sure people are talking to the right people and not getting scammed because it’s very prevalent.

Kevin Adelsberger
I am a citizen of the internet, and I am probably less prone to being phished or manipulated than most people. And someone hacked one of our customers’ emails a couple of weeks ago, and they got me. And I tried to log in to something that wasn’t the right link because I was chasing business. And then a couple of hours later, he’s like, Sorry, we got hacked. And I was like.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Oh, no.

Kevin Adelsberger
I had to tell my team that I got phished.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Well, no, I understand. We have very stringent security or IT department. I’d put them up against anyone, but things still happen. And so we’re trying to be so proactive. We also are reactive. We have services that we use that if you’re traveling, let us know you’re traveling, or you may get denied until we call you and say, Are you in Boston? Are you in Texas? Or did you make this last charge? And I think members really appreciate that. Sometimes it can be frustrating. Like, My car got denied. Yeah, you’re just trying to buy gas. I’m just trying. But in some foreign place, they weren’t not supposed to be, but we didn’t know they were. And so it can just happen that way. But we try to be proactive. I do think fraud and marketing against fraud and toward fraud and safety is a huge thing, and how AI is going to.

Kevin Adelsberger
Increase that. Oh, yeah. It’s going to get way more dangerous here.

Leigh Anne Bentley
You have voice. People can replicate voices and everything else. It’s going to be wild.

Kevin Adelsberger
So other than AI, what do you think the future of look marketing looks like? Which I know AI is a big part of it, but I didn’t want your answer.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Just to be AI. Just to be AI? Well, I think we don’t know what it’s going to be like in five years, because I think the transition has been so fast. They talked about the Internet took what, four years to hit 100 million people, and AI has taken four months, one of those types of things. So I don’t know what’s going to be next because I think it doesn’t exist yet. And so I think looking at big picture marketing, I still think it all goes back to knowing your… It goes back to the basics. Who is your target audience? How do you reach them properly and how do you treat them? It goes back to the whole umbrella, back to that see, smell, taste, touch, hear, experience. It goes back to treating your members or treating your customers the way you want to be treated and putting them first and smart marketing. Again, like I said, not marketing a product to them that they’ve already had, or don’t market a student loan to an 85-year-old. I might say that my 85-year-old doesn’t need a student loan somewhere, but that’s not- But statistically. Specifically speaking, know your audience.

Leigh Anne Bentley
And I think people want to be heard and they want to feel, I guess, one of the buzzwords that’s been around a little while that we use frequently and we talk about a lot in marketing, is the personalization, that marketing is not for the masses anymore. I mean, it is personalized and it’s personal. And so it goes back to that connection. I mean, two-way communication is here. People constantly posting stuff to you through email, through through chats, through all social media platforms, anything public, anything’s out there. And so we want to make sure that our members are heard and that we’re providing the services that they want and that we’re growing with them. Because some products we have now may not be needed a couple of years from now. So don’t- So it’s not just the marketing, but it’s what you’re selling. So don’t always hold on to something just because you’ve always done it. And that’s one thing we do say a lot in my department is just because it’s always done that way. That’s a pet peeve-like. And so we’re always, after every event, we sit down and have a continuous improvement meeting.

Leigh Anne Bentley
After something else happens, we sit down and go, We have done this better. And then that’s the first thing we look at when we start working on the next project.

Kevin Adelsberger
All right, one last question. If you had a little change in your pocket… Just kidding. We work with you guys on producing the pocket change podcast.

Leigh Anne Bentley
You did a.

Kevin Adelsberger
Great job. You guys ended that question. And so I was just going to set you up for that one. But LeAnne, thank you for taking the time to join us on the Content Machine podcast.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Can I just stay on that? Yeah. Watch the pocket change podcast.

Kevin Adelsberger
That is- That’s right. Anything you want to pitch? And then where should they find out more about the Leaders Education Foundation?

Leigh Anne Bentley
Leadersgives. Org. And please join, $10.

Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah. That’s hard to argue with. So thank you for your time.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Thank you for having me. It’s been fun.

Kevin Adelsberger
Thank you for listening to the second episode of the LeAnne Bentley podcast. If you missed the first one, go back in the feed and check it out. Thank you for checking out the Content Machine and we hope to catch you on future episodes.

Internship Diary #4 – Smiling when the Creative Well is Dry

Ideas are a finite resource. In any creative discipline, whether it be writing, design, photography, videography, or something else, we depend heavily on ideas and on the creative process. There are some days, some weeks, where it all comes easy. Your ideas are flowing so well that your pen touches paper and moves almost under its own power. The past week has not been one of those weeks.

I have been staring at my computer screen, my face and mind both completely blank, trying to figure out how to start this entry. Yes, this is a diary of sorts, and the point of a diary is just to document what happens. But this is also content, written for the company blog, and I want to do it well. The problem I face, besides my own brain’s current lack of creative flow, is that over the past couple of weeks, I’ve developed a routine for how I approach my internship. Typically, this would be a good thing — getting into a comfortable workflow makes productivity much easier. However, for writing purposes, routine is the enemy.

One of the first things hammered into my brain as a journalism student was that every story needs conflict. This doesn’t mean violence or fighting or anything like that — just narrative conflict. For instance, a short story might center around a man who can’t decide if he wants to stay in his hometown or move to the city. That’s conflict. (Inner conflict, in this example, but conflict nonetheless.)

So, this was my problem: “Everything is going great, I’m developing a comfortable routine in my internship” is not a story. It may be a pleasant statement, but it is not interesting. To freshen things up, I could make a catastrophic mistake every week and then write about that, but both Kevin and I would veto that idea quickly (for very different reasons, maybe, but the result would be the same). The solution, then, has to lie within the borders of the comfortable routine I have fortunately found.

Thankfully, life threw me a lifeline. I got a text from Eric, King of the Interns, complimenting my most recent blog post, the one about my first mistake on the job. Eric is a kind, usually gentle soul who, despite those qualities, delights in jokes that poke fun at himself, me, you, and the world around him. He is good at this. His congratulatory text was followed by this one: “Also, smile if that’s the biggest mistake you make.” Then he made a joke at his own expense.

My comfortable routine, accompanied by the occasional and unavoidable bout of writer’s block, may be a bane in the moment. That is a problem I can live with just fine. I will smile, content that I am not currently making a mistake — and hoping I’m not about to make a big one.