Robert Glazer - Friday Forward: Inspiration & Motivation to End Your Week Stronger Than It Started (Ignite Reads)

This all started with a simple change I wanted to introduce into my life: improving my morning routine.

On the heels of a transformational leadership training program, I resolved to get up earlier and dedicate some time to quiet thinking, writing, and reading something inspiring or positive to start my day.

This is not as easy a task as it should be in todays world. Many of us begin our mornings reactively and negatively, with crisis-driven news programming, social media apps vying for our attention, or a pile of emails about problems that occurred overnight. This type of morning can make it feel like the day is lost before its even started.

The problem was, I hadnt found anything inspirational that really resonated with me. A lot of the quote books and other recommended readings in inspiration were a little too rainbow and unicorn-y for me.

However, I had a collection of stories and quotes I found inspiring in a different way that I had saved in an email folder.

So I decided to try an experiment and began sending a weekly email to the roughly forty people on my team at Acceleration Partners. After all, Id learned the lessons of most entrepreneurs well: if you dont find what you want, you should start it yourself. I called it Friday Inspiration and focused on stories that were inspirational but also thought-provoking and challenging.

The stories had nothing to do with our business. Instead, my goal with each message was to write something that I would be inspired to read and that would push the team to improve across all facets of their lives. I figured that sending the messages each Friday morning was a good way to start the weekend on the right foot.

That was my primary goal. I didnt have a master plan or long-term vision of spreading these messages to a wider audience. Really, I expected the emails to be skimmed or even ignored each week. I did it anyway because I enjoyed the writing process, and it became an important part of my own routine.

To my surprise, after a few weeks, I started to get replies. Several employees told me they looked forward to the messages and had shared them with friends and family. Some had also used them as motivation to begin to make changes in their lives, whether that meant running a race, setting personal goals, or upping their game at work. It was at this point that I first thought the emails might have value for people beyond our companys walls.

Soon after, I attended an event for a group of entrepreneurs where we were sharing best practices.

I shared my Friday Inspiration concept with other business leaders at the event and told them I was getting very positive feedback from my team. I suggested they try something similar in their own organizations and added them to my email list so they could see what I was writing or forward my notes to their teams.

Several CEOs took me up on my offer and began sharing my weekly note with their companies. Within weeks, many of them told me they were receiving the same positive feedback from their employees. One CEO even started his own weekly message to his team that he still sends each week.

I began to wonder if other people might find the content valuable. I set up a basic email template, made it possible to sign up, changed the name to Friday Forward (because it was being forwarded regularly), and put a few hundred people I knew on the list. I prepared for replies such as what is this? or take me off this list, but they never came. Instead, I got the similarly positive feedback I had received from my own team. A few months later, someone wrote a piece in Inc. magazine titled This Is the Only Newsletter I Read, and a few thousand people signed up in a week. From there, it really started to take off.

Almost five years later, and to my amazement, every week, over two hundred thousand people read Friday Forward in over sixty countries around the world. More rewardingly, each week, I receive replies from readers thanking me for the positive impact its made on their lives.

As Friday Forwards reach expanded, it made an increasingly significant impact on me. Writing the Friday Forward each week became a keystone habitdiscovering and reflecting on inspiring stories allowed me to start each day on a positive note and gave me a growing responsibility to elevate others. As the Friday Forward readership grew, my motivation to improve as a writer and deliver the best possible content and value to the growing community of readers grew along with it.

The topics I choose each week are related to things I want to learn or get better at myself, so I am inherently invested in each post. I often tie the Friday Forward to a personal anecdote or current issue, making sure that the topic is accessible to the entire audience, no matter who or where they are at that moment. And each post typically ends with reflective questions that challenge readers to consider their own journey and choices.

I believe this format has resonated because Friday Forward motivates us to grow, and the topics are actionable. Its definitely not rainbows and unicorns; the topics encourage us to push outside our comfort zone and question the limits of what we can accomplish. Growth doesnt come without challenge. I believe change comes from challenge and connection.