hard vs valuable

Common pitfall for writers:

Conflating effort with quality.

Just because you put more time into something doesn’t make it better.

Something that billionaire and member of the PayPal Mafia Peter Thiel agrees with.

You see, he was on Rick Rubin’s podcast recently…

Where he made a similar point:

Apparently, he and one of his PayPal co-founders would often have the same argument about where to take the company next…

His co-founder was always pushing to do things that were HARD…

… meanwhile, Peter was pushing to do things that were valuable.

And those two things don’t always overlap.

In fact, they rarely do.

He used the example of winning a gold medal in the Olympics:

Hard? You betcha.

Valuable? Not unless you come from a country like the Philippines.

Point is:

Difficulty isn’t a useful heuristic when it comes to choosing your next move.

And the same thing applies to your newsletter:

Writing long emails packed with value may be “harder” than writing short story-driven emails…

(they certainly take more time and effort)

But that doesn’t mean they’re more valuable to your business.

Because what’s valuable to your business is:

Converting subscribers into buyers.

This is how you fund your growth, expand your offerings, and build a sustainable enterprise.

It’s how you achieve Newsletter Freedom.

And I see so many online experts these days racing to do the hard thing by giving away more and more of their knowledge for free as if they’re running a non-profit…

Without realizing they’ve lost sight of what’s valuable.

Don’t be one of them.

Jim Hamilton