Make the money you want by doing things differently
How to get the things that are hard to get.
Do you want to get the amazing results of online superstars? Big audiences, waitlist of clients, 6-7 figures?
Do you want to stand out from the crowd? To get ahead of your competitors?
You’ll want to read this newsletter.
But before I get to the point, let me start with a story.
In his book “Never Split The Difference”, FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss tells the story of one specific kidnap case in Haiti.
The kidnappers started the negotiations at $150,000 to release the woman they had taken. Voss saved her life in exchange for $4751 and a CD player.
$4751 and a CD player??
The data Chris had showed that kidnappers often took people on Mondays and were getting anxious to settle as the weekend approached.
His assumption? Chris hypothesized that the kidnappers simply wanted money to party on the weekend.
And he turned out to be right.
But that was not the part of the story that most shocked me.
What shocked me was how Chris emphasized the importance of showing kidnappers empathy and understanding during the negotiation process.
How do you show empathy to someone ready to take a person’s life so they have money to drink on the weekend?
How do you keep your cool as you discuss their party plans and calculate their party money when you know you’re in a life-or-death situation?
And also, what does that have to do with you making more money?
Solopreneurs are in a life-or-death situation.
Here’s the worst thing about becoming a solopreneur:
You never want to do anything else ever again.
Once you get a taste of this life: the freedom to work what you want, when you want, how you want and where you want, anything else feels like a compromise.
And we don’t want to live lives we settle for, right? No, we want to live the lives we choose.
This means we must make solopreneurship work.
We must make the money. We must find the audience. We must build products and sell them. The faster, the better.
How? Just like Chris Voss, we need to do the hard thing. The counterintuitive thing. The thing we keep telling ourselves we can’t do — or that’s so “out there” that we’re not even considering it.
Because, no, consistency isn’t enough.
It’ll get you up to a point, but it can’t get you all the way to success.
Success will come only if you do the hard things.
And the more hard things you do, the faster it’ll come.
Secret to success: Do More Hard Things
Here are the easy things you do — and their role in your business
Identify your goals, so you know what hard things to do.
Specific ideas about hard things you can do based on your goals. For paid subscribers only.
How to build a long-term strategy around hard things and sky-rocket your results. For paid subscribers only.
Here are the easy things you do — and their role in your business
The easy things are an important part of your business. They’re building blocks. They may be easy, but they’re still useful and/or necessary.
However, don’t count only on easy things to achieve big success.
Examples of easy things:
You write on Medium.
You write on Substack.
You show up on 1–2 social media platforms.
You have a profile on a freelance platform, and that’s how you get work.
The problem with these things is that everyone does them.
Which is why all those people get meh results. Sure, some get lucky and get slightly ahead of the curve, but overall, this is the meh group.
This doesn’t mean you’re meh. You’re just doing the easy things.
If you want growth, you need to work on the hard things.
Identify your goals, so you know what hard things to do.
Because the hard things take more effort, you need to be deliberate about doing them or they’ll overpower you.
This means you must identify a clear goal and do the hard things to achieve that goal.
Identifying your overarching goal is easier when you know what type of business you want to build.
Service business
Product business
Media business
(If you’re still not sure about that, you can refer to Clarity for Solopreneurs.)
Based on this, your goals may be:
To get more clients
To get higher-paying clients
To grow your audience/newsletter faster
To sell more products
Would you like specific ideas for hard things you can do to achieve these goals faster? Well, I live to serve.
Specific, results-focused hard things you can do based on your goals.
I have a confession to make.
I frequently steal great ideas.
This e-mail, in particular, is inspired by an e-mail I got from Joanna Wiebe.
Joanna Wiebe is a 7-figure copywriter for Thinkific, Microsoft and Spotify (to name a few of her clients).
Look at what she said in last week’s newsletter:
So it is.
That’s what most people don’t realize.
The more hard things you do, the “easier” success gets. Because very few people do hard things — and they slowly become better and better at them.
Now, to make your life “easier”, I’ll give you a list of hard things to do for each of the goals listed above.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Smarter Solopreneurs to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.