A few days ago, I got a frustrated question from reader Ron Abrahams:
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I have been writing emails, twice a week, for seven months.
I keep a file that contains a chart of titles, date sent, and brief summaries, and a file of all the content I have written. A friend told me that at some point it will make sense to write a book based on my emails.
A month ago, just as I finished one I thought something sounded familiar. I went back to my chart and sure enough, I had already written that five months earlier. Some emails are a different angle on a perspective, this one was almost the same. This one I could not use. Besides, the first one was much better.
Is there anything I can do to avoid this again? I mean, you write every day. How do you do it?
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First off, good on Ron for writing regularly for seven months. And in answer to Ron’s question,
I don’t do anything to avoid writing about the same idea twice. Because it’s not a problem. Quite the contrary.
As I’ve written in an email before, the problem is if you have a good idea and you don’t repeat it enough.
But maybe, like Ron above, you still feel that accidentally repeating yourself is a problem.
Maybe you even feel frustrated or embarrassed that you’ve done it in the past, maybe recently.
In that case, I would like to tell you that’s also not a problem. Rather it’s an opportunity, for a new email.
Somebody somewhere once said, nothing bad ever happens to you if you write a daily email. Meaning, every fumble you make, every annoyance that happens to you becomes a new topic for an email. And people actually appreciate it.
A couple days ago, I wrote about being annoyed by a reader repeatedly replying to my emails with, “write more about advertorials more on.” That email about being annoyed drew more nice replies from readers than I’ve gotten in months.
But nice replies aren’t money. So let me tell you about money.
I read once that Larry David, back when he was the show runner for Seinfeld, would fly out a new batch of NYC-based writers to LA at the start of each season.
David would squeeze these writers for for their frustrating and embarrassing stories of NYC life. By the end of the season, when the writers and their stories were all used up, David would fire them and ship them back to New York. He would then hire a new batch of NYC writers, with new stories of frustration and embarrassment.
Larry David is slated to make $1.7 billion thanks to his Seinfeld syndication rights. That’s a lot of money, because stories of frustration and embarrassment resonate widely.
But let me wrap this email up. It’s taken me an ungodly amount of time to write, and I’m worn out.
That’s because I spent 40 minutes earlier this morning fruitlessly searching for the article where I read that thing about Larry David. I searched for the article because I wanted to get the facts just right, and maybe even share the quote with you.
But I couldn’t remember where I’d read the article, and no amount of googling or scanning the New Yorker website would help.
To make things worse, I have a cold, so I kept sneezing and running to bathroom to blow my nose.
Each time, I came back to the computer to continue my fruitless Larry David search for a few minutes before the sneezing kicked in again. And nothing.
In the end simply had to tell you what I remembered of it out of my head. Oh well. At least it formed a bit of content for the email.
In entirely unrelated news, there’s my Most Valuable Email training..
If you enjoyed today’s email and found it valuable for your email writing, then there’s a pretty, pretty, pretty good chance you will like Most Valuable Email too.
For that, go here: