Don’t feel like reading? Listen to this article instead.
When you sell your knowledge and expertise as a service, the temptation every morning is to wake up and start tackling the tasks at hand.
The problem with that is, it keeps you on the hamster wheel. You are forever in the process of doing the client work, and not working on building your business through creating an audience.
And there is leverage in creating an audience. You can create products or services and sell them at scale, and quickly, but only after you have done the hard work of building your audience first.
That part has no real shortcuts. Just daily, weekly, monthly consistency; producing interesting content and building trust one word at a time.
Today I have plenty to do. But lately I’ve been victim (if you can call it that) of pursuing client work first thing in the morning. Despite having a month where I wrote nearly 1,000 words per day, I’ve now let the habit slip. Like a person with a new years resolution, it’s always easier to stay in bed instead of hitting the gym.
But today, I hit the gym (both literally and metaphorically). I wrote this content and now I can move onto other things.
With any luck, you’ll identify with parts of this in your own struggle. And with any luck, it will reaffirm the importance of putting your own future first by investing in the content you create, in order to build an audience for tomorrow that will allow you to sell your offerings at scale.
Today I did not consume, I created. I did not react to client work, I created first. And I call that a success.