Will they like it?

It’s hit me. The fear that they (you) won’t like what I’m writing.

You would have thought by now what I wouldn't have those fears any more. I’ve written a lot, and my pride and joy are the articles on Medium that are performing well. One of my top articles has had over 17,000 views, and another was good enough for Medium to do an audio version.

And yet the fear remains

It feels a bit like when I published my first articles on Medium. There was the hope of an audience building up and liking what I’d written, and I spent way too much time checking the stats on each story as it was published. At least now I’ve learnt that I need to publish and forget the stats - they would happen no matter how many times I checked the numbers.

So how do I deal wth this fear?

I know that this 100 day writing challenge is firstly for me. I had gotten into a rut and a way of thinking that stopped me from writing. So in some ways it doesn’t matter how many people actually read what I write, this is for me to get over that block.

And then there’s the second part.

There’s one thing that I’ve always told myself, and I hang on to it regardless of how many people read my stories:

If I can help even one person, it’s been worth it.

All of us have something unique to offer the world. And there’s someone out there who’s going to read a story and get value from it. Even if it’s just a little insight into how to do something, or deal with something—if I can help that one person, all this effort has been worth it.

Do we really want to help so badly?

My writing is in many ways self-serving. I write so that I get readers, some of whom will click through to my website, download a lead magnet, and some of those will eventually become clients in some form.

But yes, there is a desire to help.

In my case, it’s born from the frustrations that I went through building my own business. In retrospect there was way too much struggle, too many promises from the flavour of the month and too many disconnected and disjointed pieces of advice that slowed me down.

I didn’t deserve that, and today I believe (no, I know) that you don’t either.

There is a better way to build that business. And that’s what I want to teach the world, because if I can make the world just a little better place I will have lived a life worth living.

But I’m rambling

So there’s this fear, and the first way I will overcome it is to understand that this is firstly about me getting back into fearless writing.

And the second way in which I will overcome this is to realize that if I can help even one person, it’s been worth it.

Progress report

At the beginning of this project I mentioned that I’m developing on online course called Email Marketing 101. Between all the other things that I’m doing (consulting for clients, supporting students, admin and so on), this has top priority.

So here’s a quick view of how far I’ve progressed. I’ll post an update to this chart every now and then so you can see how long things actually take to get done (way longer than I would have liked). But every entrepreneur struggles with this, so hopefully it’s not a downer - it just shows that even after I’ve been doing this for a while, other things still get in the way and it takes longer to get the important stuff done.

Oh yes, completed Recipe 3 of 5 in the course yesterday and published it to the testers. The chart can be a little deceptive - it measures progress and not effort required, so the remaining items should go a little faster.

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