A few years ago, my wife, Kelly, won a tech startup competition at the end of an accelerator program she was a part of.
Yep. She’s a badass.
Leading up to the next year’s demo day—the final event where each Founder gives their 3-minute rapid-fire presentation of their app—she was asked to share some advice with the current cohort on crafting their presentations.
Before queuing her up, the program organizers told the Founders they should be practicing their presentation two or three times before the competition.
As the reigning champ, Kelly bristled.
“Honestly, you should rehearse your presentation 30 times,” she interjected. “And you should film every single one of them, watch them back, make yourself feel horribly embarrassed at how bad you are, and then fix all the little things until you’re not embarrassed anymore.”
“You said that?” I asked, impressed, when she told me about the call afterward.
“Well, not exactly… I told them they should rehearse multiple times, film themselves, and watch it back.”
Hmmm…
The gap between the advice Kelly wanted to give this group of Founders and the advice she actually gave is indicative of an insidious trend in how successful people impart advice to up-and-comers.
Here’s how it typically plays out:
- A successful Expert will be asked how they approach a given task
- In their response, the Expert will run through a convoluted, inefficient, possibly highly technical process for how they achieve the desired result
- Then, they’ll step back and caveat their approach with something along the lines of, “But you don’t actually need to all that. All you need to do is [Neat, Tidy, Streamlined, Simplified, Sanitized, Minimalist Approach]…
The resulting advice feels approachable.
Doable.
Non-intimidating.
Especially to an Audience who doesn’t yet possess the sophistication, knowledge, or skill of the Expert.
Which is exactly why the Expert presented it that way.
Ultimately, most successful people genuinely want the Audience to succeed.
And it’s hard to succeed if you’re so intimidated by what it will take to get there that you can’t bring yourself to start (or keep going).
But in sugarcoating their advice to make it more palatable, the Expert has removed the essence—the truth—of what it actually takes to succeed.
While the Expert may honestly believe that their process could be streamlined, the nature of creative work (including marketing) is that it is inherently inefficient.
I spend 45-90 minutes writing each issue of this newsletter for example—which is what I used to tell people when they asked me about my process and how I produced it so regularly.
“It’s not that heavy a lift,” I said. “You could definitely do it!”
The more I gave that advice, however, the more I realized it was a blatant lie.
On two fronts.
Because while I might spend an hour actually writing…
I consistently spend 4 hours wrestling with the core idea of the essay, getting sidetracked by other ideas I then start writing first drafts of… then coming back to the current issue to edit, rewrite, format, and potentially create graphics for.
In other words, all the things that elevate each issue from a rough, forgettable, mediocre first draft to something that people remember, connect with, find useful, keep coming back for, and recommend.
And that’s not something most people have the ability to do on a daily basis.
Which is why I’ve stopped lying.
Now when someone asks me about the newsletter, I tell them:
“I spend 4-5 hours a day writing. It really only works because I’m based in Europe and I can start writing at 8 am and finish by noon before anyone is awake and online for emails and calls.
“Also, I’ve built up the muscle of writing every day over the past 5 years and have published 1000+ essays and have an idea bank of 10,000+ ideas to write about, with many dozens of half-written pieces that I chip away at over months and years so I’m almost never starting from scratch.”
To most people looking to start a newsletter, this is an intimidating answer.
But it’s an honest one—especially if someone is looking to create an exceptional newsletter that their audience looks forward to reading.
At the end of the day, we as creators would do well to look closer at what successful creators actually do, rather than the distilled, sugarcoated version of what they tell others to do.
Like the Founders in Kelly’s accelerator program, the bar to not publicly embarrass yourself with your podcast, newsletter, or product offerings is low—the equivalent of running through your presentation two or three times before the event.
The bar to winning, on the other hand—to reaping significant rewards from our effort—is high.
Higher than most people, even the people who’ve already won are willing to admit.
But if we’re looking to achieve exceptional results, the reality is we should expect that it will take exceptional effort.
The results of that effort, however, are worth it.
In Kelly’s case, she ended up winning the competition.
But the competition was just the start.
In the end, the exposure her presentation—and her win—brought her launched the next phase of her career as a Founder, developer, and community leader.
It brought in funding offers, introduced her to partners, and almost immediately led to a $50k contract to develop an app for another startup.
It established her reputation in her industry which has now led to years of freelance work, teaching and coaching opportunities, sponsorships, and more.
All because she spent 30 hours crafting and rehearsing a 3-minute presentation… when perhaps 3 would have sufficed.
The next time you hear an expert talk about what it took (or what it takes) to achieve the results you want to emulate, lean in, look closer…
And do as they do, not as they say.
