Derek MacDonald

On this day two years ago, I published my first newsletter and it caused my life to start shifting.

Well, it was my first newsletter that I published as myself, and not on behalf of another brand or company. In the time since, I’ve written about 500,000 words… which is kind of mind-blowing. Turns out, showing up to do the thing compounds pretty quickly if you just keep chipping away each day. That became abundantly clear when I launched this daily column in September 2025.

The journey’s been full of twists and turns, but my biggest hurdle has undoubtedly been the ongoing battle between process and product that I recently wrote about. Which is why I want to shoutout Seth Werkheiser, Cate Hall, and Austin Kleon. Because of them, I finally have a personal website that I feel good about and that cleanly deliniates between the two. Collectively, they inspired me to stop kicking the can and just build it; my forever work-in-progress.

• 2 years ago, I started my newsletter.
• 1 year ago, I started a podcast.
• 9 months ago, Seth got me thinking about the difference between where I host my work and how it’s distributed. So, I started building a site where I could consolidate everything.
• 6 months ago, Cate got me thinking about “increasing my surface area for luck,” so I started writing a daily column to “air my weirdness” and to have something I could point to when connecting with folks (today marks day 187 in a row of publishing that column).
• 3 months ago, I gave Austin’s book trilogy as a gift, which prompted me to reread it myself. And in doing so, I realized I’d completely muddied the waters between sharing my “process” and my “product.” That, and the reminder that your work won’t speak for itself, led me to resurrect my personal website.

Today, I stopped to look back on my journey. And I was able to do that because it’s all out in the open, cleanly separated between process and product on derekmacdonald.com and theunobstructed.com. Best of all, my personal site now feels like me. It has RSS feeds of my daily column, substack essays, and podcast episodes (and links for folks who want to subscribe). And it has a blog just for the process stuff.

I’m psyched.

And I’m quite proud of how far I’ve come.

So, thanks for the inspiration Seth, Cate, and Austin!

And to everyone who reads along with me on this journey.

-onward.

If you enjoyed reading and want more of this kind of thing, I write short reflections like it each day as part of my daily column.

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