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Transcript

Is Your Main Thing the Main Thing? · The Daily Writer

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hey my friend, thanks for joining me for today's episode.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Let me tell you about one of the biggest mistakes that I made for years as a writer, and that was I kept making too many things the main thing.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: From the time I was a kid, I always knew that I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't really start taking it seriously as a career possibility until 2016, which of course, as of this year, has been 10 years ago.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: And up until that time, writing as a career seemed like a pipe dream, and I really didn't have any confidence that I could make it a reality.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: It was a lot easier to keep it as a dream, as a possibility, if you will, than to do all the work to see if I could actually make it.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: So I did what many of us do whenever we're scared or intimidated, which is we keep ourselves busy with distractions.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, as a broke college professor at the time, I wanted to make some extra income, so for seven or eight years, I had a series of side hustles.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now, about 15 years ago, I got into network marketing, trying to sell nutrition products.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Network marketing can be a great business, but I had no idea what I was doing, and that was a total failure.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: For a few years after that, I worked part-time for several churches as a music pastor, and those were good experiences for the most part, but they took a lot of time and energy.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: My biggest side hustle mistake was taking the whole summer of 2015 trying to sell books on the Amazon FBA program, and FBA stands for fulfillment by Amazon.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: I listed, packed, and shipped more than a thousand of my own books that summer.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Now I did make a little money to be fair, but in the end it was a complete loss because I had so many books that didn't sell that I actually had to pay Amazon to either ship my books back to me, continue to store them for a fee, of course, or pay Amazon to destroy those books.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Now it sounds nuts, I know, especially to writers, but I chose to pay Amazon to destroy my remaining inventory because that was actually the cheapest option.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if I could go back in time 15 years and talk to myself, I would tell that guy to get busy learning how to make a living as a writer.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, I can't go back in time and I don't happen to have a working DeLorean.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: I've heard it said the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: The next best time is today.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to tell you today that today is a great day to start believing in yourself.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're wasting time on side hustles that aren't taking you where you want to go, maybe it's time to start saying no to those things and start saying yes to your writing.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's all I've got for today.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.