๐I nearly screwed up my whole creator business...
Published about 1 year agoย โขย 5 min read
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Hey Reader!
Welcome back.
Last week was a crazy one for me. I got overloaded with client work.
(Mainly because I was on holiday the week before, so everything was left till the last minute)
I was up until 2 am writing client posts, and now I'm drowned in another (way bigger) project due next week.
So this had me thinking in my head:
'This is not what a successful creator business looks like.'
As a result, I'm switching up a lot in my systems and schedules, so I want to share some thoughts on this.
But most importantly, how you can do the same to optimise your business model for maximum output.
Today at a glance:
Long form piece: How the bottleneck analysis is going to transform my business.
1 quote: Some David Ogilvy copywriting mastery.
1 piece of content to consume: A short essay about writing how you talk
1 writing tip: The writing prompts to do your own bottleneck analysis.
(And a quick heads-up, there's a Google doc link at the end with the journal prompts I use, for you to do your own bottleneck analysis)
Read time: 4 minutes.
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I started journalling in 2019.
It was the centre-stone of my life for two years.
I was a full-on bullet journal nerd.
Every system imaginable you could imagine, I had it decked out.
My weekly set up for January 2021. To-do lists, reviews, and overarching goals.
Habit trackers, weekly review systems, monthly progress monitors, you name it, I did it (obsessively).
And at one point, I stopped it all.
I even stopped the actual journalling aspect, which I religiously did every single night before bed.
Why?
Not sure. I guess I stopped becoming so much of an optimisation bro once I actually started getting busy with real-life business.
Hot take: Optimisation bros don't really get a lot of shiz done.
But recently, I found myself drifting back to the written journal.
The reason: Some things had to change in the way I organise my freelance business. So this takes me onto a very specific type of analysis I will be doing to make these changes..
The Bottleneck Analysis
There's a famous mathematician called Richard Hamming.
He was known to sit down with experts from other fields, and get straight to the point, asking two questions:
What's the most important problem in your field?
Why aren't you working on them?
I got this whole idea from Dickie Bush, who got this from a famous book.
Simply put; to become the best versions of ourselves, in life and in business, we need to confront the brutal facts of why something isn't working and attack it.
So that's what the bottleneck analysis is. A tool to analyse things that aren't working, so we can further improve them and work on our weak points.
So here is how I adapted this idea and came up with certain questions to ask myself, such as:
What's the biggest drain of your time currently? And why aren't you working on it to become even more efficient?
What's the one main constraint stopping my business from growing? And why am I not working on this one thing?
What is the biggest reason for my procrastination and lack of routine/schedule? And what can I do to become a productive, time-efficient machine?
If I could scale one aspect of my business that would carry over into everything else, what is it? And why am I not focusing more of my time there?
What is the biggest self-limiting belief keeping me from doing what the successful people around me are doing? And what's stopping you from taking the first step towards it?
What's the most important thing you can do to free up more of your time, so you spend less time working, and more time getting actual results? And why are you not focusing most of your time on optimising this?
As you see, there is a pattern in these questions.
As I scale up, make more money, and become more busy, this is becoming more important than ever.
My income and growth are directly related to how efficient I am, and how streamlined my systems are.
So, ask yourself the same questions, with the same framework.
1. What's the most important thing holding me back from achieving X?
2. Why aren't I working on that?
PS scroll to the last section for a link to these prompts on a Google doc, so you can go through the journalling exercise yourself. Set a 30-minute timer, and attack the questions.
I recently came across a collection of essays by Paul Graham. For those who don't know, he's a startup connoisseur, founding the startup accelerator Y-Combinator.
He's also famous for his short-form essays. He's quite similar to the Naval-type modern-age philosopher.
I downloaded the full collection of his essays onto my phone.
The test of a good writer is to see if their words read like they talk.
"If you simply manage to write in spoken language, you'll be ahead of 95% of writers. And it's so easy to do: just don't let a sentence through unless it's the way you'd say it to a friend." - Paul Graham
Some cool essays I'm reading next:
How To DO What You Love
How to Start a Startup
Six Principles For Making New Things
How to Write Usefully
Life is short
1 quote to ponder on:
Legendary copywriter and advertising tycoon David Ogilvy on writing headlines:
"If you want to write headlines that sell, you'd better study." - David Ogilvy.
Study what works. And replicate it. Simple as that.
The writing prompts to do your own bottleneck analysis
I've put the prompts in a neat Google doc for you to easily fill out and have a good (but hard) brutally honest journalling session.
Sit down, and close all of your opened tabs. Set a 30-minute timer. Put on some Hans Zimmer if you must, and get upfront with yourself with the questions.
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