How to establish habits that lead to success

-> (especially for newsletters)

Billy Oppenheimer writes an excellent weekly newsletter called “Six at 6” where he shares 6 stories he’s researched with a common theme.

This week’s newsletter was about the power of consistent habit. Of doing a little every day to progress towards your goal. Whether that’s taking 100 practice shots at lacrosse every day, travelling 15m towards the South Pole every day or bringing every bit of energy to bit-part acting jobs every day.

I do worry a bit about survivorship bias when you hear anecdotes like these. You hear from the folks who succeeded by putting in the reps every day and who attribute their success to it. But not the folks who did the reps, didn’t succeed, and whose stories never get told.

So we should perhaps classify doing the reps as necessary but not sufficient.

But that doesn’t take away from the fact that if you want to succeed in sport, acting, sailing or marketing - you have to do the reps.

Email in particular is very dependent on, well, emailing.

My course and templates let you learn from the experience and mistakes of others (usually me when it comes to learning from mistakes).

But at the end of the day, to get better at writing newsletters that get results for your business you have to write and send newsletters.

And the one thing I’ve found more than anything else that determines whether you’ll put in those reps every day is whether you enjoy it.

Of course, you might not initially. But at some point you have to find a style of writing you like.

No one keeps up something discretionary they hate every day.

So you have to explore and experiment a bit.

Maybe you’ll find you enjoy telling stories from your career. Or from what happened last week.

Maybe you love keeping up to date with the latest news and developments in your field and sharing those. Or digging deep into new ideas and making them practically applicable. Or making weird connections from different fields and media.

Anything can work, as long as you find what works for you.

Explore → Repeat → Repeat → Repeat.

It’s how to succeed with any marketing. But especially email.

- Ian