People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing, that's why we recommend it daily. - Zig Ziglar

I was researching slash writing about the reasons why we keep delaying implementation of crucial changes in our business. What or who impacts the way we make decisions? Are there decision-making activities that set the most successful business people apart?

Thinking about that led me to the subject of mastermind groups. This article is about how being part of a group of passionate friends helps me make better business decisions.

Between 2003 and 2009 I was a hermit who barely got out of her office. I remember working fourteen hour days. I became estranged from many good friends because they never got to see me. They did call to grab a cup of coffee, but I rarely went.

As a result, I had no one to learn from but myself. If you’ve been reading my email articles where I often write about my many business mistakes, you know how expensive these lessons can get.

Today I’m a member of a small and unusual mastermind group.

A mastermind group is a small group of people who meet regularly for the purpose of reinforcing personal and professional growth, all while supporting each other.

My group is just me, my boyfriend (who is also a developer on my team), and a close friend of ours, who owns a marketing consultancy.

We meet spontaneously about once a week to talk life, universe, and everything. Because we’re not just friends but also business partners, we end up talking mostly about business.

We never meant to start a mastermind group. We only call it that as a joke, because our meetings are not formal. There was no strict application process. We don’t set meeting agendas, nor do we have a set “mastermind group weekday”. We meet to simply enjoy each other’s presence and to let our stories take us wherever we’re supposed to arrive in our lives. As a result, each of us grows as a (business)person a little each week. The two to four hours we spend together is one of the most motivating things I do all week.

Benefits I get from my mastermind group

Infusion of positive energy. Imagine entering a reality distortion field inside which it is impossible to feel bad about anything. That’s what our mastermind meetups feel like. We feed off each other’s positivity and we take that feeling home.

Sometimes I come to the meetup feeling overwhelmed or perplexed about what lies ahead of me. Seeing my other two masterminds in a cheerful mood makes me want to have a piece of that too. As a result, I have a wonderful time and this contagious positivity often spills over into the next day.

Solving problems and challenges. We often get together to discuss the next important step in our professional lives. Many times we all share the same issue, sometimes it’s just one person’s conundrum. In which direction should we take our businesses? What do I say to a client if this thing happens? Should I accept this opportunity? Is this an opportunity at all, or a wolf in sheep’s clothing? Sometimes we need to hear a confirmation or an opposite opinion before we feel ready to make a decision.

Personal support. The three of us are now at crossroads in our professional careers. We’re all working on something completely new right now, something that we never tried before. Having support from knowledgeable friends in delicate times helps you keep hope and focus. I’d much rather say: “I succeeded because of the support from my friends” than: “I did this all by myself”. The latter does not sound like much fun. When all things are equal, I always take the choice that includes fun.

Getting out of my own bubble. It’s crucial to let other people’s ways of doing things penetrate our self-inflicted bubbles. Another person’s perspective makes you re-evaluate everything you do.

For example, I’ve always considered myself a true digital citizen. Everything that excites me and that I want to do exists in virtual realms. This way of thinking affects the way I used to approach marketing. Before we formed our mastermind group, I never realized how effective non-digital and non-virtual marketing could be. Mingling with strangers in conferences? Organizing live talks? Sending snail mails? Those things were rarely, if ever, on my horizon. But when you see others succeed with something you once thought was boring or hard or a waste of time, you start looking for other beliefs of yours which are holding you back. You poke that bubble until it bursts.

Learning from other people’s successes and mistakes. At the price of one beer or two teas we share on a typical day, I get to pick another person’s brain for free, and they get to pick mine. Most of our talking consists of sharing stories about how we deal with clients, partners, employees, business colleagues, and events that surround us. What we have learned throughout the week, we share freely. We all have more than a decade of experience in various professional services and it happens very often that we discuss lessons we learned ten, fifteen years ago. Having heard their stories retold in different ways so many times, I feel like their experience becomes mine.

Accountability. We don’t have any rules about keeping each other accountable, and we don’t need any. I said I would write a book and I did. I said I want to start a product business and I’m doing it. Saying those things aloud in a controlled environment, to people who you admire, gives you more push to stick to your plans.

Learning new information. We exchange links, videos, books, tools, strategies and tactics about our businesses. Not one meetup goes by without someone taking home new vital information. Much of this new information makes its way into everything that I publish.

For example, my friend mentioned a video he saw online. In a week, I ended up seeing the video, buying a related book, and integrating the lessons from the book into my mental framework. It was that good.

A safe environment for receiving much needed positive criticism. Not everything we do is optimal. But friends don’t let friends wander around clueless. I trust my masterminds to warn me about my blunders and set me straight.

For example, most friends wouldn’t criticize you over the phone or in an email if they knew they would see you in a few days. But they might say something to you in person, when they feel the time is right to bring it up. That’s the best way to receive and give criticism: in person, kindly. This way criticism is no longer criticism, it’s the kind of support you need.

How to start or join a mastermind group

The best things happen when you’re not trying to make anything happen.

There’s no need to go around telling people “let’s start a mastermind group!”. Most people don’t need another appointment on their calendar. Just go grab a beer with a friend or a couple of them. Let them be the ones who inspire you, who you feel good around, and who are entrepreneurs like you. If your meetup goes well, say: “hey, let’s do this again next week!” and be the one to make the next meetup happen. What you control, happens.

You could meet new people if you go to meetup.com and see where professionals like you meet in your area. Like all public meetups, you’ll meet people who you never want to see again, and a person or two there will catch your attention. I’d exchange Twitter handles with those people, be in contact with them until the next meeting and I’d give them more attention when the next meeting happens. I’d sit right across them and listen to their stories. People who you like are more likely to like you back. It might be a start of a wonderful friendship.

In my experience, anything that gets us out of that office and close to other professionals is a good start. Working too much gets up wrapped up in our own bubble where solutions are limited.

Have an opinion on the topic of mastermind groups? Discuss this post on Google+.

Creative commons image license: "Normal" Soap Bubble by Gerwin Sturm

I ran into these two tweets the other day:

Signed up for a freelance email lead service thing (curious to see what they offered). Turns out a serious of long and patronising emails.

— Paul Macgregor (@SocketStudios) July 7, 2014

‘Your portfolio is wrong’ ‘You don’t know how much to charge’ ‘You too could be great like these guys’ I have medium for that, thanks.

— Paul Macgregor (@SocketStudios) July 7, 2014

I was immediately like:

OMG this guy is totally right! Do my articles come off as condescending and as patronizing like that too? Gosh I hope not. How do I make sure I don't patronize my readers and still get my message across?

As someone who writes educational content for a living or, to be honest - who only recently started to write for a living - not being able to teach people important stuff is kind of a biggie. I will be honest with you: my biggest fear is being ignored. People who feel like I'm patronizing them would surely ignore me.

This is not about me being afraid to offend people. I'm sure I'm perfectly capable of offending some people just by being who I am. I'm an atheist gay-friendly vegan pirate. There, I just made half of the world's population raise their eyebrows at me. She's what?!? Really, I don't care about that.

I'm also not concerned with constructive criticism. I welcome it, although it's not always easy to hear the truth. But learning from other people's mistakes is so much sweeter than learning from my own. That's why I decided that those two tweets would teach me something. I pretended they were constructive criticism directed at me personally, kept it in my RAM for a few days and then forgot about it.

But not for long. Today I was writing a new article for my newsletter about the business of web development about making a web agency irreplaceable. (Want to read about that? Subscribe to Simpfinity newsletter and the pigeons will instantly email you a link to the archive, where all the published articles are kept.)

Lessons from a complete stranger on Twitter resurfaced as soon as I felt that I was telling people that they were making a mistake, doing something wrong or didn't know something.

I stopped writing, confused and irritated.

From what I know from other writers, I can't teach people if I don't make the content about them personally. People need to identify with my writing and find a piece of themselves in what I wrote. Since most of my writing is about making web development businesses more profitable and more organized by avoiding the mistakes I made, I mostly write about that - mistakes.

I didn't know how to resolve this conflict. My assumption is that others make the same mistakes as I do and that writing about how I solved my problems would help people.

Well, it does. But when a reader receives the first newsletter edition from an unknown person and this person goes on to tell him everything that could be wrong with him and his business, he doesn't feel like continuing to read any more. That's what Paul from Twitter must have felt when he received the first email from that email lead service.

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” ― Maya Angelou, quote on Goodreads

It's hard to forget about that first impression.

Words Are Incredibly Powerful. I Changed Just One Thing in my Writing and It Made The Whole Difference

It's amazing how experiences and stuff that we read daily influence our behavior and our thoughts. Two weeks before running into the two tweets from Paul, I bought this book Write Harder by another complete stranger Uri Bram. In his book he was talking about how the way writers address readers completely changes how readers feel about what is being discussed.

Hmm. Pronouns.

Can it be that simple?

It turns out it can. Compare these two sentences:

You were wrong.

I was wrong.

The first sentence is a kick in the face. The reader's face. Nobody likes to be punched in the face. If I tell my reader that she is wrong, her guard is instantly up and I can't reach her. A person having a bad day could be, like, who the hell is she to tell me I'm wrong. She doesn't even know me. Unsubscribe!

The second sentence is part of a story. Humans can't resist stories. We're like cats going nuts for laser pointers. If I tell you what happened to me, you'd be all like, Hmm, I wonder what happens next. Tell me more. After all, it's not like these mistakes are mine. I know what she's talking about because I've been there too. I wonder how she resolved her issue. This could turn out helpful for me. Where do I subscribe?

And there it was, my solution to not patronizing my readers and still being able to teach them stuff:

1. Every time I talk about the negative stuff, such as mistakes, how painful or wrong or bad something is, I write in the first person - either as I or as we, and I always define who that we is. I make the bad stuff happen to me in my stories. Sometimes I use an undefined neutral third person, them. I'm making a neutral third person feel bad about what is happening. That way I don't patronize the reader and I don't make her feel bad.
2. Every time I talk about the positive stuff, such as benefits, expected results, how things will turn out, praises, I write to you - the second person. I make all the good stuff in my writing happen to you. You will get good results. You will avoid problems. You will get better clients. You will earn more. You will be happier in your professional life. You don't have to feel any pain.

What I Just Told You Goes Against Everything They've Taught Me About Sales

If you're in sales, you probably know about the pain vs. gain paradigm. People respond more to experiences of avoiding pain than they respond to promises of gaining pleasure. That's what copywriting for sales and business is sometimes all about: stabbing people in the back as deep and as hard as possible, twisting the knife some more so that people really feel the pain, and then dangling a solution in front of them so that people would buy the solution.

That's how humans work. That's why sales is focused on eliciting pain in 75% of the cases. People just don't change until it hurts real bad. And let's not blame sales as a profession or sales geeks for how the world works because most sales geeks are honest and good people. If there is something to 'blame', it's human nature.

Now, as a sales geek, I don't trust anyone who claims that influence is of no interest to them. I do want to motivate and influence my readers and I'd be a liar if I claimed otherwise.

The thing is: I want my influence to feel good to you.

I respect you. I know you are an intelligent human being who did not get an Internet connection to be scolded by a virtual avatar (because that's what we are to each other online: a bunch of talking heads on a computer network).

Out of respect for you and all my readers, I will assume that you can put two and two together and connect what I write and how I write with your experience, in such a way that can help you if and when you need help.

I'll be like those dots that Steve Jobs was talking about:

“You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” - Steve Jobs, quote on Goodreads

So here I am, throwing my dots of wisdom your way, hoping you would make a meaningful connection between them when the time is right for you. I will do my absolute best not to insult your intelligence or belittle you.

Here is an example from my latest newsletter where I paid special attention to how I'm addressing readers:

“But I’m not good enough / I’m too small to offer all those services. There’s this agency X who is ten times my size and they do everything better than I could possibly offer.”

I have that voice in my head too. That agency X has it too. The Oatmeal guy - who, like, draws the funniest and the most creative comic in the world - has it too.

This is how I approach this issue: there will always be companies and people doing a better job than me. Even if I was Seth Godin or Jony Ive, there are still people on the planet who do a better job than those two freaks (and when I say freaks, I mean that in the most respectful way).

But my clients haven’t hired those other agencies and quite frankly, what makes me think my clients would prefer them over me, them over you? They already chose you. They like you. They like that they can afford you, a talented geek that you are. Your skills and experience are several orders of magnitude more advanced than anything your clients are capable of imagining, producing and delivering. Not only do the clients lack the time to work on their online businesses, they even lack the drive and the passion to become great Internet marketers. That passion is what clients admire in us web geeks. That passion is for sale and you can make good money cashing in on that passion.

First I start with a quote from an unidentified person. I could have written the quote as a question like this:

Do you feel like you are not good enough or too small to offer all those services?

Readers feel the change in their emotions almost instantly. The word you in that sentence is directed at the reader in an attempt to connect with her on an emotional level. It works splendidly - if I wanted the reader to feel bad about herself. Most writers do this to their readers unconsciously, unknowingly, or at least with good intentions to lead their readers to a satisfying solution.

In the next paragraph I carefully steer all the negative feelings to me, the first person:

I have that voice in my head too. There will always be companies and people doing a better job than me.

And then, when there is time to talk about the positive stuff, I want to gradually turn the focus to you, the reader:

...what makes me think my clients would prefer them over me, them over you? They already chose you. They like you. Your skills and experience are several orders of magnitude more advanced than anything your clients are capable of imagining, producing and delivering.

Notice how me steps down to give way to you? This needs to happen because all the good and the positive and the hopeful I want to talk about is never about me. It's always about you. If I don't find a way to reach you, I can never help you, and that way I can never help myself. It's just like Zig Ziglar said:

“You can have everything in life that you want if you just give enough other people what they want.” ― Zig Ziglar

I have no idea where all these quotes are coming from today. It must be all those dots.

By associating only positive feelings with the word you in my writing, I am hoping to touch that part inside you that wants to receive guidance, but is too busy or too afraid to ask for it. I give you the dots. You remember the dots. The dots will connect in your future, when you will need them the most. I am certain of that. That's how I connected the dots from Paul from Twitter and from Uri who wrote that book about pronouns in writing. That's influence at its best.

The Power of Stories

My focus on making you feel good about what you read from me comes with an unexpected reward, both for you and for me. The story is the reward.

When I write about me, my writing will feel to you as a story. Whatever I write will be more interesting to you and you will stick around for more because you're obviously getting value from me. That's a plus for you.

What I get is increased influence on my readers. Stories are contagious. Any message that I want to get across to my readers will stick longer and harder to their inner walls. A well-told story bypasses all human shields and puts all doubts on pause. My job as a writer is to get the right message across, a message that helps you get what you want.

By writing so, you and me both win.

P.S.

Notice how pronouns are used in this article. Not one of them is a coincidence.

Discuss this article with me on Google+.

Creative Commons Image Credit: you me

I hate writing. I love having written. - Dorothy Parker

I published a book. I'm an author.

On June 9th 2014 I pressed Publish on Leanpub and the book Recurring Revenue For Web Agencies with my name on it appeared online for the world to read, buy, appreciate and critique.

I wanted to publish a book since 2012. It didn't happen then for a number of reasons. This post explains what I changed and who or what helped.

My Writing Mentors

Sometimes the writing happens but the publishing does not. Writing is like football: it does not help if you've played the first half well if it's Mexico who win through in the end. You gotta score. You gotta ship.

That's what happened to me. In 2012, I announced on my Facebook page and on my blog that I would be publishing a book by the end of that year. I started writing, but stuff got in the way. Life got in the way. 2012 went by. I continued writing in 2013, got to over 62,000 unedited words in my book. Life got in the way again and I never published.

During all that time, I read a lot about writing. You could say that I should have been writing, not reading - and you'd be right and wrong at the same time. Reading about writing did help in my case, and it wasn't the reading that got in my way.

Writing is a solitary activity. When you're writing your first book, you're on your own. There is no one to help you.

Unless you get help from mentors, which I did.

No, I didn't hire a mentor to cheer me on to write. I pretended that some of my favorite authors, who I respect and follow online, were my personal mentors. I pretended that what they said online was meant for me personally. I changed my behavior based on the advice I've cherry-picked from their books, newsletters, blogs, podcasts and videos.

Some of the things they said made the difference between not publishing and publishing. They showed me the door and I went through it.

I'm a Writer

When do you become a writer?

When you have published your first book?
When you have written a hundred blog posts?
When you have landed a column in a respectable publication?
When your friends start calling you a writer?

None of the above. Do you want me to show you a single book that persuaded me that I'm a writer?

Here it is. My mentor Jeff Goins taught me that you become a writer when you say so. When you say it out loud that you are a writer, you set a certain change in motion. Your inner self will strive to maintain consistency with your proclaimed identity. What do writers do? They write. Am I a writer? Then I should write. So I wrote.

Jeff Goins, the online champion of making writing your calling, taught me WHY I needed to write. It's because I cannot not write. I'd write even if they forbade me to. I'd pay to be able to write. I'm most creative when I write. It's who I am.

Writing Every Day

There are only two days in the year that nothing can be done. One is called Yesterday and the other is called Tomorrow. Today is the right day to Love, Believe, Do and mostly Live. - Dalai Lama

Want me to show you a single post that changed my life? Here it is, from my mentor Leo Babauta on the topic of change. Let me quote the guy:

Nothing will change unless you make a daily change. - Leo Babauta

This is the most powerful and at the same time the most overlooked piece of advice on the planet. Every day, the window of opportunity to work on creating the Future Self we want to become is limited to Today. Something in our human biology makes it irresistible to dream big in the far future, but prevents us from accepting the simple direct path to there.

I said to myself that I wanted to earn my living from writing. I've taken a good look at the straightest path that would take me there. The path is to write every day and to publish when I'm done writing. The more I write every day, the faster I will get there.

Leo Babauta taught me WHAT one change is essential to go from not published to published.

Put Your Fingers on the Keys

I now knew WHY I wanted to write. I found out WHAT I need to change in my life to become an author. But HOW do I actually do it?

I'll show you the single most sobering kick in the ass a writer can get. Here's when my mentor Chris Brogan stepped in to teach me the mechanics. Here's what he says in this audio interview, emphasis mine:

So I do 2,000 to 4,000 words a day. The way I do that, and I know we’ll go into that in a great deal of depth, is that I type. So I just put my fingers on the keys and I know that is immediately a turn-off to people, but yes, you must type to actually get the words typed. - Chris Brogan

He puts his fingers on the keys. I remember listening to this interview and pausing the audio stream to reflect on what he just said. I thought, could it be that easy? Is that how you become Chris Brogan if you do it consistently for ten years?

I too want to join the ranks of those writers who write about a piece of poopy and get fifty comments. That's the only reason I tried :) OK, I'm kidding. I already told you WHY I tried. But when I tried, it worked for me too.

That's how I start my daily writing sessions now. I sit down, I place my fingers on the keyboard and I start writing. I know that the first few hundred words that I vomit all over my digital paper will be just that: vomit. It stinks and it's not pretty to look at. The magic starts happening every time after having typed for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes. It's a comforting insight to know that your good writing is always within you and that all it takes to get there is time (and a lot of editing). This thought alone makes me want to endure through the first dreadful minute of starting.

Thinking is Outlining Is Writing

No mentor in particular taught me the lesson about outlining. I figured it out for myself while I was writing. That's what happens when you practice your craft: you improve it.

I've never worked on a book before and there was never a need to outline anything. Most of my blog posts were spur-of-the-moment types of writing. I sat down with a burning idea in my head and a couple of hours later, a blog post was born. I just loved it how I could start and finish in one sitting. To outline was to waste time.

That's not how I would write my book, mostly because I can't write a whole book in just one sitting. Burning motivation only got me so far.

Lack of outlining the book was what kept me from publishing it. When you're outlining, you're listing and structuring your thoughts which will one day make up a book. Outlining is deciding what goes in your book and what you leave out. Without an outline, every time I sat down to write, I had to start the thinking process from scratch. Thinking is terrifying. I was forcing myself to go straight from my best thinking to my best writing. What I needed to do instead is to capture my thoughts in a structure first. That structure is called the outline.

I consciously decided to change my process. I first told myself that it's ok to invest some time in the outline and that outlining is writing too. Every day I carved out the time to work on the outline of my book. I allowed myself to write during outlining if I felt inspired about a topic, but I kept my focus on the outline. I considered the outline finished when I had a list of topics that I wanted to write about and when one day was enough to start and finish writing the first draft of a topic. Writing a book became like writing blog posts again: every day I'd write one blog post, but this time there was order in my writing.

Real Artists Ship.

It was Steve Jobs who said this and who will forever own the word shipping in my head.

But I owe it to my partner Sasha who kept reminding me that shipping is now more important for me personally than to ship perfectly.

When I discovered the Leanpub self-publishing platform where I published my book, I instantly knew that I would be shipping with them. Their philosophy resonated with what my company does for a living (we write software which is never perfect). And because Leanpub encourages authors to publish books while they're still in-progress, it was Sasha who kept pushing me to push Publish. If it wasn't for him, I'd still be putting it off. I'd still be polishing my landing page. I'd still be researching what other authors do so that I wouldn't make any rookie mistakes. He helped me accept that as a first time author, I indeed was a rookie and that it's ok to make rookie mistakes. I just needed to make my mistakes as a published author. Published authors make better mistakes.

Creative Commons Image Credit: Launching "Mobil Valiant"

Discuss this post on Google+.

I’m successful in many areas of my life.

For example, in April I celebrated ten years of being vegan. In the past decade I never once lapsed to eating anything of animal origin.

I’m also proud to say that I am a happy person. I’m happy for who I am, where I am, what I have and whom I'm with. Being happy is my ultimate achievement and I've worked hard for it.

There are areas where I can’t claim 100% success. For example, I still haven’t managed to build the kind of business that would be perfectly aligned with my personal values. Business-wise I’m in the best place now than I ever was, but something is still missing. My ultimate goal is to build the kind of business that buys me a certain level of personal freedom.

I’ve been wondering: how come one can achieve 100% success in one area and not in another? What are the building blocks of success?

I’ve identified self-confidence as the ‘secret’ characteristic of every person who deems herself successful. The good thing about self-confidence is that it’s completely under my control.

Unlike success. Success is unobtanium if you make it your direct goal. Success does not exist. Even when you’re able to define it, see it, hear it, smell it and touch it, it’s not success that you’re seeing, hearing, smelling and touching. Your representation of success is always something more specific. You experience success as a number on your bank account. An amazing person sleeping next to you. An airplane ticket to Iceland. Sitting under the tree, listening to the nature making sounds and not having to do a damn thing in the world.

Success is unobtainium until you make it more concrete, until you break it down to specific characteristics which you can control.

What is under your control you can measure. What you can measure you can improve.

As the most important building block of success, I’m happy to inform you that self-confidence is 100% under your control.

But where does self-confidence come from? What creates it? What precedes it?

I want to teach what I know. For example, I know a thing or two about selling websites. What I know can help other web professionals to build better businesses.

I asked myself this: where, when and how did I arrive at my self-confidence in selling websites? How do I dare to ask for five times more money than some other people? How do I teach others to ask for more money and get the sale?

The process of teaching is the process of understanding. When I want to understand a phenomenon, I always look to deconstruct it to its building blocks. Like a child playing with Lego bricks I recently took my own self-confidence apart and studied its atoms. The molecule of my self-confidence split in three atoms: knowledge, skills and practice.

To me, knowledge means knowing the true costs of running my business. I just know how much effort and expenses (in time and resources paid with money) go into making a product such as a website. I also know what it takes to sell a website: I’ve read a ton of sales books and articles and I keep reading more. I also know the business value of a good website. I’ve been acquiring and internalizing this knowledge for more than a decade. I use my knowledge as a powerful ally which won’t let me forget why and what I need to do in sales.

So, knowledge is one of the sources of self-confidence. But knowing the why and the what of sales is not enough, is it? Knowing is not the same as doing.

It also takes skills. Skills are the how of knowledge. In my case, I may know that I need to ask for a certain amount of money to sell a profitable web project. But in what way exactly do I ask so that I get the sale? That’s where my sales skills kick in. I have practical sales training where I’ve learned essential sales skills such as qualifying leads, asking questions, communication, presenting, listening and asking for the sale. My teachers taught me which roles those skills play in sales.

Now that I have the why, the what and the how, it’s time to start practicing. Practice is acquiring experience in using your new skills. I’ve now worked in sales for more that three thousand days (not counting Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays). On every one of those three thousand days I put myself in a situation where I had to practice the skills I’ve learned. On even days I sucked a lot and sold nothing. On odd days I sucked less and sold a website or two. With each website sold my self-confidence grew because I practiced the skills that I learned. When you do this for over three thousand days, self-confidence comes easy. And success comes easy when you’re self-confident.

But you don’t want to wait three thousand days. You want to start now. How do you do it? By following the trail to its source, like this:

If you lack success, become more self-confident.
If you lack self-confidence, practice new skills.
If you lack skills, acquire knowledge.

I can’t help you succeed, make you more self-confident or make you practice your skills. That’s your job.

But I can set you on the path of success. I can give you the source code to success: the knowledge.

I write about the business of website development. My personal business fetishes are pricing, recurring revenue, sales, getting enough qualified leads and organizing business processes. The place where I publish all my knowledge and my best tips is the Simpfinity newsletter to which you should totally subscribe. Oh, and there will be books soon. Subscribers will be the first to find out about them.

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Creative Commons Image License: 'Birds of a Feather' by Jessica Lok

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Want to write for a living? You can. You just can't put a $2.99 price tag on your book if you want to eat.

I've been ranting about pricing for the past five years.

Charge more. Just fucking do it.

That's what I've been telling my fellow web developers and web development company owners. That's what I've been training myself to do.

Now that I am finally ready to finish writing a book, I see that the same web development lessons about pricing apply to publishing books as well. There are so many talented writers out there, but they've been making the same mistake as I used to do: they set their price based on what everybody else does.

And everybody else is wrong.

If you haven't been writing and publishing since the dawn of the social era, chances are your audience is tiny or non-existent. You can't sell books at $2.99 apiece and start your writing career if your audience consists of 50 followers, most of which are friends and family.

If you want to perpetuate the myth of a starving author and play the martyr, do so in silence.

What I've discovered recently is that there's a booming market for self-published technical and business books. Geeks who slouch on computers by day write books by night and earn up to high five figure numbers. In U.S. dollars.

What are they doing differently?

They're not waiting to become good enough. Every day they fight their inner demons who whisper to them that they're not good enough. Who the fuck do you think you are? They know they're good enough now.

They're not waiting for permission from their peers, friends, role models, celebrities, mothers, lovers and bosses. They give themselves a permission to write, to hit publish and to put a price on their work.

They're not waiting to be saved by others. They're not waiting for a big publishing company, Techcrunch, Amazon, a Twitter user with hundreds of thousands of followers, a VC or an agent to discover their talent. They know that they only need a couple of hundreds of readers who will discover their talent during the very process of writing the book.

They're not waiting for a big audience to emerge from thin air. They start with a mailing list of two users (themselves and their closest soulmate) and they just fucking start writing and hitting that publish button until their thumbs are red.

If you know a skill that other people use to make money, you can make a living by teaching that skill. ~Nathan Barry, Authority

What Skill Do You Have?

Skills are like assholes. Everybody's got one. ~Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry in The Dead Pool

(I might have slightly edited the above quote.)

I don't know about you, but one of my best skills is knowing how to sell a website using only phone and email. I'm going to teach people how to sell hundreds of websites without meeting clients in person. That's not the only way to sell a website, but it sure as hell is something a lot of web designers and web agencies have to do every day. They talk to prospects on the phone and write sales proposals, but waste a lot of time and energy in the process. I figured out a way to do it well enough to run a company on it.

(If you want to be notified about my "Sell More Websites" book, subscribe to my business mailing list).

Teach your micro-skills.

Am I the best salesperson in the world? I'm not. If I decided to write a comprehensive guide titled "How to Sell", my lizard brain would laugh so hard and so loudly and so persistently that I would not be able to quiet it down.

I don't have the guts to write a general book about sales. I also don't need to nor want to. That would be a mistake because a general book about a general skill talks to no specific audience and solves no specific problem. When your target audience definition is all over the spectrum, you end up selling to nobody. That's the dark place where starving (technical) self-published authors live.

Look at these guys who teach micro-skills by writing books:

Backbone.Marionette.js: A Gentle Introduction - 2034 books sold

Sublime Productivity - 1386 books sold, earned over $16,000

Everyday Rails Testing with RSpec - 3835 books sold

Why programmers work at night - 1854 books sold

A JavaScript library out of hundreds of thousands of them. A text editor out of hundreds of them. A Rails testing framework out of I have no idea how many of them. An analysis of a particular behavior pattern of a specific group of people.

Are you fucking kidding me?

No, I kid you not.

It's the readers who are starved for acquiring specific micro-skills and micro-knowledge that they need to be more awesome on their jobs. The geeks turned authors are a living proof of that.

Here, take a look at this guy: The Grumpy Programmer's PHPUnit Cookbook - 778 books sold at $29.00 a pop.

778 readers times 29 bucks = $22.000+.

Twenty two thousand dollars, earned by teaching a significant subset of all programmers in the world (PHP programmers only) who want to learn about one specific skill (unit testing with PHP).

Granted, the author probably did not cash in the full $22K. He was probably selling the book at a discounted price while he was still writing it.

(that's what Leanpub is all about: you can charge money for an unfinished book and people are happy to pay. Yes, you've read that correctly. Yes, you're welcome.)

What this author did not try to do is write a PHP Bible for everyone and his mom. He isolated one tiny problem that has significant consequences if not handled and decided to teach a couple of hundred people how to test their PHP code the right way.

Did you notice the word sold up there? These geeks teach micro-skills and micro-topics and charge real, good dollars for their work. They have built small publishing empires which sell their books by the thousands. Their books also promote their businesses. Some of them probably write the books as a clever form of marketing their core business.

What the Fuck Are You Waiting For? Why Aren't You Teaching?

Does the word teach scare you? It can be overwhelming. It is overloaded with meaning and subtext. Your lizard brain is having a party in your head at the mere thought of you becoming a teacher, isn't it? :) Crush the enemy within. Simply replace the word teach with sharing all the knowledge I've got on the subject and you'll be fine. Suck on that, lizard brain!

Are you waiting to become better at the skill you'd like to teach? News flash: those geeks I mentioned got better at their skills because they chose to teach them.

I knew this intellectually, but didn't really understand how little I really knew about Ansible until writing the book. In one short month, I've gained a much fuller understanding of Ansible and grown in my knowledge of Linux system administration and application deployment. If I do something once, I don't really understand it. If I do it again, I might know more about what I did, but I still don't really understand it. If I teach others about it (in writing or teaching), I force myself to understand it so (a) I don't look like a fool, and (b) I don't waste other people's time. ~ Jeff Geerling, Server Check.in and author of Ansible for DevOps

Are you waiting until the whole book is clearly laid out in your mind's eye? I've got news for you: ain't gonna happen by magic. Nope. The breadth and the depth of your future bestseller will have been defined after your hiney had been kissing your chair for a few hours.

Oh, so you'll first work on increasing your Twitter followership and your mailing list and only then will you start writing, when you have a bigger audience? Aren't you the complicated one :) You grow your audience by writing every day and by talking about writing to your mailing list and on social media.

Write. Leave a small digital footprint about your writing on social media and on your blog. Write more. Leave more digital footprints. Do this every day.

But I don't have time. I work a soul-crushing 10-hour day job. Or, my clients take the best of me.

Boo hoo. Poor you. Here, have a cookie.

Do you feel better now? Ok.

You don't have time nor do you find time.

Time is not something you are able to possess.

You make time.

Franz Kafka sat down at his desk at 10:30 or 11:00 PM and worked until 1, 2, 3 AM. He fucking made time for his craft. He probably knew he owed it to the world. Without him consciously making the time, this would have been just another nobody's tombstone.

When you say I don't have time, what you're saying is this is not important enough to me.

I guess a soul-crushing job or demanding clients are more important to you. You must really love your job to keep postponing your life's calling.

Writing a book has completely changed my business and career. My long term goal was to be running my own business, and now I'm doing that. ~ Jarrod Drysdale from StudioFellow in the book Authority

Your English-as-a-second-language isn't perfect? That's what human editors are for. Don't tell me you can't google right now and find one native speaker who would love to edit your book without breaking your bank! If you're strapped for cash, crowdsource your book editing. Ask a dozen of your English-speaking followers to read your book and find problems in it. Reward them with your free ebook.

Ok, I Don't Want to Wait Anymore. You've Convinced Me. What Do I Do?

I have no idea! Don't look at me. I'm not an expert.

But here's what I would do.

1. Think of a micro-skill that you already have. A good micro-skill to teach is the one that enough people need to earn money. The more money those people have to spend, the better. If you can teach entrepreneurs in a niche close to your heart, please do. The entrepreneurs are the ones with money.
2. Go online and run a few Google searches. A fancy, Silicon-Valley-style word for this activity is "validating your idea" or "market research". Do people ask questions online about that skill? Do you hear them discussing problems that they suffer from because they lack the skill? Hang out in their online communities and listen to their conversations. For example, I follow a few subreddits where web designers and web developers hang out. I hear them mentioning specific problems I solved with my good sales skills a long time ago. What are they complaining about? Could you position your micro-skill as one of the solutions to their problems? Talk to those people, participate in their discussions. Comment on their threads. Ask them if they would like to learn your skill. They'll point you in the right direction.
3. When you have validated that one of your ideas for a book has merit, decide to write the book. I will write this book is what you say to yourself in the mirror. Out loud.
4. Start working on the outline of the book. Outline is a fancy writer's jargon for "series of headings and subheadings in the book, broken down to a single idea". If your outline starts looking like any table of contents you've seen in any book, you're on the right track. Ask yourself: What is the one most important thing to know about this skill? What is the second most important thing about it? And so on. Write it all down in a tool of your choice: Google Docs, Evernote, text editor, whatever. Write down all ideas you want to mention - just puke them out on a piece of digital paper - you'll organize them later. A set of chaotic bullet points is good - anything that moves your needle.
5. Start writing. Pick a single idea that seems like something you'd like to explore now. Yes, explore: that's what you're doing. You're exploring an idea in writing. The good thing about writing about single ideas is that it doesn't feel like writing a book. It feels like writing a blog post, one at a time. Do you know what a collection of finished blog posts on a single topic is called? It's called a book. A guide. Even the ultimate guide or the definitive guide. Finish writing two to three chapters and take a one day break. You deserve it!
6. Edit those three chapters. Editing means that the next day you re-read what you've wrote and correct anything that does not sound right. The best way to spot bad writing is to read what you wrote out loud. If it sounds weird when you say it, it sounds weird when you read it.
7. Go to Leanpub publishing platform because they take care of everything for you. You'll publish your book to the world there. I can't believe how little money Leanpub asks in return for their awesome services (they only take 10% + 50 cents per each sale your book makes via their platform). Create an account there, create a minimum viable book description using the tools provided, upload your first three chapters and attach a price to your book. Don't worry about not making everything perfect. It's your first time. Luckily, the Leanpub environment is one of the most forgiving places to start writing a book. If you screw something up, nobody will yell at you.
8. Set up a Mailchimp mailing list, put it on your website and start collecting email addresses. Announce to the world that you're writing a book and that people should subscribe to your mailing list to get notifications about it. Link to your published and unfinished Leanpub book from your website and mention it in your newsletter.
9. Start a blog on your website. A WordPress website with a blog will do. Write about writing your book, about why your topic is so important and how it helps your target audience be more awesome at what they do. In my case, I plan to educate my business blog readers about how to interview clients on the phone for the first time, what to say exactly and in what order. I discard a ton of ideas when I write a book, but I don't just throw then away - I publish them as blog posts or tweets or Google+ posts. That's why I don't have to worry about inspiration for my blog or social media updates. I don't let any clever brain fart go unpublished :) I just don't put all of them in my book.

That's Enough to Start. This Is Where You Are Now:

You're now angry with me because I yelled at you. Don't be. You're cool. It's not you who I yelled at. This blog post is a publicized internal monologue I had to have with myself this morning. Most of my blog posts are like that: just me talking to myself.

This is what you have now:

1. A book topic to write about.
2. An outline of the future book.
3. A first few published chapters.
4. A website with a blog.
5. A mailing list, capable of accepting new subscribers.
6. A cool publishing platform (Leanpub) which does not reek of cheap like Amazon.com does. The upper pricing limit for a book on Leanpub is $500. Leanpub lets you keep 90% of your earnings at all price points, while Amazon lets you keep only 30% if your book is anything above $9,99. Be on Amazon but don't count or wait for it to save you. You will save yourself.

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It's Sunday afternoon and I'm playing Plants vs. Zombies 2.

I'm playing because I'm avoiding a boring task I absolutely have to finish today.

I'm in the middle of shooting ten holes through a bunch of zombies when this idea comes knocking on my brain:

I'm procrastinating because I'm attaching a certain emotion to the dreaded task. What emotion am I feeling right now? Would the task scare me less if I detached the emotion itself from the task? If yes, how exactly does one detach emotions from stuff?

I immediately quit the game to further explore these questions and see myself develop them into answers. I wanted to see how the story ends.

I couldn't pinpoint the exact emotion. It was that general "I don't feel like doing it" feeling. It wasn't much, but it was just enough.

Feel. Hmmm. Such a simple yet telling word. Could it hold the secret to beating procrastination?

A question popped in my head, the question that immediately solved my Sunday riddle:

Do I need to feel like writing in order to start writing?

No I don't. It's an illusion coming from my false belief that writers only write when they're inspired to write.

“Someone once asked Somerset Maugham if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. 'I write only when inspiration strikes,' he replied. 'Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.'” - Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

So that's where the source of my procrastination lies: in a feeling that I need to feel a certain way in order to work on a task.

To stop procrastinating, therefore, I need to go through the following routine every time I want to motivate myself.

Procrastination Be Gone: My Six Steps to a Task Resolved

1. I need to let go of the expectation that I need to feel like doing the task in order to actually start working on the task. I do that by accepting how I'm feeling right now and saying this to myself: "I don't feel like working on that task and that's ok. The 'right' feeling is not a prerequisite."
2. I need to take out my laptop, place it in my lap or on my desk, open the lid and log in. That puts me in a position where I stare at a blank screen and that is good. Alternatively, if I'm already on my laptop performing my usual distracting activities (mostly surfing Google+), I must close all open browser tabs and all open applications.
3. I must open the software tool with which I will be working on the task. In 90% of the time that's my editor for writing. Nothing but my editor should remain open.
4. (the following one is crucial) I must assume the working position. Specifically, this means that I must place my palms above the keyboard.
5. I must write one true sentence - the truest one I know. It could be a trivial statement which has nothing to do with the task itself, such as this: "It's a beautiful day outside and I'm stuck here writing that thing I don't feel like writing." Anything that gets me going is good. I'll arrive at where I need to be eventually.
6. Then I must write the second truest sentence I know.

Notice how I'm micromanaging myself? "Open the laptop lid. Log in. Place your palms above the keyboard." Micromanagement is important here and I thread lightly through these micro-steps because it's the start of the activity that's scaring me, not the activity itself. I'm afraid that this feeling I'm feeling right now would be with me the whole time while I work on the task. I dread feeling badly for an extended period of time, although I know this simply does not happen. As soon as I start working, the feeling is gone and I feel excited about my progress and the final result I'm about to produce.

If it doesn't work for me immediately, I talk myself into spending not more than a minute on the task. I say these sentences to myself:

I'm just going to take out my laptop and open it, that's all.

I'm just going to open my editor and write one sentence I feel like writing right now.

99% of the time when I do that, I am successful in finishing whatever I start, and it takes me less than a minute to get me going. The problem I've been having, though, is that I was distracting myself with false beliefs about the way I should be feeling about working on the task.

I still have that writing task to complete on a Sunday afternoon, so it will be a good practicing opportunity for me.

Comments

Go ahead, try it for yourself and let me know on Google+ what you think about my approach.

An insight came to me while I was reading the book A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy.

(So much revelation in the first few pages. Go and buy it. You'll thank me later.)

Yesterday I decided I would look at the new business I'm venturing into as an adventure.

Adventure-centered attitude is the best antidote to FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt).

If my new business is an adventure, then all the obstacles in my way are what makes the adventure interesting. Something to look forward to. A valuable learning opportunity. An opportunity to feel as hero of my own story.

If, on the contrary, I perceive my new business as a potential source of anxiety because of so many unknown unknowns, I will not enjoy the journey. I will only live for that one moment in the far, far future when I will have succeeded.

But what is an adventure good for if you're not enjoying every minute of it?

Always be yourself. Unless you can be Indiana Jones. Then always be Indiana Jones.

Doesn't Indiana Jones leave an impression of a man having a lot of fun? Even when you see him in a deep pit fighting snakes?

That's how I see myself today: as Indiana Jones. Coming to the office in the morning equals to showing up for an adventure.

Hmmm, I wonder what new insights await me as I'm writing and publishing my next newsletter issue.

I wonder what great people I might meet today on Twitter. Maybe some of them become my future friends. Maybe some of them will be delighted about the app I'm working on because it helped their business.

Who knows what this temporary setback I'm experiencing teaches me in the long run.

What is the worst that can happen if I don't set up this Facebook advertising campaign right?

An adventure-oriented attitude. It's ten times better than worrying about whether your business would lead you to where you think you'll be in two year's time. If the ability to control outcomes is an illusion anyway, why force dissatisfaction on yourself? Simply relax and mindfully enjoy the ride.

Your current time and place is a page from an adventure book. You're telling your journey's story on every page of that book, not only at its end.

When I look back at the last decade of my life, I see it as an adventure in learning. What I've learned in that period helped to prepare me for the new adventure that's in front of me.

This thought alone makes me super excited about my future and super grateful about my past. If you ask me what my life's goal is, it is to live the life of no regrets and to die empty.

Regarding regrets: so far so good :) I'm not ready to die just yet, though. I've got work to do.

Comments

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I decided to do this mostly because I needed a better publishing platform which would help me publish more good stuff more often. I've known for some time that the choice of a writing tool has an effect on me. Ghost editor supports Markdown syntax and Markdown is currently the most productive way to publish directly to the web. My old blog had a classic WYSIWYG editor which put too much work on me and gave me too many options.

I also hated the way my old blog looked like. I needed a simple, no fluff, beautifully designed look and Ghost provides that via their theme marketplace. I chose a theme that makes my blog look like Medium and I like it that way.

I chose not to host Ghost myself for free because Ghost Team provides great support at no extra charge (premium email support is included in the monthly blog hosting price). Their support is way cheaper than my boyfriend's time.

Finally, I wanted to just. start. writing. again. I've been blogging on Google+ more than I've been writing on my own web blog for the past three years. Google+ gave me audience and simple publishing tools and made me want to hit 'Publish'. That's what I'm hoping to get from Ghost: a writer-friendly environment.

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You know the type: 

“9 Ways to Excel at Your Social Media Strategy in 2014”
“15 Design Trends You Won’t Believe are Coming”
“Three Ways to Be Productive If Your Office Doesn’t Have an Air Conditioner”

You probably see a hundred headlines like those on your average social media break. I’m not amused to see how many people accept to write them and drown in mediocrity, when it’s so easy to be different by doing the exact opposite of what everybody else is doing.

The problem I have with most list articles is that they don’t make me smarter

The above headlines? I made them up just now. People actually write those, and some people actually click them. And when they do click, they quickly discover that the content is shallow, of low quality, and rehashing of the rehashed. I’ve clicked enough of them to know that I should actively avoid them forever.

List articles are often written by people whose job is to maximize page impressions and ad revenue, for people who are bored. Rarely do I see a list article with real value and deep thought. Value often comes from specific examples, authentic stories and ballsy writing. 

To me, list article headlines are nothing but a sign of bad content and lazy writing (and I’m not the only one to think that, although some people strongly disagree). They’re cheap tricks that websites monetized by advertising play on bored people, posing as valuable content. They’re the result of copywriters selling copywriting when the Internet was still young.

If your target audience are bored people with nothing to do and your business model is advertising, you’ll probably always have a fresh new stream of readers for your list articles, forever. But if you write content to persuade, influence, get business leads and to sell your products, you want to attract alert people in active pursuit of solutions to their problems. I strongly believe the latter group pays better in the long run.

A better alternative: an article which is a collection of links to your older related posts

Why don’t you write an article containing summaries with links to at least three or more in-depth articles on a similar topic? That would then be a valuable post-mortem list article and not a dishonest attempt at link bait. If you can also refrain from using that lovely attention-grabbing number in your headline, kudos to you! You’re a true rebel.

You can have your cake and eat it too:

• You can have a bulleted list of ideas in your article. Online readers love bulleted lists.
• Your content won’t be shallow because there’s a link next to each bulleted summary, leading to another blog post where you dive deeper into the subject.
• You satisfy the needs of both worlds: the bored people and the value seekers. The bored people will read your article and maybe subscribe to your stuff (if you exposed them to a well-placed call to action). The value seekers will follow all your links and fall in love with the depth and the breadth of your thoughts. These guys might continue to request a demo of your product or instantly buy your inexpensive infoproduct. Giving value = payday.

So for example, this is how this approach would work for me:

• I write blog posts on a certain topic - planned or ad hoc.
• After a while, I realize that I’ve written a whole series on a specific, narrow topic. For example, I love writing about creating sales proposal documents (subscribe to my Simpfinity newsletter to read exclusive articles on that topic). I could easily create a list article titled “My best and proven rules for laying out an effective sales proposal document” and link to previous blog posts where I talked about sales quote layout rules.
• I keep writing blog post on any other topic of my choosing. As soon as I have three or more older blog posts on a specific and narrow topic, I can create a new article which is a collection of them. 

Stay specific and narrow

Do you wonder why I emphasized the words specific and narrow twice? One of the reason most list articles are of low quality is that they deal with broad, bigger than life topics which should fit in a book and not in a blog post. For example, “My best rules for writing sales proposals” would be too broad a topic; “My best rules for laying out sales proposals for selling web development services” is just specific and narrow enough (I’ve narrowed it down to layouts of a sales proposal document and to web development services, which is a specific industry). By being specific and narrow in my writing, I successfully laser-target my intended audience (professionals selling web development services who are also concerned about the effectiveness of their sales document layouts). 

(Dis)agree?

I welcome your thoughts and comments to this on Google+.

It's a geek marketer's favorite buzzword, more popular than SEO or social media (or so it seems to me; maybe I live in a content marketing reality distortion field).

Everybody is telling you - no, yelling at you! - to create "valuable content" and to promote it.

But rarely do you see specific examples of a valuable content piece, so I'm gonna give you a real one.

A lesson in content marketing from a live Google+ Hangout On Air (HOA)

Yesterday was the first time ever that I tuned into a Hangout On Air. If you've never participated in one, it's a live stream on Google+ and Youtube, used as a cooler alternative to webinars. A person organizes a hangout and invites smart people or celebrities to talk about an interesting subject.

Last night's HOA was organized by my good Google+ friend, +Martin Shervington. His guest was +Guy Kawasaki who spoke on the subject of self-publishing a book.

Guy is an entertaining fellow and as soon as he started cracking jokes and tweetable quotes, the nerd in me opened a text editor and started writing interesting quotes, while Guy was inventing them on the fly. After the HOA was over in an hour or so, I looked at my file and thought to myself: My my, that's a nice collection of informative, educational and entertaining quotes! I should totally publish them!

I knew I would never publish this stuff if I saved the quotes in a file and waited until tomorrow. I would probably just forget about it until it was too late or uninteresting.

So an hour after the hangout was finished, I published this original Google+ post with the link to a Youtube recording of the hangout.

People loved and shared my unique Guy Kawasaki quotes collection

And now, the lesson what "valuable content" really is.

Guy shared the link at the moment the hangout was going live. I shared the link after the hangout was over, and I attached the quotes collection in the form of a short, original Google+ post. Nothing fancy, nothing new on Google+.

Guy's link was reshared 15 times, mine was reshared 20 times. The image above is the snapshot from Google+ Ripples, a nice tool that shows you how many times a URL has been shared, and which Google+ user "seeded" the most shares.

Of course, at this moment Guy has almost 4 million followers, and I have less than 9000 followers.

Guy Kawasaki and me, we both shared the same link on Google+ (the link to a recorded hangout on Youtube). I'm not at all saying that what Guy posted wasn't valuable. I'm saying that my link + original content performed relatively much better share-wise, if you compare the strength of my network to Guy's demigoddery on Google+ (demigoddery? is that even a word? I'm so totally allowed to invent one new English word per post).

What was so "valuable" about my content, exactly?

My post was timely and fresh. I was completing it while the live event was taking place. I published it immediately after the event, while people were still thinking about it.

Everybody loves good quotes. And Guy's quotes are funny and smart. Some of them were even completely off-topic, like the quote about being lucky to have a heart attack in Canada, where it's cheaper to take care of it medically :) So, publishing the type of content everybody loves to read helps volumes.

My post was short and snackable. Just right for Google+. I've been on Google+ from day one, and I've learned what kind of content people love to consume and share. So, knowing the rules of the network and playing by them makes your content shareable, and you can't have content marketing without shareable content!

Nobody else thought of posting a quotes collection. I could have posted a review or a summary of the hangout, but these quotes - a product of my unique scribomania - were already sitting idly in my editor! I knew Guy would not publish a collection of his own quotes (because that would be lame), so I jumped at the opportunity. Originality is king, and timely, short and appropriate originality is queen!

It was in alignment with the type of content I usually post on Google+. People who read my stuff know I share links and publish my own original short-form and long-form posts about writing, publishing and entrepreneurship. If I had been posting nothing but animated cat gifs for the last two years, people would uncircle me (sadly, there was no mention of cats in Guy's quotes).

I did not publish my Guy Kawasaki quotes post because I wanted to "do content marketing". I published it because I loved the hangout, I'm a big fan of Guy Kawasaki, and because I love promoting good stuff from people I like (in this case, Guy's new book "APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur" and the event itself from my friend Martin Shervington). So there you have it, the final lesson about where valuable content comes from: from your inner passion.

Because it will be.

That thing you're afraid of: starting your own business, changing jobs, starting work on a new product... The truth is, it's harder that you can imagine it.  If you knew exactly how hard it will be and how many problems you'd encounter on your journey, you'd probably give up because you're not ready yet for all of it.

But that's not the reason not to just... start. Hardships are like ocean waves: you will learn to surf the waves as they rush at you, wave by wave. Not all of them will rush at you at once: that's how you survive. That's how everybody who created anything meaningful survived.

Don't fear the killer tsunamis, for they are rare, and with time you'll develop an early warning system for them. While you're still inexperienced in the beginning, avoid known tsunami regions and you'll do fine.

Calm seas are rare too, so learn to recognize them and enjoy them as they happen.

Expect and accept the waves. Every wave is an opportunity for you to prove just how much you want to succeed with this thing.

Just start. It will be hard. You don't want to know just yet how hard it will be. You fear the hardships today because you know you're not capable of overcoming them. But your future self is, because your future self is stronger.

You stronger future self is waiting for you to embark on a journey today. Just start.

***

Creative Commons image credit: AliHanlon

Recently I have become fascinated with what the future will bring. After reading Abundance, I have learned about what is possible in the next 25 years. I want to be a part of the movement which will make this abundance happen.

The abundance line

There’s a line above which the abundance starts.

Above it, humans have the time to collaborate and work creatively towards solving humanity’s problems.

Below it, humans have the time only to survive. This is no way for an intelligent species to live.

Where’s the problem, exactly?

I have identified that our most important problem is the need to work to just barely survive.

Nobody should spend their life to just barely survive. This is my deeply held belief.

We have to work 40 hours a week, 40-50 years a lifetime to get:

• water
• food
• shelter
• clothing
• medicine
• education

All of the above needs to be free or nearly free. This world is possible. It may sound unbelievable to some people, but after reading www.abundancethebook.com, I believe.

I have learned that the quickest path towards the abundance is to generating squanderable amounts of energy. When we have achieved that level, we will have developed technologies to create water, food, shelter, clothing and medicine almost out of thin air, almost for free. We’re now in the process of experimenting with energy.

We’ve already achieved the level at which we now have squanderable amount of nearly free education. It is called the internet. My internet costs $41 month. If all other bullet points I mentioned cost $41, I could survive with only $246 a month. Average net salary in my country today is exactly $899 a month (data for May 2012). This means that on average, people in my country would only have to work 6 days a month to have their basic needs met. The other 15 days a month we’d spend as we saw fit.

Today we work 21 days a month. Yes, we do afford to buy a little bit more than just basic needs. We buy smartphones, tablets, computers, vacations and school books for our children.

But the abundant world of the future I’m talking about is even cheaper to afford than a whopping $246 a month.

Being part of the solution

Before each and every one of use can start solving the world’s problems, we must first stop being the problem ourselves.

I can’t participate in solving world hunger if I have to work 40 hours a week just to feed and dress myself.

I personally have to achieve freedom first.

How do I achieve personal freedom

Right now, my streams of passive recurring income cover only a part of my expenses. I co-run a business and my business generates passive recurring income, but not enough. And I have to show up for work every day, 40 days a week just like everybody else, to maintain the current level of my business. I plan to change that in the future, but let’s go back to what a person without an existing business can do.

I personally need multiple streams of passive income which demand only the smallest possible fraction of my time to maintain them.

So phase one of being able to change the world, is to create anything that brings in the minimum amount a month just to survive, recurringly, passively.

When I have achieved that, I can stop “working” and I can start creating. Humanity has no use of me if I’m not creating. Humanity wants me to achieve my personal freedom, no: humanity demands I do it. There’s the purpose of life somewhere in the previous sentence.

I have identified a digital product business to be the solution to my personal freedom. All I need to do, is create a profitable one or more digital products which bring in a certain amount of money monthly. Currently I’m publishing an exclusive-to-Google+ post series describing the necessary features of my perfect digital business. Visit my Google+ About for links to the published posts.

After I have achieved passive recurring income, I can start participating in solving the world’s problems.

How do we change the world then, again?

Each and every living human changes the world by first achieving personal freedom from mandatory work for survival.

We’re not doing this to squander our life watching TV and partying all night. People are not a lazy species. People are a curious, imaginative, creative, fun and intelligent species. Suspend your disbelief for a second and kindly accept the idea that our current 40-hour work-sleep-work regime is killing everything creative in us. This regime is creating an illusion of people being lazy. We’re not lazy. We’re just exhausted.

Most people do nothing creative at work and that’s the main problem. I am not against work, I am against meaningless work. I plan to work till the day I drop dead. I don’t need to retire, ever. Why would I want to retire from anything I am passionate about?

Imagine if you didn’t have to work a day in your life any more, while having all your basic needs met. Do you honestly see yourself watching TV till the day you die? You’d be bored after a month and your creative powers would kick in naturally.

You could be the next hotshot entrepreneur. You could be the next Elon Musk. Hell, I could be the next Elon Musk!

But not before I’m free from things Elon Musk was free from before he sent a rocket into space. I cannot simultaneously work on rocket science and thinking about where my next meal would come from.

So, first we need free time. We will later decide what do we want to dedicate it to. There’s no shortage of problems to work on.

Me personally, I want to dedicate my free time to participating in making abundance for all humans possible. Abundance will lead to people devoting their lives to achieving longevity. We will soon upgrade ourselves to Human 2.0 - technologically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. We will have matured into a civilization able to conquer the Milky Way.

Creative Commons image credit: pasotraspaso

"I'm making a ton of money running an affiliate website in English. Let's make a similar website, but for Croatian audience!"

I said yes. We were both fools. But we were 20 years old then.

It took me years to realize what a small town our country is. I'm writing this because I don't want other young people to make the same mistake I did, and in this post I've prepared the simplest math to prove my point.

I give you two words:

Pas
Dog

"Pas" means "dog" in Croatian. It took me the same amount of time to write down "pas", as it took me to write down "dog". It takes me twice the time to write "pas" and "dog" one after another. This simplified math becomes life-changing in the next few sentences.

The first word "pas" is understood by 22.3 million people in 7 South European countries (Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Macedonia, Kosovo and Montenegro). That's a whopping 0.003% of the world population.

The second word "dog" is understood by 1.5 billion people, spread across almost every country of the world. That's almost 22% of all the people living on Earth right now.

It's astonishing how a simple choice of letter combination magnifies my potential by the factor of 67. But, what's in a number, right?

Wrong.

For every 1 person that reads my blog post in the obscure language of my small country, there are 67 more people that can be touched, inspired and influenced by my ideas - but aren't, if I don't write in English.

For every like, follow, plus, comment and share I get from my fellow countrymen and neighbors who understand me, I can get 67 likes, follows, plusses, comments and shares from people all around the world - but I won't, if I don't write in English.

For every dollar I could make on the market of 22.3 million people in 7 countries, I could make 67 dollars selling to my fans everywhere in the world - but I won't, if my product is not offered to English-speaking people.

For every friend I make in Smallville, there are 67 new friends eager to meet me in Metropolis - but if I greet them with "Bok!" instead of with "Hi!", we can never be friends.

Oh, that reminds me!

Yesterday on Google+, I became friends with a guy from Greenland. 

Greenland! Do you know anyone from Greenland? Well, I do! I now have a friend there! I could put that under "Bragging rights" in my Google+ profile.

Greenland might be the largest island in the world, but only 56.000 people live there - and they natively speak Greenlandic and Danish. My new friend spoke English when he talked to me, and that's why we were able to connect. Good for him! 

Because, if he ever created a product or a service that was easily offered and distributed over the Internet, I could become his customer. If he chose to limit himself to 56.000 people speaking Greenlandic or Danish on a big wonderful icy world called Greenland, his chances of me ever buying anything from him come close to zero.

I have online friends in Finland, South Africa, United States, Netherlands, Italy... As well as in Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia. The neighborhood doesn't go anywhere if I choose so, and guess what? When us neighbors meet online publicly, we all speak English. This way, others can join our conversation - and they do.

One day, some of my online friends might buy stuff I make. One day, I might buy some of the stuff they make. For that reason, and because my life is too short for translation, I only create in English.

That is, until the Chinese decide to finally conquer the Internet.

***

Image: Touching Rosetta, credit to Namlhots

Yesterday I've read Guy Kawasaki's newest ebook "What The Plus!" in one sitting. The book is the missing manual about succeeding on Google+by attracting as many followers as you can.

I recommend that you read the book (it's only $2.99) and test everything he says. It works. I may not have 1.7M Google+ followers like Guy does, but everything he wrote worked for my Google+ presence as well.

This blog post is not a book review

Here I personally want to explore and write down things I think Guy Kawasaki does to spread the word about his books.  Here's one book review by David Deal that Guy Kawasaki shared on Google+. 

I'm writing this because I want to remember the following book marketing lessons from one of the bestselling authors in the world.

Give away book copies for FREE

Every now and then, Guy gives away hundreds of PDF copies for free.

Guy said in a recent hangout that the more he gives away, the more he sells. He has his own theories why this is so, and one of mine is that people who got the book for free do more than an average user to share the book. I got the book for free, liked it and felt like sharing. Also, knowing that Guy reads and responds to almost every mention of his name on Google+, this blog post I'm writing is a nice way to connect with a person I admire, and maybe get on his radar (because I will be mentioning this blog post on Google+).

Don't work alone on your book

Before Guy finished the book, he sent it to 200+ volunteers / beta testers. They checked the book for typos, factual and logical errors. Kawasaki basically crowdsourced bug fixing and attributed beta tester by mentioning people's names in the book.

I've seen other successful authors do this, and there's a good reason why this is good marketing. 

First, other people lend you an objective pair of eyes and the book comes out better because of it. A good book gets more stars on Amazon.com.

Second, other people do your work for free. Time is money, and if I was Guy Kawasaki, I'd sure as hell tap the potential of 1.7M followers to do nice things for me. Guy shares so much quality information online that many people like to return the favor.

At last, but not the least: when Guy frakkin' Kawasaki mentions your name in his book, you're bound to tell everyone you know on Google+, Twitter and Facebook about it. Free, priceless word of mouth for Guy that helps his SEO as well, and powerful social proof for you.

Use other people's art and credit them

Guy used other people's photos wherever he could, and properly credited authors with links to their websites. This makes sense, especially for Guy - a photography afficionado. Why include your own photos if you can get a mention or a link to the book from one more artist, who you share a passion with?

Share, share, overshare - and be helpful

Guy's ebook is full of links to posts, books and other people. He shares lavishly. This makes the book a helpful resource, even to Google+ 1st generation users like me. I've visited almost every link Guy mentioned in the book and circled a few new interesting people.

People whose links and resources ended up in Kawasaki's book will most likely talk about it, buy a copy and write a review of the book on their blog. 

So, why work in a vacuum, when you can share your knowledge and attribute people on every occasion you get?

Help people blog about your book by making the book awesome

Guy makes the book visually attractive by including relevant quotes at the beginning of every chapter and breaking long pieces of text with images and screen captures. 

Also, a healthy dose of humor is present in every chapter. Just enough to turn yet another page.

An attractive book helps people finish reading the book, and people who finish reading the book will blog about the book. See what I'm doing here? Blogging about a book. If I read half through it, I would be ashamed to blog about a book I didn't finish reading.

Ask an influential friend to write a chapter of your book

Guy asked a few people to write chapters of his book:

1. A popular photographer Dave Powell wrote a chapter about sharing photos.
2. Peg Fitzpatrick, director of marketing and social media manager, talked about how to succeed on Google+ if you're not famous like Guy is.
3. Lynette Young, creator and curator of Women of Google+, explained how to succeed as a woman on Google+.

This is an awesome concept: the author does not pretend to be an expert in everything, and this very act makes him even more influential. Guy invites another expert to speak about his or her field of expertise, at the same time promoting those people, and giving them the chance to promote Guy's book. At the moment, 2 of 3 of those people have a direct link to Kawasaki's book in their About sections on Google+. 

Three other people wrote 3 out of 14 chapters of the book. Again - don't work in the vacuum, promote other people's work, help them and they will in return help you. Guy's book "What the Plus?" is all about promoting other people on Google+ and collecting influence points for this free promotion.

Table of contents of the book "What The Plus!"

Here's what you can read about in the book:

Chapter 1: Why I Love Google+ 

Chapter 2: How to Get Started 

Chapter 3: How to Master Circles and Streams 

Chapter 4: How to Make an Enchanting Profile 

Chapter 4+: How to Achieve Trustworthiness 

Chapter 5: How to Comment

Chapter 6: How to Share Posts 

Chapter 6+: How to Optimize for Social Search 

Chapter 7: How to Share Photos 

Chapter 8: How to Respond to Comments 

Chapter 9: How to Hang Out 

Chapter 10: How to Get More Followers

 Chapter 10+: How to Be a Little Fish in a Big Pond 

Chapter 11: How to Deal with Bozos 

Chapter 11+: How to Thrive in the All-Boys’ Club 

Chapter 12: How to Avoid Cluelessness 

Chapter 13: How to Get Google+ Help 

Chapter 14: How to Master Google+ 

Go get "What The Plus!" or read more on Mashable about how Guy launches books using social media.