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The Word, The Work and The Truth of The Matter

I had a prominent writer’s bump on the middle finger of my right hand from as early as I could remember. I never really thought about it until I was in my twenties and noticed it had all but disappeared. I wasn’t spending my days taking notes by hand anymore and any writing I now did was on a computer.

In December 2013 the bump came back. I had just launched my first print newsletter and thought it would be a fun idea to do a handwritten edition for the New Year. So I spent weeks of evenings and weekends handwriting 50 Moleskine postal notebooks. I’d seen the notebooks in a museum shop a few months earlier and picked a couple up. I didn’t know what I planned to do but something about them spoke to me.

I had been exploring the idea of self-disclosure and more intimate communication with my audience. That’s one of the reasons I started the print newsletter – it was a more private form of communication so I could say things there I’d never publish online. One day it hit me that a handwritten essay sent in the form of a post-able notebook would be the perfect continuation of that idea.

The advice all around me at that time was to leverage everything you do to produce the maximum amount of content with minimum effort. The standard thing to do then was start an ‘inner circle’ à la Dan Kennedy where you charge $97 a month and put out a 12-page newsletter with lots of how-to and technical marketing info, an audio recording, and a member’s call each month. I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Just the thought of the monthly treadmill of producing all that content was a major turn off. That model never really made sense to me.

I didn’t know what I wanted to do exactly but I knew I wanted it to be unique to me, and I didn’t want to copy what I saw others doing just for the sake of it. So I started a simple £7 a month 4-page newsletter as a testing ground. It was my attempt to feel out what the next step might be.

I knew doing a handwritten edition of my newsletter made no business sense and could only ever be a one-off but I was absolutely certain I wanted to do it. I was excited by the idea and knew it would be worth it somehow.

So while most of my contemporaries were figuring out how to maximise their productivity I spent almost a full working week’s worth of hours handwriting these notebooks.

Do I Even Care About Business?

18 months later I was on a walk-and-talk break with a friend at a mastermind meeting in the States. He was in the mastermind group as the guest of another business owner. He was an artist but had spent the last couple of years learning about business and now he was trying to decide if he wanted to go all in and start an enterprise of his own. He was running his options past me and I had to be honest with him about my feelings on the matter. Starting your own business is not always what it’s cracked up to be. “I’m not sure I’m even interested in business any more,” I told him.

It would be another year or more before I started to really understand my work and my place within the business world.

My journey up until that point had been pretty typical. As I embarked on my career as an entrepreneur I read everything you’re supposed to read – Tony Robbins’ Awaken The Giant Within, Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, Richard Branson’s autobiography. Then I got into more specifics – Zig Ziglar on sales, Dan Kennedy on direct-response marketing, Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth on entrepreneurial management.

It was a bottomless pit of learning. I constantly felt like I needed to know more. I was on all the email lists and spent my evenings on webinars and taking online courses. A pattern began to emerge. I’d get excited about a particular model, formula or system and think, “This is it! I’ve finally cracked it.” I’d have new-found purpose and direction in my business for a few weeks or months but then I’d abandon the system, fail to make it work or question my direction anew.

And back I’d go to my bottomless pit of learning. I’d discover another teacher, course or school of thought and the cycle would begin again. Slowly and painfully, this is how I edged forward for years.

I started getting really frustrated when another pattern emerged. There were certain people I knew who seemed to have a very different journey. People like my friend, whom I’ll call Steve. Steve got interested in marketing years after me and I was more than happy to show him the ropes and give him some pointers to get started. For reasons I couldn’t understand, Steve didn’t get stuck in the bottomless pit of learning I was in. He learned one or two models and strategies and then without questioning it just went to work applying it. And within a year he had surpassed me on all metrics.

I was kinda pissed off about it. On paper I knew a lot, I understood much about how to build and run a successful enterprise – more than a lot of people who’d gotten much further than I had. But I just couldn’t turn it into meaningful progress or achievement. And all the while I’m beginning to realise that maybe I’m not actually interested in business at all. Which was confusing as hell because I’d long thought of myself as an entrepreneur.

The Two Types of Entrepreneur

All these years I’d lumped myself and all the other business owners and marketing types I knew into one big category of ‘entrepreneur’. But eventually it became clear to me that there are actually two different types of people within that group.

The first is the true businessperson – they’re fascinated by the game of business and their passion is for building businesses. The second type of person is the artist. They may never have thought of themselves that way but still, they are an artist; they just happen to operate in the business world. They may build a very successful business but their real passion is the substance of the work they do rather than the game of business.

The problem I was having – the same one that plays out for many of my clients – is that I was an artist but I was following instructions designed for a businessperson, like my friend Steve. And it just doesn’t work like that. The businessperson is focused on building businesses. The artist is focused on building a body of work. The paths to sane and sustainable progress and achievement for each are VERY different.

If you find it difficult to follow someone else’s system and you lean more towards creating your own curriculum rather than following an existing one then you’re probably an artist rather than a businessperson. And if you measure yourself against businessperson types then you’ll more than likely feel frustrated, disillusioned and confused. I have good news for you: you’re not doing it wrong. You’re simply playing a different game than they are.

The Pay Off

It was December 2013 when I mailed one of those handwritten notebooks to Canada to Ray Khan, a customer I’d never met before. In March 2016, Ray posted this in my private Facebook group:

I can’t say if those postal notebooks were ever directly responsible for any sizeable chunk of revenue but the fact that Ray kept his in a drawer by his bedside and was still carrying it around with him over two years later was enough for me. It’s a piece of my body of work I’m still proud of.

It’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve accepted I’m an artist rather than a businessperson. And leaning into it has been the best decision I’ve ever made. The most satisfying, productive and ultimately lucrative things I’ve done in my business were ideas I can now identify as coming from my ‘artistic self’ rather than my ‘business head’. In fact many of them are, on the face of it, kind of ridiculous ideas that don’t appear to make business sense. But they do make artistic sense. And that’s what pays off in the long run when you’re running an artistic-type enterprise.

How To Run Your Business Like An Artist

Another pattern I’ve noticed in the past year or so is that virtually every client I speak to is an artist-type entrepreneur, whether they realise it or not. And many of them are struggling to figure out how to do their work and run their business in a way that makes sense for them and makes money at the same time.

So this November I’m going to lead you on a 30 day immersion into taking an artistic approach to your work and how to run your business as an artist. And what better way to do it than in the form of a one-off, never-to-be-repeated project…

I’ve done a 4 week writing series at least once a year for the past few years. Always as a series of emails. This November I’m doing something similar but different. I’m doing a 30 day letter series. I’m taking things offline for many reasons. If you decide to participate you’ll get a box in the post before the beginning of November. Inside that box will be 30 sealed letters. Every day in the month of November you’ll have a daily ritual where you open your letter from me for that day.

When I’ve done online writing series in the past they’re mostly improvised and I figure it out as I go along. This one is different. It involves a lot more advance planning and is designed to take you on a journey of transformation. Over the course of the 30 days we’ll explore a whole new paradigm for approaching your work, planning your strategy and clarifying your goals. My hope is it will help you find your groove in this world where you’ve never quite felt like you fit.

Some days the letter will task you with specific, short exercises to do. Other days the letter will reveal specific strategies I use to run my business like an artist. Throughout the month I’ll also host conversations related to the themes of the letters in my private members Facebook group. You can ask me questions, you can share your thoughts and learnings, and hear others share their perspective and specific situations too. This Be Yourself Community Facebook group is a place where artist-type entrepreneurs are already gathered – you’ll fit right in.

I’m calling this letter set The Word, The Work and The Truth of The Matter. As well as being a bit of a collector’s item it’s a unique format that allows me to share my latest insights and curate an experience for you. These days I consciously run my business as an artist, which means I ask very different questions of myself than most business owners and marketers. And I have some clear rules and boundaries that help me run my business in a way that makes sense for the progression of my work and curiosities but also works financially and from a business point of view. We’ll explore all of this and more together this November.

The Word, The Work and The Truth of the Matter is £174 (including VAT and shipping) if you’re in the UK, or $199 (including shipping) for the US, Europe and the rest of the world. It includes an annual membership of the Be Yourself Community so we can have discussions in the private Facebook group as we go through the series together.

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