A few weeks ago, marketer Matt Giaro interviewed me for his podcast.
Maybe because Matt also writes daily emails, or maybe because he’s into direct marketing, but he asked me questions I actually enjoyed answering and had something to say about.
The result is that this podcast appearance is one of my less horrific ones.
At one point, Matt asked me how I think about tying up my emails into the offers I’m making.
I told Matt how I think about that. But then I told him something that I think is much more important.
In fact, it’s my Prime Directive for writing this email newsletter.
It has never been to make money.
Maybe you think I’m signaling how good of a guy I am by telling you that. That’s not it. Consider this:
My Prime Directive also hasn’t been to provide value for my readers, or even to entertain them.
Nope.
My Prime Directive for this newsletter is very unsexy, very uninspiring, and a bit inhuman, almost Borg-like.
It’s simply… to keep this newsletter going day after day.
I’m writing this email from the Athens airport, waiting for my flight to Barcelona.
I’ve been in Greece for the past 5 days. It’s a kind of vacation, though each day I found a break in my “vacation time” to write this daily email.
Perhaps that’s because I’m a bit of a obsessive-compulsive beaver.
Or perhaps it’s a perfectly logical, rational decision. In the words of Morgan Housel, the author of The Psychology of Money:
“What I want to have is endurance. I want to be so unbreakable financially in the short run to increase the odds that I will be able to stick around as an investor for the stocks that I do own to compound for the longest period of time. If you understand the math of compounding, you know that the big gains come at the end of the period.”
… and I’d add, it’s not just stocks. This is also true for other assets, such as skills you’re building, knowledge you’re stacking up, content you’re creating, or email subscribers you’re attracting.
That said, just because my Prime Directive is rather inhuman — “resistance is futile, another email will follow tomorrow” — doesn’t mean I can’t on occasion try to make these emails valuable to you.
So let me take this moment to remind you of the old chestnut, which is no less true because it’s preached so often:
The best time to finally start something you have been putting off for an eternity — is today.
It doesn’t have to be an email list you write to daily.
There are plenty of other good investments out there, which you can start investing a nickel’s worth of time, energy, or money into right now.
But if you don’t hate writing… and if you happen to like flexibility and independence… then an email list of engaged readers is a good investment to start today.
And if you want some practical tips about how to do that in a way that meshes with your sense of self, assuming you’re not a natural-born salesman, then the podcast I did with Matt might be worth listening to.
The topic for that podcast was “How to send daily emails that make money without selling.”
The topic came up because I heard from a few people that it never seems I’m selling in these emails.
Of course, that can be because there are times I’m not actually selling anything, like today. (The Borg can subsist for months without food.)
On the other hand, there were also unbroken periods — stretching for years at a time — when each email I sent ended with a CTA to buy a paid product I was selling.
And yet, people somehow didn’t find it salesy… and they wanted to know how I do that.
If you’re curious too, I break it down in the interview with Matt. The link is here: