A few days ago, a long-time reader wrote to me. He first signed up for my email newsletter in 2019. I hadn’t heard from him in a while, so I asked him how his copywriting career is going.
He replied:
“As for the copywriting part, I’m still doubting myself because I’ve come to believe I don’t have the right mindset to learn the craft. I’m not disciplined enough and get easily distracted… And most of all, I lack confidence, because I still believe not being a native is an impediment to writing in English. The good news is: I’ve decided not to give up :-)”
As Mark Ford wrote recently, if you have what it takes, success should be a lay-up.
In my experience as a copywriter, that means all you have to do is take on small jobs at small pay to start, deliver on those jobs, continue to develop your skills, and increase the scale of jobs you take on and the money you’re paid for them.
Simple, right?
Well, as the Good Book says, broad is the way that leads to destruction. There are many swamps, quicksand pits, walls of brambles, and patches of stinging nettle and poison ivy that can show up in your way.
The first of these, as my long-time reader wrote above, is being afraid to even get started.
But there are others that come up also, even once you’re well on the path. I’ve come across some of them myself, and I’ve seen and heard other copywriters who had or have runins with some of these traps.
A few people have written to ask me about my Copy Zone offer, about succeeding in the business of copywriting. It’s behind schedule, and one reason is that I wanted to address the most common and the most dangerous of these quicksand pits and traps.
Because the best advice in the world is only a part of the story — one path that worked for somebody once, because they didn’t get stuck in the same traps that you might get stuck in.
But let me leave you with something concrete and maybe useful:
In my experience, action >>> mindset. It’s much easier and more effective to change your behavior than to change the way you think and feel.
That’s not a call to “just do it.”
Well, ideally, yes — just do it. But if you can’t force yourself to just do it, in spite of repeated tries, then just do something. Create some sort of change in your behavior, whatever that may be. You might just create a real change in your life — and even in your beliefs.
But actually, there’s something else also, which trumps changes in behavior… just as much as changes in behavior trump changes in mindset. But this email is running long, so I’ll save that for another time, or perhaps another place.
In the meantime, if you’d like to sign up for my email newsletter, you can do so here.