Two Quick Things:
1 → We love Campminder. We love the Campminder team (Hey Dan! Hey Snug! Hey everyone at Campminder).
We love Campminder because we run camp on Campminder. Registration, staffing, reports, awesome new dashboards, all of it.
And Campanion crushes it for pics all summer. This is the parents favorite part. Check out Campminder.
2 → Running camp ads can be confusing, complicated, and overwhelming. It doesn't have to be.
Cullan and his team at CampAdsUs runs Google advertising for summer camps.
Nonprofit camp? Put the $120,000-a-year Google Ad Grant to work. Yes, you read that number right.
For-profit camps? Rebuild your campaigns so every dollar brings in more families. Put Google Ads to work for your camp. Click the link and say "Hey Cullan! Jack sent us."
Ok, on to camp, dopamine and big rocks (plus the sand)..
Doug and I were talking about this chart over the summer.
A little clickbait-y and a little too neat? Sure.
The left side gets painted as better than the right, and nostalgia is sneaky like that. Sometimes it makes the old stuff look better than it really was, and sometimes the old way was just the better way. The truth is probably somewhere in between.
But one part of it is definitely true.
We're all dopamine machines out searching for dopamine all day. Big businesses know it. They've gotten really good at delivering it to us in lots of different forms.
We can sit on the couch and mainline TikTok or let my emotions get taken over by the Bills (except when it's a bye week). That's so much easier than getting friends together to make jokes or put on a play or play some music.
No judgment here. I do plenty of scrolling (and posting!) on Twitter and IG. Plus, a Sunday watching Josh Allen never hurt anyone. But a life only full of the stuff in the right column is a life I don't want to live.
The hard part is that it gets tougher every day to fit the left column in.
The Big Rocks
Stephen Covey has the famous bit about this. If you fill up a vase with some sand first, the big rocks don't fit when it's time to put them in. Put the big rocks in first, and everything fits, sand and all.
The big rocks are the stuff you care about. For that chart up top, the implication might be that they're the left column. Playing the sport instead of just watching it. Seeing your people. Making the thing.
I have to be pretty aware of this in my own life now. "Go play volleyball" goes on the calendar. "Write letters to people I care about" needs a scheduled time. Because if it doesn't, I'm going to go and fill the whole day with sand.
So far, this is standard stuff. Covey's vase analogy is one of the most famous time management stories around. Productivity books have done many, many laps on this already. Some version of "name what matters, schedule it first."
But Covey's story treats the sand like just some random stuff that fills in around the cracks. And I don't think that's quite right anymore.
What The Sand Is Made Of
If you think about a kid's year right now, it's easy to see a vase already full with rocks (that camps might not always see as rocks, but that's a different story).
School, and practices and music lessons and rehearsals and family time. Most kids are not short on learning, enrichment, and things all the way worth doing. Those rocks are awesome ones.
The sand is the part that's under attack. And because it just looks like spare time, nobody is really guarding it.
The right column of that chart doesn't go after the rocks all that much, some though maybe not as much as gets let on. It lives in the gaps.
Rides home, waiting rooms, 20 minutes of "down time". If there's dopamine hits within reach, the in-between minutes are going to go there.
Mostly before, the in-between minutes were the good stuff even if we didn't recognize it at the time. Talking to whoever was around. Making jokes. Being bored until the boredom randomly turned into something.
In the 90s, people worried that kids sat around too much. That's not the problem anymore. The hanging-out time is the rare thing now.
A lot of parents would love Wayne's World happening in their basement most weekends or the Sandlot gang roasting s'mores in the tree house. Watch it, trust me, nostalgia is awesome.
Put the big rocks in first. Then protect what the sand is made of.
The Carve Out
We keep coming back to the idea of a 90s summer. Not everything about it was better. The sand was, though.
Nobody is getting rid of dopamine culture. It'll be right there waiting, for the kids and for the rest of us.
But look at what camp gets to do. The big rocks go in first by default. It's called the camp schedule. But remember, plenty of places have rocks. Schools have rocks. Travel teams have rocks.
What camp has is the sand.
For weeks at a time, the in-between minutes are friends and jokes and a little boredom, because the right column is just gone.
Nobody else in a kid's year is protecting the in-between minutes. That job belongs to camp.
A few weeks ago I started a running list of the problems camp solves for parents. Maybe we put this one on it. Parents can schedule the rocks themselves, and they do a great job of it. They can't make the sand clean. Camp can.
That's not a small thing. It might be the biggest thing we've got.
You got this,
Jack
PS - Doug wrote a new one over on the Substack about camps needing a Moneyball moment. Check it out over there (and subscribe!)
