It's weird how we treat paying for things like a personal failure when sometimes it's just paying for a setup that actually works. This whole "hustle for less" mindset kinda falls apart when you realize a hundred bucks can buy you back hours of your week.

Honestly I had the exact same thing happen with our weekly all hands meetings. I was convinced everyone would hate them and just zone out but my team lead pushed for them. We started doing a 15 minute standup on Monday mornings where we go over wins from last week and what we're tackling this week. At first I thought it was a huge waste of time but after a month I noticed people actually started talking to each other more and problems got solved way faster. The biggest thing was we had this one engineer who never spoke up in emails but in those meetings he'd casually mention a bug he found and it saved us like two weeks of work. That's when I totally changed my mind about it.

My buddy runs his own shop and said last fall he had five bikes come in with stripped pedal threads in one week. He swore the universe was just messing with him at that point.

Oh man, that's frustrating. I read somewhere that a lot of those sales courses are just recycled advice from blogs. Did you end up trying anything different that worked better?

Oh, have you checked if the library has a community board online too? Some of them list events that aren't on flyers, and I bet other branches might have similar drawing groups if you ask a librarian. I've seen craft swaps and writing clubs at a few libraries around here, but sketching with free supplies is a really cool idea.