I've been trying to record these voice notes every Friday for you, but I didn't publish one of these on Friday, which is symptomatic of a larger overall challenge for me as a new father, which is keeping up with the publishing pace that I have set for myself. And I shared this on LinkedIn and Blue Sky. Yes, I'm on Blue Sky now. You can find me at j.blog.
But I got some really kind messages, people being very supportive and a lot of people saying, hey, why not do less and better? Or why not just, you know, publish less generally? Do you need to keep up with the pace? And the thing is, I've done a good job in the business of setting it up so that the more I publish, the more attention comes into the business, flows through the system, and turns into revenue. The more I publish, the more I earn. So if I publish less...
then revenue has a noticeable impact. That's why I try to keep up with it. Now, of course, I'm always trying to improve the system so that it's more efficient and I could make... system improvements so that I can publish less and earn as much as I'm doing right now. But even in that world, keeping up with the current publishing pace would then mean I earn more as well. So it's a tricky thing. The biggest thing to work on is just...
mentally giving myself some more grace. But the reason I want to record this voice memo in particular, I was listening to a recent episode of the Tim Ferriss show. He interviewed Derek Sivers, who's also been on Creator Science. And Derek talked about this blog post he read. So he was telling the secondhand story. I'm now telling the thirdhand story. But he read a blog post that broke down the difference between the simple and easy, complex and hard. In this definition.
Easy and hard are subjective. Easy meaning close at hand. You're actually well-equipped and skilled enough to do this. You've done it before. Hard is it's not well at hand. You have to learn. It's not something you are already skilled at. Simple and complex are more objective measures, though, because the root of the word, the etymology of the word...
has to do with connection points. Something that is simple does not have any dependencies. And something that is complex does have dependencies. And if you apply that to your business, if I apply it to my business,
I have a very complex business right now in that a lot of things are interconnected. There are a lot of dependencies, which brings some mental overhead and stress. So one of the things that I'm looking to do... over the next year in 2025 is reduce complexity in the business, reduce some of these dependencies and interconnected points to make the business as a whole simpler.
One of the ways I'm doing that is I'm looking at my KPI tracker for the year and saying, OK, if I looked at the activities of the business in terms of effort and outcome. What can I remove or at least reduce? Right now, one of the highest effort parts of the business is sponsorship operations, but it has a big outcome as well. So your immediate thought is, am I willing to take that to zero to reduce complexity? But I think what I could actually do is say, what is the 80-20?
of sponsorship in my business can i still get 80 of the outcome of sponsorship by doing only 20 of the activities that might look like reducing sponsorship on
The podcast is actually the more operationally intense bit of sponsorship for me. And it drives the lowest amount of revenue in terms of channel besides newsletter and YouTube. My newsletter and YouTube drive... essentially an equivalent amount of sponsorship revenue but um as a whole podcasting represents uh less than 20 percent of sponsor revenue
So I'm looking at things like that to say, what can I do to reduce complexity in the business to give myself some space and joy back so that I can not only have the time to produce content to the degree that I want, but also the... the energy space and the emotional space that I have. When things are really tight, when I find time to create content, if I'm not in the headspace I would ideally like to be, that's also not.
good you know for me for the business as a whole so one of the things i'm doing over the next month and a half as we have holidays here is thinking about the year ahead how do i reduce complexity make things more simple, remove dependencies, and be willing to leave revenue on the table where the cost of earning that revenue is not as valuable.
as the time that I might get back by not taking in that revenue. Maybe that inspires you to do the same as well. I think we could all better pursue elegance and simplicity in the way we run our businesses. And I think this is a good time of year to consider that.
I hope you had a great weekend. This Thursday, or sorry, this Friday is Black Friday, and I am running a Black Friday promotion, but it's only available if you're on my email list. So go to creatorscience.com, and you will get your unique promotion on Friday. consider no pressure or expectation. I know the holidays are tough for some, so no pressure whatsoever. I hope you have a great Thanksgiving and I'll talk to you next week.