Crushing Your Limiting Beliefs
Why forcing yourself into a corner will change your life immediately.
Imagine you already possessed a skill that you could start charging people for tomorrow.
Wouldn’t that be nifty?
Now imagine you never really noticed that skill, or the doors it unlocked for you, because your own limiting beliefs made you forget you already held the key.
This week’s newsletter is a call to action for writers who feel like they’ll probably have something to offer the world in a year or two, but that they need more time to ‘figure things out’ first.
I want to talk about limiting beliefs.
Particularly, the incredible speed at which those beliefs are destroyed when you force yourself into a corner.
If you’re following the sort of people I am on Twitter, you’ll see a tonne of threads about:
forming habits
personal growth
making money
All useful topics, and I’m not knocking it.
But what you’ll also see are some absurdly high numbers:
‘My little one-person business now makes $157,320 per month. How? I stopped drinking caffeine past 11am’ - Paraphrased from Twitter, kind of.
Ok, fine. I’m slightly jealous.
Having said that, it is genuinely inspiring to see people who’ve been able to create a comfortable life for their families, simply by delivering value at scale on the internet.
But, especially for an online writing newbie, the numbers you see can be incapacitating.
No one expects to become rich overnight (and it’s not really about that anyway), but when you see 20 year olds racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales (looking at you Easlo, you talented swine), it’s easy to feel like there’s must be something they had at the outset of their online writing journey that you don’t.
Is it a mindset thing?
A skill they learned?
Luck?
‘Other people charging for their expertise is fair enough, but I don’t know enough to charge for mine.’
This is how I felt a month ago.
I saw other people charting their own financial destiny online and thought it looked pretty tasty.
But it wasn’t open to me. Not for a few more years at least.
The first time I even conceptualised the idea of charging others for my ‘expertise’ was when my friend Gordon asked me why on Earth I wasn’t looking into consulting. Or writing ebooks. Or designing courses. Or ANYTHING else to which my experience lent itself.
After all, I’d been writing things for Ali Abdaal for a little under a year. That’s not something a lot of people have on their CV.
My response?
‘I don’t know enough yet’
Gordon fixed me with a wry smile.
We discussed it some more. I remained unmoved. Then, peacefully, I sank back into my glorious comfort zone.
‘One day, I think it would be quite something to become a consulting YouTube scriptwriter. Maybe I’ll make a cool Notion template and stick it on Gumroad, like a true digital nomad. But I should get at least another few years under my belt first. Ideally a decade, just to be safe.’
After some twists and turns, however, I went freelance last week.
I had no plan, no extra clients, and only enough money to keep me in London for two months.
Two months.
Well gosh.
I certainly didn’t feel experienced enough for this but, suddenly, I had to be.
It turns out, when you give yourself no choice but to make something work, you tend to move pretty quickly.
It was Twitter that saved the day. One retweet from Ali, and I was booked up for months.
Now I appreciate that retweet was one hell of an Unfair Advantage.
But this whole episode led me to two realisations:
We continually underestimate and undervalue the skills we have.
Content creators NEED content writers.
Let’s chat about these, briefly.
Undervaluing Skills
Of course I should have been looking into YouTube consulting. Or ebooks. Or courses. A year writing things for a YouTuber is so blatantly a valuable thing, it’s almost embarrassing that I didn’t capitalise on it sooner.
Breaking this limiting belief made me notice that this wasn’t the first time I’d let them affect my judgement, either.
When I applied to work for Ali in the first place, I was convinced I didn’t have the experience to get the gig.
Until I got it, and it suddenly turned out I did.
Writing comedy sketches for years with my comedy partner wasn’t directly the same as writing YouTube scripts.
But it was a regular writing cadence which had lasted more than half a decade.
So think about this:
What have you been writing in the last five years. Or even the last year?
Who could you turn to for a testimonial?
How could you position yourself, with the experience you have, as someone who could make a creator’s life 5x easier.
Because, by now, I genuinely believe having exactly the ‘right’ experience doesn’t matter.
If you’re a writer who displays consistency and reliability, you have a skill which is in demand.
And not just by bland, corporate companies who barely know what a thumbnail is.
YouTubers need you too…
Underestimating Demand
The past fortnight has highlighted how many content creators NEED someone to write for them.
I’ve had YouTubers with channels ranging from as litle as 1000 subscribers, all the way up to 500,000, all asking for the same help, and willing to pay a decent price for it.
Dozens of them.
These creators love what they do, but they can’t do it all.
They love making videos, but the research and fact-checking takes hours.
They want a more active Twitter, but tweet threads take time and contemplation.
They’d love to keep their newsletter going, but the time slips away each week.
Much of what’s required is purely functional. They want someone to give them their time back.
But that’s not to say there’s no creative scope in all this.
Right now I’m working with an awesome guy called Justin Moore, and we’ve had a tonne of fun creating a bunch of visual gags for his next video. I’m so excited to see them on YouTube in a few weeks.
There is high potential for creativity, but you also don't need to reinvent the wheel.
A lot of creators simply want you to understand their vision and help them realise it.
‘Functional’ tasks, like converting copy from one platform to another, can be done by any dedicated copywriter.
Working in the creator economy is accessible in a way I didn’t comprehend a year ago.
So start building up your writing habit. Tweet daily. Interact with creators. Send interesting DMs.
And, if you’re able, back yourself into a corner. Give yourself a deadline. Make it non-negotiable.
It feels overwhelming at first but, believe me, once you give yourself no choice but to figure things out, you’d best believe those things are going to get figured out.
Speak soon!
George
🎙 Podcast Recommendation
While making my way through The Art and Business of Online writing by Nicholas Cole this week, I also started listening to The Digital Writing Podcast, which he hosts with Dickie Bush.
The first episode with Steph Smith is a great place to start. Also really enjoyed Dan Koe’s episode - especially useful for new online writers looking to grow an audience 🙋♂️
🙋♂️Freebies
As promised earlier this week on Twitter, I’m giving out a simple little table I use on Notion for brainstorming YouTube titles.
It’s designed to give you a nudge if your title is too long to display fully across all devices.
I’ve put it on Gumroad for free here. Probably a little OTT, but I’ll be giving out more free stuff soon so this way it’s all stored in one place :)