Sell products based on problems you’ve solved, not problems you have.
Don’t ask people to hire you to get them clients if you struggle to get clients.
Don’t sell audience growth tips if you don’t have a large audience.
This should be obvious.
Apparently, it’s not.
If you track how much traffic your website gets, you’ll start optimizing to get traffic. Maybe that’s good, maybe it’s not. If you track how many likes you get, you’ll start posting things that get more likes. Maybe that’s good, maybe it’s not. If you track how consistently you publish, you’ll feel pressure to publish more often. Maybe that’s good, maybe it’s not. There are unintended consequences of everything you track.
A realization that seems obvious, but hasn’t been:
My main business goal isn’t to make as much money as possible.
It’s not even to be profitable.
It’s to have fun and enjoy what I do.
Because if I don’t do that, what’s the point?
I might as well get a job I don’t like if it’s just about the money.
My daughter just rode a zip line at a playground for the first time. Her first ride started fine, then she fell off when she unwrapped her legs. I told her to keep her legs wrapped. The next time she did and had a great ride. Sometimes the difference between success and failure is someone telling you what to do.
Sometimes when I listen to a new album I’m quick to skip a song. If the first 30 seconds don’t grab me, I’ll skip to the next song because why waste my time? Other times I listen to all of every song - even the ones I don’t like at first. And when I do that, occasionally there’s a brilliant lyric or moment I discover 3 minutes into a song I don’t like.
“If you wanted people to read your blog, you had to make it compelling enough that they would visit it, directly, because they wanted to. And if they wanted to respond to you, they had to do it on their own blog, and link back. The effect of this was that there were few equivalents of the worst aspects of social media that broke through. If someone wanted to troll you, they’d have to do it on their own site and hope you took the bait because otherwise no one would see it.