As the week wraps up, we offer some of our thoughts on content marketing, curate a few interesting articles we’ve come across, and tell you what we’ve been up to.

Last January, I lost my mom to Alzheimer’s—in truth, I’d lost her years before, given the ugly path of that disease. And, as an only child who had lost her father 11 months before, I’ve been a bit lost myself in the interim.

But I can look back fondly at some of the lessons she shared and how they’ve shaped my career and my work. One, in particular, stands out—and it’s not advice she gave so much as the way she lived: mediocrity just doesn’t cut it. Here are just a couple of small examples:

My mom was a life insurance broker, working with lots of agencies to help them sell their products. Every month, her company put out a report ranking agents for their results. If she wasn’t at the top, she redoubled her work ethic so she would be back there the next month. It was a rare month when she didn’t achieve her goal. She did all of this through a meteoric rise through the glass ceiling, having been promoted from an administrative assistant all the way to a brokerage representative—and all with just a high school degree.
In her spare time, mom took up golf. She took group lessons for a long time, progressed to more intensive individual lessons, and then started playing every weekend (much to my chagrin, as I was dragged along to bear witness in the golf cart). At her peak, before her illness, she was playing at least three times a week and consistently hitting in the 80s and winning local tournaments. She even hit a hole in one. My mom was tireless in her pursuit of excellence on the course. (I wish she were here to help me with my short game, now that I actually enjoy playing.)

Those lessons have stayed with me, and I learned them well—in every aspect of my life.

Today, I’m proud of what our little agency has done, but I’m definitely not satisfied. We’re growing year over year, but we have additional room for growth. We’re constantly striving to deliver the most engaging, thought-provoking content in our industry. We’re hiring new writers to join us in our mission to deliver that content to some of the best brands in the legal, professional services, and B2B markets. We’re strategizing about how to move our own brand forward and continue to elevate our skill set.

As my mom would probably agree, every day is an opportunity to learn and grow. I’m trying to embody her example every day. I don’t always live up to it, but it’s a worthy goal. I encourage you to do the same.

I miss and love you, Mom.

(More) tips to improve your content marketing

What’s new this week in the legal industry

Things to read before you clock out for the weekend

What Alexa is recording about you
Ways to protect your digital privacy
One reason that last meeting may have been a waste of your time

So, what has Scribe been up to?

Speaking on emerging forms at ESI at the Sedona Conference Working Group 1 Mid-Year Meeting
Writing about the benefits of text extraction for eDiscovery
Learning about the difficulty of working with emoji in data rendering and interpretation
Interviewing leaders in legal innovation for an upcoming report
Drafting an abstract for an upcoming chapter of a book on legal technology

Are you ready to take your content from mediocre to mesmerizing? Let’s talk.

Friday scribbles: what I learned about running a content marketing business from my mom