A couple of years ago, when I was going hard at The Complete Creative, and looking to relaunch my podcast, I messaged a friend about being a guest and she said (and I’m paraphrasing here):
“I think this is a bad idea.”
I was taken aback, so I asked why.
“You’re doing too much,” she replied. “Why don’t you try to just be a writer for a while?”
It didn’t make much sense then, and I disregarded it immediately. However, over the next year, especially as we went through COVID and I was frantically trying to keep from losing everything, her words kept nagging at me.
I was spending a lot of time doing things I didn’t want to do, just so I could make enough money to do the things I wanted to do, like writing.
I was doing dozens of podcasts a week, book marketing, killing myself to scrape by, and the whole time I wasn’t writing ANYTHING.
While we were in COVID lockdown, I told my wife I had no time to write because again I was trying to do everything, especially at the beginning of COVID, and it was making me super stressed.
She then said. “It seems like you’re just doing all this other stuff so you can funnel all your money into writing. What if you just didn’t do that other stuff?”
She was right, too, as was my friend.
I would be spending five hours on podcasts for coaching and courses, and then take whatever money I earned and funnel it all into books and such, which meant I was spending 10 hours to do five hours of work I cared about and was actually moving the career I wanted forward.
I didn’t care about owning a course business, or building a membership community. I was just doing it because people said it was a good way to make money that could then be funneled into writing.
After thinking about it and trying to come up with a plan for months, I ended up realizing that while I couldn’t give it up completely, if I was judicious with my courses and book marketing, then I could make almost as much money just as a writer, since I wouldn’t need the revenue to keep those other businesses going.
I stopped my podcast. I stopped driving traffic to coaching and courses. I stopped doing editorial projects.
Whenever I see other people suffering the same burnout that I did, I think about what my friend and my wife told me.
What if you just did the one thing you love, instead of the hundred other things you think you need to do in order to keep the thing you love going?
What if you pared down to the essentials?
Would it allow you to put our more products and possibly, just maybe, cover the revenue from the things you’re giving up?
If you can’t cut completely, what if you cut out the low margin activities in favor of a couple of high margin ones?
What if instead of doing something else and funneling that money into your passion, you just did your passion?
Now, I was lucky that I could make that choice, and even then I still maintain courses and do book marketing, but now I do them on my terms.
They now work for me, instead of me working for them, and always in service to one goal: giving me more time to write.
It’s been quite liberating, and I’m able to focus almost all my energy on writing, allowing me to write more and do more doing the thing I was put on this Earth to do.
Since I made that decision, I have written 11 books in the past 12 months.
I also spend a lot of time marketing myself, but as a writer, not as a guru or whatever else I was doing. Focusing on writing does not mean ONLY writing. To me, it means targeting activities that move my writing career forward, which includes marketing and sales.
This might not work for you, but I know almost everybody I know is dealing with some form of this, one way or another, so hopefully it resonates.
We are taught that more is better, but that’s not true. Growth for the sake of growth, without intentionality, is not better. Growth into something you don’t want to be is not better. Busy for the sake of busy isn’t better.
Oh do I get your pain. I’ve had people who have gotten upset with me because I said I couldn’t do something for them. I have limited time and I don’t need to be overly stretched to do things I really don’t want to do. With that said, I’m not on FB, Twitter or Instagram. I do a few things with Pinterest, but that is about it. Writing and editing and marketing my own books matters more than all the other stuff that I don’t have time. for.
Glad you saw the light.