Author / Nathan Coumbe

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Posts by Nathan Coumbe

My mission is to learn, inform, inspire, and improve. I am a passionate teacher, an avid writer, a leader of people, and a strategic thinker. Wherever I am, whatever the work I am called to do, my goal is the same: make my little corner of the world better for everyone in it. To do this, I ask better questions and solve more interesting problems for those I serve. Think deeply. Think often. Keep exploring. Always be curious.
by Nathan Coumbe

What’s the project?

Go ahead: read the books, watch the videos, and take the courses. 

But at the end of all that, you need to take action. And the best way to do so is to have a project. 

I don’t mean a 3-panel trifold board school project that you dread so much you put it off until the night before it’s due. 

I mean a project that puts into action the stuff you’ve just learned. Something that fires you up. And lets you use your new skills in a way that will let you experiment while also helping others.

Maybe that’s:

  • Writing and submitting an article to practice your research skills
  • Building a website to practice your design abilities
  • Creating a YouTube video “lecture” to teach someone what you just learned
  • Playing a solo for friends and family (or dare I say, other, more critical musicians?)

When I was working and studying as a musician myself, I learned this was an unspoken rule of improvement. 

Everything you learned had one goal attached: perform what you learned in front of someone else.

That pressure to perform led to vast improvements in my playing abilities, especially my weekly recurring jazz trio gig. I had to be laser-focused on putting newfound abilities to use on a regular basis. 

My unspoken mantra became: “If I can’t use this tonight, I haven’t really learned it yet.” 

Until you can use what you’ve “learned” in the real world, nothing has happened. 

Human beings are artisans and craftspeople: your brain is wired to make things and do something with what you learn. Not just have it marinate in your mind after reading a book or watching a video. 

Making, performing, creating, teaching. These acts put our knowledge to use… and make us feel useful. Like the masters of a craft that we all have the ability to be. 

So, you need projects. 

They’re the key to learning new things. But they’re also the key to fulfilling work and a meaningful life. 

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by Nathan Coumbe

Never be in a hurry

I’ve been on a Cal Newport Deep Work/Digital Minimalism kick for the last few weeks.

Here’s a quote from Saint Francis de Sales that seems particularly apt to my current way of thinking:

“Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset.”

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by Nathan Coumbe

A solution to the homeless problem

I live in the Deep South—the “Bible Belt” as some call it. 

One of our quirks? We’re surrounded by churches. 

By most estimates, there are more than 9,100 in this state. That’s one church for every 330 Mississippians.

Many of them are huge. But what I’ve never understood is why they’re so big for seemingly no reason. 

They take up massive tracts of land. The enormous buildings themselves cost a fortune to light, heat, and cool. 

And 6 days a week, they sit almost entirely empty. 

Why not take a leaf out of the “Good Book” and use them for the public good when a service isn’t happening?

What if they became a shelter for the homeless? From the sweltering heat (we hit 104º a couple of weeks ago), pollution, and the elements?

What if they were a place to shower and eat? A staging ground for launching a job search?

My research has shown that some churches throughout the country already do this, but not many here in Mississippi. 

I’m no theologian, but I feel Jesus would approve.

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by Nathan Coumbe

You don’t have to help everyone

But you can help the person in front of you. 

We often get overwhelmed when we see a problem. “There are so many people suffering from this. I don’t even know where to start.”

That thinking paralyzes us from taking any action. Because we can’t understand how we can possibly solve the big issue, we do nothing. 

The solution is simple: help the person in front of you. Right now. In this moment. 

Then, when the opportunity presents itself again, repeat.

One thing, one person, one idea at a time. 

It’s a lot better than nothing at all.

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by Nathan Coumbe

We need the dreamers

A friend of mine wrote to me the other day telling me that my “realistic views” helped to balance out her “daydreaming” ideas. 

But we need the dreamers. 

Without them, nothing changes. Nothing improves. 

No new ideas means the world never gets safer, cleaner, healthier, or more just.

Without the imagination, suppositions, and oulandishness of some humans, we stagnate. 

Sure, we also (sometimes) need the realists and the doers to make the dreams come true. 

But without the people who are willing to say, “Is this anything?”, the rest of us have nothing to work with.

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by Nathan Coumbe

Bringing about our own extinction

David Meerman Scott published a fascinating article a few days ago. It compares modern AI companies to Enron and that company’s financial scandal that broke in 2001. 

But one paragraph in particular stood out to me that warrants quoting in full:

Altman says there’s a chance that so-called Artificial General Intelligence (which is still years or decades away) has the possibility of turning against humans. “I think that whether the chance of existential calamity is 0.5 percent or 50 percent, we should still take it seriously,” Altman says. “I don’t have an exact number, but I’m closer to the 0.5 than the 50.” (Source)

Terrifying, right?

I would argue that if you are creating something that has anything other than a 0% chance of wiping out humanity, you probably shouldn’t do it. 

For example: marketing Pepsi to be consumed in massive amounts, while definitely bad for humans, doesn’t run the risk of causing mass extinction.

On the other hand, bringing Tyrannosaurus rex back to life definitely has a greater than 0% chance of doing just that.

Now, I’m not a doomsday prepper by any stretch of the imagination… But when someone tells me there’s even a small chance that what they’re making could turn out like The Matrix, I start to worry. 

It’s as if they never watched I, Robot or read Jurassic Park (which is actually about runaway technology, not dinosaurs). 

These companies have a responsibility to guarantee that this doesn’t happen. We already made this mistake with nuclear weapons. And that threat still looms large over our heads, especially right now during the Russo-Ukraine War. 

We have enough threats to deal with. Let’s not create more of our own volition.

I’ll leave you with my favorite quote from Jurassic Park:

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

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by Nathan Coumbe

Do you actually need more information?

…or do you simply need to act on the information you already have?

Often, research is a symptom of fear. After a certain point, gathering more data is just procrastination. 

It’s worth asking this question when you’re feeling anxious to start something new.

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by Nathan Coumbe

Writing changes how we speak

I sent my mom a hilarious video the other day. One portion contained tons of Gen Z slang she didn’t understand. 

Now, me being a millennial, I knew what it all meant (even though I don’t use it myself). She asked me to translate, so I did. 

Now, as hysterical as this scenario sounds, it actually brought up a good point. 

Members of Gen Z speak the way they text rather than texting the way they speak (which is what us “old folks” do).

Nearly everything said is a shorthand for something else… because it’s faster to type the slang or shorthand than it is to write out the word or sentence. 

Now, even though my generation had AIM (that’s AOL Instant Messenger for you youngsters), Napster, MySpace, and the like, we never adopted shorthand as a way of speaking in person. I would argue that’s because only a small portion of our communication happened in shorthand using this technology. 

We spent most of our time hanging out in real life, talking on the phone, chatting in class (and being punished for it). In short, most of our communication was through spoken, rather than written, word.

But since Gen Z was the first generation to grow up with the ubiquity of cell phones and social media (rather than having it introduced later in life like it was for Millennials), it’s completely changed the way they communicate. 

A huge majority of their time is spent “writing” in the since that they are using written communication in some form. 

Texting. Messaging. Making Reels and TikToks. Creating snippets of text on SnapChat.

Which brings me back to the original point of this post. 

Language changes as writing changes, so writing changes how we speak. 

It’s a fact of history: our vocabularies expanded exponentially because we started writing things down. And the more we wrote down, the more clarity we were able (and needed) to create about what we were trying to say.

So when you spend all day writing as your main form of communication, the spoken language changes to reflect your writing.

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by Nathan Coumbe

It’s not an absence of passion

It’s a presence of fear. 

That thing you were considering—now you feel you aren’t “passionate” enough about it to pursue. 

The business you thought of starting. The video you were going to film. The degree you thought about getting.

You’re telling yourself you aren’t passionate about it. And therefore it’s not worth doing. 

You’re wrong. 

Passion has nothing to do with it. You’re just scared. 

Scared of starting. Scared of failing. Unsure of what it will look like once you commit. 

To paraphrase Seth Godin: if it scares you, it’s a pretty good sign you should try to do it.

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by Nathan Coumbe

The new way of getting jobs

I used to create and edit resumés as a side hustle.

I learned soon after I started that it wasn’t the best business to run. Not because I was bad at it (my resumés were gorgeous and well-made), but because no one who could hire my clients ever got the resumés I made. 

By the time I started that little business, resumé screening software had taken over the business world. And most job postings were getting anywhere from 200 to 1,000 applicants a piece. No one was seeing my clients’ resumés.

Someone would get those jobs, but it was unlikely to be the person I was helping. 

If you read books like What Color Is Your Parachute? or 48 Days to the Work (and Life) You Love, you’ll learn that sending out resumés to companies only works about 4% of the time. 

That means you’d have to apply for 25 jobs to get one response (just a response, not a hiring decision). And those are just basic statistics—you wouldn’t actually get a response 1 in 25 times. You might have to send out 100 applications and only get responses on the last 4.

So what to do?

I’ve been asked recently by numerous people if I could help them fix their resumés. And I’ve declined every time. 

“I don’t do that anymore,” I say, “because it no longer works.”

What does work is simple: connection.

The old saying is, unfortunately, true: it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. And in the connection economy of the 21st Century, that really is the only thing that matters. 

By connections, I don’t mean the hundreds of people you barely know on LinkedIn. People who are creating content to (maybe) entice the platform’s algorithm in the hopes that someone will see them and say, “Let’s hire Jane.”

I mean real people that you know: friends, family, coworkers. The barista who knows your name. The husband of the banker who handles your mortgage.

If you want a to get a job in the modern economy (and 88% of those available are never posted online), you have to talk to a lot of people. 

Every job I’ve ever had, I got because I knew someone. Every. Single. One. 

Half the time I wasn’t even looking. The other half, I asked for help. I told lots of people with whom I’d built relationships that I was looking.

Now, I also know that’s probably some of my privilege showing. But it’s the advice that I’ve given everyone who’s asked me over the last couple of years. And for those who have listened—and taken ACTION—it’s worked out. 

Now, I’m no networking expert. Nor do I “network” in the slimy business sense.

I’ve just read a lot and built relationships with people.

In addition to the couple of books I recommended above, I’d also tell you to check out:

Both of these books have strategies on how to TALK to people in ways that will (eventually and without being sleazy) lead to jobs. 

Resumés don’t work. Connections do. 

But resumés are easier—a way to hide from the difficult, but effective, work of having meaningful conversations with real people. 

Do the thing that works, not the thing that’s easy.

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