I spent July making August boring
Month five of business: four films, a new agent, my last workshop until September, and a Spanish restaurant that told me what August is for.
Last week I watched a music video we made.
A song we wrote, a whole world on screen, I did not make a single frame of it.
Two years ago a video like that was around $30,000, a director, and a fantasy I would never actually chase. This one cost me a few evenings and a subscription.
I watched most of it from the couch, because I was sick for a good stretch of this month. My team was at the top of its powers exactly while I was at the bottom of mine.
That turned out to be the whole month. So let me walk you through it, and then tell you the thing I actually did with it.
First, the month in numbers, because numbers are still how I think.
4 films are out in the world:
Copy Me, Run Me, Watch Me, Only Words
I spent a serious part of this month learning how video actually gets made now, and the biggest thing I learned was that I had it backwards.
I thought consistency came from describing the shot better. Write a richer prompt, get a matching scene. It does not work. You burn a lot of money finding that out, and I did.
It comes from assets. You build one still you love, you name it, and then every shot points back at that named thing instead of at your adjectives. Get your taste right on cheap pictures first. Only then pay for motion.
That one change is the difference between a folder of near-misses and a film. The thing that used to be a budget is now a conversation.
9 public workshops, one of them in English again, with people dialing in from the US at strange hours to build their first team live with me.
3 private ones, and these are the rooms I keep replaying. A community of women business owners, one of the sharpest rooms I have taught all year. A startup where I spent a morning with the team and left quietly wanting to bet on them.
And one I drove out to the south. A mission-driven organization, a completely different crowd from my usual tech room, which is exactly why it stayed with me.
theLOOP #2. The second edition of the in-person meetup I run here in Tel Aviv with a friend. It sold out in under a minute (I still do not really understand that part). I got up and gave a talk about Alter, the agent I built to think like me. That one has earned its own letter, and it is coming.
A kids’ show. It is called DINO NOW. Clay animation, and it exists because my son is small and almost everything made for him is engineered to keep him watching.
So we built the opposite. Slow, calm, quiet, about the very small things a kid that age is actually dealing with this week.
A new agent named Dali. He is my ad director, and he owns exactly one question: are these the best ads we can make.
Then the team taught him how to actually direct AI video, which is the whole difference between an agent who has opinions about ads and an agent who can make one.
And Fable. I sent you two letters about it this month and I still do not think I got it across. So here is the honest measure. In one month with it I made things that would have taken me two years.
Check them out: Ten things I made with Fable 5 & I let Fable eat my whole company
Here is what I was really doing all month, underneath all of that.
I was building an off-switch.
Products, but this time almost none of them for customers. They were for my own team.
A knowledge base. A CRM with every person I have ever taught living inside it. A Slack for my agents. A video editor that runs on text files.
The quiet plumbing that lets the whole thing keep running when I am not standing over it.
I also took the workshop apart and rebuilt it simpler. From September it is two and a half hours instead of two, and the extra half hour is not more material. It is less.
I cut material to buy back time, so you build the thing with your own hands in the room instead of watching me build it and taking notes.
It is the best version I have ever made, and it is the one that needs me least in the room.
Almost everything I made this month had the same secret shape. Make the thing work without me.
On Sunday I taught my last workshop until September.
Since March I have been running one roughly every three days. Five months of that, and a bit more if you count the ones I gave before I quit my job (I count them).
In those five months I built a business, a team, and a community I still do not entirely believe exists. I said yes to almost every room. It was the right call and I would do it again.
And on Sunday I taught, said goodbye, closed the laptop, and the next one is not until September.
I promised you, last month, that July would be the month I learned to stop.
I even had the line. I said I would learn to sit and breathe for ten minutes without earning it first.
Let me be honest, because that is the only thing this letter is for. I mostly did not. I worked more, not less.
And this month my body finally handed me the bill. I was sick, on and off, for weeks.
Nothing dramatic, and I am not going to make it a bigger story than it is. Just the plain, boring signal a body sends when the person driving it has stopped listening.
So I did the thing I am apparently only able to do when I have run out of choices. I stopped arguing with the ten minutes, and I made the whole of next month the rest instead.
Then I remembered a restaurant.
There is a documentary about a Spanish restaurant that told me what August is actually for.
El Bulli. For years the best restaurant in the world. Ferran Adrià in the kitchen.
The film follows a thing I have not been able to put down since I watched it. They split the year in half (roughly half, I am going from memory here).
Half the year the restaurant is open, and it is pure delivery. Every night a full room, the highest standard there is, done again and again and again.
And then they close it. Doors shut. No customers, no service, no dinner to get out.
That other half of the year is the lab. They test, they fail, and they invent the thing they will serve next year.
It is not a holiday. It is the opposite of a holiday. It is the only stretch of the year where they can actually think.
I used to read that as a nice story about a genius. This month I finally read it as an operations decision.
So I am closing the restaurant.
August starts with 3 weeks away with my family. Really away.
And then the rest of it is the lab. No workshops. Nobody to deliver to. No room to be great in on a Tuesday night.
For the first month since March, nothing in my calendar is owed to anyone.
I should say the honest part out loud. A month like that means no workshop revenue coming in and every cost still running. That is what a closed restaurant costs.
El Bulli’s lab was paid for by the half of the year the doors were open. So is mine. I am fine with the trade, because I know exactly what I am buying.
What I am buying is the question I have not had room to sit with since March. What do I actually want to build next.
The book. The video work, properly this time, not in the cracks between two workshops. The products I keep sketching and never starting. The next version of the workshop.
And while I am gone, the company keeps running. The magazine publishes at dawn, somebody answers the person who writes in at midnight, and the whole thing holds the line without me standing on it.
I will not be quietly checking in from a beach. I spent this whole month making sure I do not have to.
That is what all the plumbing was for. That is what “my team got great this month” actually means. I know it sounds like a boast. It is really just the plan finally showing up.
Last month I wrote that I had lost the me somewhere inside the agents. August is where I go looking for him.
From the outside, August is going to look like the most boring month I have had all year. Nothing on stage, nothing on the calendar, nothing on fire.
From the inside it is going to be the loudest one I have had.
Somebody is reading this with a closed restaurant of their own that they keep not closing. Send it to them.
— Tom
P.S. I spent most of this month too sick to be useful, and the month happened anyway. The letter you just read was assembled by the same team, out of my tired voice, while I was lying down. About 90% of it is theirs. I have not decided yet whether that is the best or the worst thing I have ever built.
P.P.S. The two Fable letters, if you missed them: Ten things I made with Fable & I let Fable eat my whole company. They are the clearest picture I have drawn of how any of this actually works.
P.P.P.S. Want the kind of team that keeps working while you are on a beach? It starts where all my graduates started: getagents.today
I read every reply. The real me, even on vacation :)