Category: WorkCategory: Work

The thing that comes easy might just be your big thing, which came up in a recent conversation about selling. It’s easy to get stuck in the mindset of “this is easy for me, so it must not be valuable.”

Sometimes I feel like these blog posts aren’t my finest work. But then I’ll include one in a newsletter and get five email replies like, “this was so good!”

But the filters of perfection and safety hold us back, or the idea that our work has to be hard. Maybe trust in the “easy thing” and see where it lands.

You made a product, a service, an offering, an album, and now you want to sell it, and damn – selling is hard.

None of it is simple! None of this is plug and play!

Trust, people, communities, communication, being associated with other people, and the lending of credibility, building our own credibility, reputation, alignment – WHEW! These are things that help the sale, but it’s a million different factors that get you to the finish line.

And like Stephen Dorr said on a recent call: experiments.

No one woke up one day and had it all figured out, or watched the right YouTube video and arrived at the answer – they tried things, tested things, over and over again to discover what worked for them.

Cody Cook-Parrott is having a summer sale, six classes for $99. Lo-Fi Ghosts sells their monthly mail club like this, and the Catdrool Club is sold like this. Darla Jackson is “offering up 100 tiny rabbits at a Summer Sale rate.”

And those are just some sales-page examples – everyone has their own way of marketing and promoting and reminding people of their offerings!

A great comment from Laura Van Buskirk, “knowing your angle that actually gets results and that part of the process takes elbow grease and experience to figure out.”

It was only recently that we were expected to always be available. This from Nicholas Bate (via Patrick Rhone):

“Life was shaped, from edge to edge, by scarcity and by natural limits. The shop shut. The night fell. The letter took three days. You were, for long stretches, simply out of reach.”

We drove across town to pick up groceries without a phone. We drove across state lines. We drove in snow storms and heavy rain.

Without a phone.

Yes, of course the phone comes in handy in emergency situations, but now everything is seemingly an emergency sitatuion, from breaking news, shipping alerts, album announcements, Slack notifications.

When are we ever out of reach?

I got to join someone else’s community call and talk about topic everyone wants an answer to: “how do I pull back from social media and still find work / clients / opportunities?”

In other words, “all the work / clients /opportunities are on social media, and if I leave, I’m ruined.”

I usually ask folks if they’ve tried renting billboards when they ask me this. They look at me like I have three heads, and then I tell them I’m joking. How about sky writing? Print ads? Hand bills? Direct mail?

There are 1,000 different ways to “reach” people, and 10,000 different people explaining those 1,000 different ways.

That leaves us a million variables, and then we look up and realize that we’re just talking about the marketing, when so often we forget to talk about the offer or the product or the market or the demand.

Saturday I reflected on our WHY HAVEN’T YOU STARTED THE THING YET? call (see upcoming calls here), and thought “we need to ask better questions.”

I kept thinking about this during a hike later in the day, then today (Sunday) I typed out a Substack Note from a parking lot:

“Maybe “should I start a newsletter” is the wrong question.

Maybe it’s “should I send a newsletter to the people who like me about the cool stuff I’m doing in hopes that maybe their day will be brighter and maybe they might (GASP) support me with their gracious attention and / or financial means?”

Starting a newsletter, setting up a website, making a YouTube channel – those are just to-do items, grand dreams. But who’s it for? What’s it about? Who does it serve? What’s the intended outcome?

Basic question leads to a vague and cloudy answers, so we must ask better questions to get a better sense of what’s worth starting.

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Join our next “WHY HAVEN’T YOU STARTED THE THING YET?” call, on Monday, July 13 from 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM EDT. Register here, pay what you want starting at $3.