My pal Garrett Daun recently highlighted a very important point, after reading one of the gazillion of emails I sent to launch my Breakneck Content book this past weekend.
The email was about something James Altucher wrote a few years ago re: 30-day challenges.
Specifically, this:
“Write down 10 ideas a day for 30 days.”
Followed by how doing something similar has effected my own business.
Anyway, Garrett replied to all that with:
Hey Ben-
You totally gave away like 90% of the “secrets” for literally anyone to:
-resurrect their dead creativity
-improve their brain functions
-improve all their relationships
-quit their stupid jobs
-feel a sense of celebration about every single moment
-find their natural, empowered voice
-live an amazing life, designed the way they’ve always wanted…
In the email you wrote below.
The funniest thing about it all is that the “missing” 10% is that people have to get a notebook and pen and actually do what you revealed for them to do.
And my guess is that maybe 1% of your readers will do it.
Which is amazing, that they’ll all go spend countless thousands of dollars to try to find some secret business tactics that will never work for them…
It is difficult for me to argue with his 1% number.
Frankly, from what I can tell, the vast majority of people up in this business are far too busy trying to chase, find, and collect a bunch of “hacks” or whatever, instead of developing the patience and work ethic to do the boring grunt work to blow right past the bleating herd. This is especially true of my recent “Breakneck Content” book I just launched, which is almost all quick-reading (some chapters are a single paragraph!) meat & potato solutions that sometimes take lots of effort (with a few taking almost no effort at all), and are not at-all exciting… but that I’ve used to in some cases bang out more content in any given month, than a lot of people I know do in a year.
Which brings me to the punchline:
Success is sekzy.
Making lots of sales is sekzy.
But the hard, often boring, and almost always not-very-fun work it takes to get that success and make them sales?
Not so sekzy…
In fact, not only is it not sekzy, but people will often have contempt for it.
And, in some instances, have contempt for the messenger, too.
I suspect this has always been the case since the beginning of time…
Whatever the case, a bit of housekeeping for those who bought Breakneck Content last night or weren’t able to:
- I turned it off in the shopping cart after the deadline.
- Thus, if you had trouble ordering last night after the deadline, that’s why.
- I only printed 150 copies for the launch, since the 800 or so people who were subscribed to “Email Players” (i.e. my best buyers) this past July had already gotten the info inside the book, and so I simply did not expect all that many sales beyond what was printed.
- But, we ended up doing almost 100 more sales than what was printed
- Which means if you bought on the last day (right around yesterday afternoon PST) it is going to take longer to get your book to you than if you’d not procrastinated and waited, since we have to print a bunch of fresh copies up.
- Probably a good week longer, maybe two weeks, if it takes longer than that let me know immediately
- There’s a lesson about procrastination in there somewhere.
- One person complained about getting 5 emails in a day yesterday, which was amusing considering I sent 7 emails…
- More emails = more sales when you do email right, in my experience
- To learn how to write emails people enjoy reading & buying from go here:
Ben Settle
