Linchpin

[Important Edit: We have a few more Linchpin books than planned, and it's the same deal: They're free for the taking if you pick up a copy of the Idea Catalyst Kit while they're still sitting on my desk. Skip to the bottom of the Kit sales page and hit that buy button if you already know you want one!]

It’s not easy, what you’re trying to do.

Man — I think you know it just as well as I do. And yet we keep on it, because there’s something in it that speaks to us. This week I had an extended conversation with a friend, via email, about the hard shit we’ve been through to allow us to do what we’re doing. And when I felt bewildered by the engines of circumstance and the challenges that are inevitably laid on us — all at once! — he began to quote my own testaments back to me, maybe without even knowing how familiar those testaments were.

Self-employment is not for the weak… or sane, he said. We may be crazy, but we couldn’t live our lives any other way. These challenges are only the world’s way of asking us how badly we really want this and what sacrifices we’re willing to make to have it. The story is more interesting, this way. And we always come through in the end.

Spring follows Winter, he said.

I was going to write a launch post this morning, and I suppose this is still a launch post. It’s still got all the goodies at the bottom, just like any other launch post. But the last 24 hours has been so strange and unreal in so many different ways, both waking and dreaming. My sparse handful of sleep from last night will fuel me through today, and you know what? So will yours. And this may not be the perfect launch post I had planned, but it will say what I mean to say, and that’s all that counts.

In January I made the Idea Catalyst Kit because I had this one thing I knew I could explain, this process I knew was valuable. It took me years to gain enough clarity about it that I’d even be willing to try writing it down, and once I started, it was three weeks of insanely hard work — at all hours — before it was done. I thought I could save my readers hours and days and weeks of casting about for answers if I wrote it all down and put it together in a certain way — and I hope that’s been as successful as it seems from what people have told me.

I barely slept, that three weeks. (I barely remember it, to tell you the truth.) And most of the people I know in casual social settings would look at what I did for that three weeks and be very confused at how far I was willing to go to get it done. It’s just an infoproduct. Even the word infoproduct is dumb. What are you doing this for? Isn’t there something better you can do? Take a freaking break.

But somehow I had wrapped myself up in the meaning of this project. I had wrapped myself up in the possibility that someone would read it and listen to it and work through it and really learn how to tackle their problems, really come to understand how they could create options and plan projects and make great waves, you know, and something would happen to them. I became obsessively focused on the idea that there was something I could teach them that would make a difference. Because you may not know this (not being inside my head at all hours) but I spend far too much time thinking about what I have been through to make this my job, and worrying and wondering about everyone else who pursues the same. Maybe… I can spare them some of this hard shit, I think. Because when I feel it, I can take it. Sometimes things are hard. But when I think about someone else like me, alone in their office or living room or back bedroom with a laptop and the fear and the worry and the consequences of getting it wrong again, someone who feels lonely a lot of the time, someone whose friends and loved ones really don’t get it, someone who feels the same heavy feeling in their chest that I do, that feeling that we have to do this thing, it’s the right thing, it’s the thing we need, it’s the thing we’re supposed to do… When I think about all of us experiencing that, I get all worked up. This shroud of emotion settles over me and my hands reach for the damn keyboard and I start typing again, because I can’t go back in time to help my past self, when I was lonely or bewildered or scared, but I can help you.

This infoproduct — the word that makes me barf, so I say “learning kit” instead — was the crux of that realization for me. And then I set about figuring out how I could get it to you and somehow make you understand that this isn’t an internet marketing thing. Because internet marketing ruins everything, and I think you know that. If someone walked up to me and somehow convinced me the only way I could make a living was internet marketing I would shoot myself, because if that’s what’s going on, we’re all fucked. If our only substitute for helping and healing and connecting with each other is internet marketing, if it’s about making another 97 bucks and seeing how many people I can convince to break out PayPal, forget the fucking internet, the fun is over.

But that’s not how it has to be. And the only thing I could think of that would prove I was on the right page, for the people who would have to put up with my emails and blog posts and little sales buttons and huge long sales copy — because you have to do it right to sell it, to get it into someone’s hands in the first place, which makes the whole thing all the more confusing — the only thing I could think of was to promise that I’d keep adding to it. For as long as I can, for as long as I could think of content that would matter and be useful, that’s what I promised. And then I promised you could have your money back if it didn’t work out, because the idea of someone paying for this thing and keeping it and not getting anything out of it makes me sick to my stomach.

And then I put my phone number on there, and I laughed, and I thought… there’s nothing else I can do. I have to trust that this tells them what I needed to tell them.

It’s hard to make a living doing something that matters to you, because you are constantly second-guessing yourself. You’re saying, I can’t do this. The price is too high — the emotional price, the money price, all of it. I need it to get to more people than this. I need them to know that this isn’t about cash. But if you don’t make the model sustainable, you can’t keep doing it. All your noble aspirations fly right out the goddamned window because instead of dictating your own schedule and spending large swaths of it making a difference, you have to sit in a cubicle and accede to some madman’s whims 40 hours a week.

So you set the price where the fucking price needs to be set, and you do what you can to help the people who ask you for help, and you hope that it makes a difference and you hope that you make millions of dollars a decade or two down the road and you won’t have to worry about making a living anymore, you can just do what needs to be done. Well, I don’t know if that really happens to anyone. It probably does. And philanthropy is a nice dream, with this feeling in my gut that if I don’t find a way to help, I’ll fizzle and wither and my life will be colorless and empty.

So this is how I am helping. I’m giving it my best attempt. And the resulting details will be brief, because this post is already long — and in the end, you can read all about it on the page in question, you don’t need me to babble about it here.

Long story short: I added a lot. I’m not going to increase the price. You can have all of it for the same 97 bucks it cost when it was half this size, and if you get yours before the first 50 sales are made this week, I’m going to send you one of the 50 Linchpin books on my desk — this book that answered all of the questions I was still asking when I made the Idea Catalyst Kit, this book that might as well be Idea Catalyst 201 (or 20,001). Together, Linchpin and the Kit represent two halves of my journey to making a difference.

The Kit explains my entire, long-developed process of being a catalyst — everything I learned before January 2010.

Linchpin is what taught me the lessons I craved, then, when I started to ask questions that no one else had the answers to. (Thanks, Seth.)

Together, I hope they make a difference for you. If they don’t, I want to be the first to know — because then we can think of something else. Something will work, and we’ll find it.

If you think it might help, you can read all about the additions here.

Thank you for listening, guys.