A new subscriber wrote in yesterday to ask:
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How would you start over if you’d lost everything right now? Including your friends and connections that you acquired over the years, only you, your knowledge and your skill.
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I paused at this, because I had recently been thinking about the same question, for my own reasons.
For a moment, I considered writing up my thoughts, and sharing them in an email. But then I asked myself, why?
What good will it do you to know what I would do if I lost everything but MY knowledge, MY skill, and MY good looks?
The fact is, my knowledge (of stuff like marketing principles and tactics) and my skill (in things like copywriting) took years to develop.
The same is true of my mindset, if by that we mean my ability to choose projects… to drive them to the end even when I’m feeling uncertain and dispirited… to tweak my approach and try again when I lay an egg… and to recognize when it’s time to cut my losses and move on.
Because of all this, it would be useless for me to tell you what I would do, unless you have my knowledge and skills and mindset.
(It would also be close to useless if you do have my knowledge and skills and mindset, because in that case you’re prolly not thinking of getting rid of everything you’ve got and starting from zero.)
Here are a few things I think are worth doing in general:
– Selling
– Writing
– Having an audience and maintaining a good relationship with that audience
If you do all three of these on a decent level — not “world class” level, not “so good they can’t ignore you,” simply decent — you will have work and money, as long as work and money are to be had.
Now please just give me a second. Let me go to my closet and dig it out… ah yes, here it is. My favorite hobby horse:
Daily emails.
The fact is, writing a daily email will, bit by bit, get you better at selling, at writing, and in time, even if you do absolutely nothing else, it will build up a small but dedicated audience for you (that’s how it happened for me at least).
Where daily emails will eventually take you, nobody knows. But I’m willing to bet it will be a good destination, better than where you’re at now. Plus, you might even enjoy the journey along the way.
If you want help starting and sticking with the habit of writing daily emails: