Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I'm going to share with you three short emails that I sent to my daily mailing list. The first one was titled, Better is Different. If you want things to get better, something has to change. This change can come from one of two places. Number one, you can sit around waiting for the universe to change in your favor. Or two, you can change something yourself right now. Neither way is guaranteed to work, but I'd rather bet on something I can control than something I can't. The second email is called Leap of Faith. The phrase leap of faith is a cliche. Cliche is a brilliant insight that has been drained of meaning through overuse. Cliche is basically a victim of its own success, a metaphor that's so powerful that it ceases to work. It's weird. You know when to say one, but you don't really understand what you're saying. It's just a thing people say when they're in a given situation, like a sound you make with your mouth that has no real meaning to either party, but you both know it's the right sound to make. There's an upside to this. It means that most cliches contain a brilliant insight that you've never recognized, but it's been staring you in the face all along. Alright, but I digress. So what does leap of faith really mean? It means that you need to jump from one side of the chasm to the other without proof you're going to make it. It means you have to take action based on belief, not data. There's no way around this. If you want to do anything interesting, you're going to need to make a leap of faith, probably lots of them. So what does this tell us? It tells us that we will never feel like we're completely ready. We will never have proof that this is the right time. We will never know for sure that we'll make it to the other side. You just have to believe. Please note, I am not saying that you'll succeed just because you believe. I'm saying that you'll never take action if you don't. And the last email is of whittling and woodchippers. There's a big difference between cutting your thumb and cutting your thumb off. But why? Sure, cutting the skin on your thumb probably hurts a lot less than cutting your thumb clean off, but the real difference is that the skin grows back and thumbs don't. One is easy to recover from, the other is a permanent loss. So consider this. If thumbs did grow back, it'd be a lot less of a big deal if you lost one. It might stink for a while, but you'd recover. Here's the thing. When you're thinking about making a change in your business, ask yourself this. If things go horribly wrong, would this result in a permanent loss, or would I recover quickly? Once you have your answer, act accordingly. All right, that's it for this week. I'm Jonathan Stark, and I hope you join me again next time for Ditching Hourly. Hey, Jonathan again. The next time someone asks you for your hourly rate, I want you to stop what you're doing and go over to valuepricingbootcamp.com to sign up for my free value pricing email course. That URL again is valuepricingbootcamp.com. Hope to see you there. 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.