Why is Mason writing about puzzles anyway?

I don't know

I discovered my love for writing on one of my entrepreneurial journeys. It was called Greenling and we started as a meta-CSA box, delivering fresh veggies weekly from a variety of farms to people in the Austin, TX area. I wrote a weekly email newsletter about what’s in the box. I would add little stories about the farms, about agriculture, about the latest developments in Organics, local happenings, all kinds of things.

I’m also a consummate procrastinator. We needed to get the newsletter out Friday mornings so our regulars could decide what to order and we’d base farmer orders off those early estimates for the next week. I could never find the time to write it before Friday morning so I’d wake up at 5am and knock it out. Soup to nuts, straight writing, no prior work or ideas. I kinda loved it and after 10 years we had over 100k subscribers for our Austin TX local box newsletter with 40% open rate. I actually captured a lot of the extra articles in this Blogger page. If you wanna catch up on Sustainability news from 2007-2010 it’s a great source. I think in 2010 we finally incorporated the newsletter into our website and no longer needed said blogger page.

We sold that company in 2015 and I apparently haven’t had a good enough excuse to write since then. After Cece’s Veggie Co early success people would suggest I put that story of the rollercoaster from local success to verge of bankruptcy to national success into a book. It’s a crazy story, and I liked the idea of getting back into writing, but I was skeptical of how that would work or why I’d do it. A mentor, who had written books, shared that writing a book is an ego-centric exercise so I lost interest. If you’re writing a book, you want something from it, is that perspective. I don’t want anything.

Then this vision happened! I still don’t fully understand it or why. But it is. And this vision has helped me put my pieces together in a way that allows me to live more in-line with my true self and more coherently. At the center of the vision, and the center of The Puzzle framework, is helping others build their puzzles. See we all have our own pieces that we don’t really need. Tidbits of info, introductions, application of our skills in a novel way - these are all puzzle pieces that can help others. We can place our pieces in front of others and completely change the course of their puzzle. Each one of us has the ability to transform other peoples’ lives. All of our puzzles are connected, in some way, through some set of connection points through this wild world of puzzles.

Part of me doesn’t want to go down this path. I’m preparing myself for the brutal criticism of the interwebs, the constant rejection and fear that nobody cares.

I don’t want fame and I don’t care if this ever makes money. I just hope it makes it into the hands of people who find value from The Puzzle framework. I want to help people with their puzzle and the vision told me that at some point it will come back to help me when I really need it. But it does, indeed, need to find the hands of people who could value from it so I must do my best to put it out into the world. I would love to discuss The Puzzle with anyone so please reach out. There is gobs and gobs of more info and details about the concept, but it’s also rather incomplete. It needs actual discourse and varied perspectives for the framework to find it’s voice.