In October, I didn’t have a single paid order.
I wasn’t really promoting anymore. I already knew I was going to be making a shift. I just didn’t quite know what that shift was.
Now I know the first part of it. I’m retiring every product I’ve built.
The advice I followed
You’ve heard this one. Take what you already do, turn it into a product, and let it sell while you get on with your life. Evergreen. Passive income.
That’s what I did when I was moving from Geek in Your Pocket to the Quiet Rebel™. I was brainstorming my way through the transition, and I built products out of the things I was doing in my business. Tech. Decisions. Running a business without hiring anyone. It all made sense, because I knew how to do those things and I could write them down.
Here’s what I came to discover. Just because it’s something I do in my business doesn’t mean it’s something I’m excited to share.
The advice asks what you know. It never asks whether you want to keep talking about it.
Letting go was the easy part
I sat down to work out which one would be hardest to let go of, and there wasn’t one.
They were all easy. I hadn’t had them up for very long, and they didn’t really excite me anyway. That told me as much as October did.
What evergreen asked me to give up
Most of these products were evergreen, and because they were, I kept my distance. I didn’t want to give too much support. No answering questions, no hosting calls. That’s how you keep an evergreen product running without it running you, and on paper it made sense.
But at this point in my business and my life, I want to do things I feel I can contribute to. I want to be helpful to the people who are participating. A product designed so that I stay out of the way can’t do that.
So what I need is a hybrid. Some of it runs on its own, and some of it has me in it, alongside the people who said yes.
What this makes room for
I need to make money in a way that feeds my creativity. As cheesy as that sounds, it’s true.
That means more writing like this. It means the poetry course I signed up for, and the kind of work I’d do even if nobody asked me to.
It also means something new. I’ll be offering it at Black Friday, and it’s the right combination of all of this: something I’m excited to share, with room for me to be in it with you. I’ll tell you more soon.
If you’ve got something on your shelf
You might have a product, a service or a whole line of work that came from what you could do rather than what you wanted to do. Plenty of us do. We were told that’s how it works.
Ask yourself whether you’d still be glad to talk about it a year from now. If the answer is no, you’re allowed to put it down, even if it’s good, and even if you worked hard on it.
If you’re not sure where your own business stands, the Quiet Compass is a good place to start. It’s five questions and about two minutes, and it shows you the one thing to focus on next.
Life first. Work optional.It’s your business, your energy and your rules.