Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly, I'm Jonathan Stark. Let's say you wanted to start a daily mailing list. You'd probably have a few questions right out of the gate, like how would you come up with enough stuff to write about? Or how would you keep up your momentum without getting bored? Or how would you organize your ideas in a way that produced a cohesive body of work over time? To address these issues, I dreamed up a framework I call the solar system content model. Here's how it works. Picture a solar system. It's got a sun in the center with a bunch of different planets circling around it. The sun in the metaphor represents the central idea of your work, and the planets represent all the different topics that you might write about to support your central idea. The planets need the gravitational pull of the sun to revolve around. Otherwise, they would just fly apart in different directions. So without the sun, there's no system. Without the solar, there's no system. For example, years ago, when I first started blogging, I would sporadically write about whatever I was interested in that day, and then a week or a month or six months would go by and I wouldn't post anything. Topic-wise, it was a total flea market. Nothing made sense together. The organizing principle was basically whatever Stark was interested in that day, and it didn't do a thing for my business. It was tough to stick with, and nobody really read it. It was a complete waste of time. In contrast, I've been publishing my current mailing list every single day for years, and it's been, hands down, the best single thing I've ever done for my business. If you look at the list of topics I cover, it's pretty diverse. Niching down, value pricing, productized services, writing books, creating courses, speaking at conferences, starting a podcast, dealing with imposter syndrome, writing project proposals, negotiating sales deals, scope creep, and so on and so on and so on. If I didn't filter this grab bag of topics through my son, namely the idea of ditching hourly billing, and that I want you to stop trading time for money, then these ideas wouldn't hold together as a body of work. It'd just be another flea market, a total mess. I can write about value pricing one day, and then productized services the next, and then about mailing lists and podcasts and book tours and all these things day after day because they're all held together by the central theme of ditching hourly. If you have a strong sun in the middle of your solar system, you can have loads of very different planets that revolve around it. They can even have moons around the planets. The gravitational pull will make everything make sense for the reader, and it'll give you plenty of room to write every day without getting bored or feeling repetitive. Of course, this raises the question, how do you find your sun? In my experience working with people, this can be pretty hard to just nail right out of the gate. The approach that I recommend is to just start with the planets. There are probably a lot of different areas inside of your expertise that you talk about, things where you feel like you've got something useful to add to the conversation. Maybe one is a contrarian stance that you have about your industry. Maybe one is something that absolutely infuriates you about your competitors. Maybe one's about some common trap that your ideal buyers always fall into. Maybe one is a unique worldview that makes you different from everyone else in your space. Maybe one is how you apply a seemingly unrelated philosophy to your work. Whatever your planets are, just start a list. Don't worry about organizing it or de-duping them or grouping by topics or if a given idea is too big or too small compared to the others. Just brain dump anything and everything that you might like to write about. By the way, if you've been blogging or emailing for a while, you can pull some themes out of there and include those in the list probably. Keep your list in a handy place so you can add to it over time. A text file on your desktop or a notes app on your phone, whatever. When a new idea occurs to you, just add it to the bottom of the list and just close the file. Forget about it. Once you've got a couple dozen ideas, read over the list and see if a sun pops out at you. It'll usually be something sort of grand or philosophical or visionary or revolutionary even. A really big idea. The kind of thing that would make for a good TED talk. It might even be a little intimidating. Like you might think, who am I to write about something so grandiose? If a sun doesn't jump out at you and you cannot figure out what your central organizing theme is, share your list with a friend. Ideally, someone who's a big thinker and is creative and optimistic generally. Ask them which of the ideas seems like the biggest or most important to them. Have a conversation with your friend about the different ideas so they can tease out more detail about each one. And notice if one of them seems to contain a bottomless pit of subtopics or facets or different angles you could take. Also, notice how you feel as you discuss each idea with your friend. Does one light you up or get you super excited? That might be your sun. Okay, but what if none of your planets feels like a sun? Well, sometimes what happens is your sun isn't explicitly on the list, but instead...

implied by the planets. Sometimes your sun is so obvious to you that you don't even think of it as a thing. You're too close to it to see it. It's a blind spot for you. For example, if you're a software developer, you might have a bunch of planets for things like agile, dry, test-driven development, CICD, and so forth. None of these feel like a sun to me, but they're all still topics related to productivity and automation. So maybe productivity is your central theme, or maybe that humans shouldn't compete with computers, or that your contrarian stance might be that laziness is good. So think about this. People say the best programmers are lazy because they automate everything so they don't have to do any work. This feels like a possible sun to me. You could spin a be lazier sun in a way that's interesting and maybe a little bit funny and that tweaks people and gets them interested. And it would support a huge number of otherwise seemingly unrelated topics. You could write about being lazy for fun and profit every day for years without ever repeating yourself. Okay, final note. It can take a while to figure out what your sun is or at least how to put it into words. If you're having a hard time, just start writing about your planets anyway, and your sun will eventually reveal itself. Once it does, your writing will get better, easier, and more effective. That's it for this time. I'm Jonathan Stark, and I hope you join me again next week on Ditching Hourly. Bye. Hey, Jonathan again. Do you have questions about how to improve your business? Things like value pricing your work instead of billing for your time. Or positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space. Or maybe productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal. Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes you to get ready for work in the morning. Best of all, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call you don't feel like it was worth it, just say the word and I'll refund your purchase in full. To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to jonathanstark.com slash call. C-A-L-L. That URL again is jonathanstark.com slash call. Hope to see you there.