What am I missing here?

and other questions to ask when you're blocked and can't seem to keep going.

Hi,

We just had our final 🦄Hapitalist breakthrough session of October, and it was just as magical as all the others. It’s so weird to watch something work so well for the people inside the program, and still struggle to get even a few more people to try it.

It’s frustrating, and I want to scream into the void just about every hour of every day, but then again, I’m very used to dealing with this level of cognitive dissonance.

This is not the first time, or even the tenth time, I’ve run smack dab into the same problem. In fact, almost everything I launch makes no sense to people until it makes all the sense.

I am the Marty McFly of indie publishing, constantly saying:

“I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet, but your kids are gonna love it.”

This isn’t a complaint, just a reality. It happened with Kickstarter. It happened with live shows. It happened with Substack.

Frankly, it happened with direct sales as an entire concept.

The people who came with me at the beginning were like “I have no idea what Russell is talking about, but he sure is doing something right. So, I’m just gonna take a leap of faith.”

Turns out that it’s not easy to monetize leaps of faith. They take a lot of trust, which is hard get in the year of our lord flying spaghetti monster 2025.

It also takes a spare $300, which is even harder to find these days.

People have always resisted what I have to say, even going so far as to torpedo my career for years, until one day they were suddenly all in on it. The same people who actively rooted against me were now the biggest fans of what I had to say.

• I’ve watched people who called me a charlatan for talking about Kickstarter suddenly post how their latest Kickstarter raised $10k as if they came up with the idea.

• I’ve seen writers who said live shows are too exhausting for a decade suddenly rave about reader events like they willed them into existence.

• I’ve tracked as authors pivoted away from retailer-exclusivity to embrace direct sales after saying I wasn’t a “real writer” for focusing on those channels from the start.

It might sound like I’m complaining here, but I have nothing but love in my heart for every one of them. I’m so glad they came around, and that I could play some small part in their journey, even if they would never admit it.

Heck, they might not even remember it, as the human mind is great at tricking itself into believing any old thing. I certainly don’t begrudge them anything and wish them the best. I love that for them…over there…away from me, though.

All that to say that I absolutely believe that in a couple of years people who are rolling their eyes now will say:

“It turns out we should have been cultivating an integrated author ecosystem and building leverage through direct channels this whole time. I’ll be hosting a masterclass about how I came up with this idea myself with no help and have never believed anything else.”

Meanwhile, I will flat out tell you Ben Templesmith taught me this system in 2017 and I’ve been trying since then to figure out how to make it work for authors and writers who weren’t superstars.

If you listen to that episode of my podcast, you can literally here my wheels start turning.

[SPECIAL ARCHIVE EPISODE] How to build a creator ecosystem with Ben Templesmith

It’s taken nearly a decade for the tools to catch up to this problem, but I’ve been turning it over for that long at this point. Even though the tools are finally where they need to be for this to work, the writer collective consciousness isn’t quite ready to accept this solution yet.

Which is why I push this particular boulder up this particular hill, and why I do it with a smile, because we’re almost at the mountaintop.

We’re so close, and one of these days, we’ll crest that peak together, and it will be glorious.

I’ve learned recently that I’m much better making money for others than myself because I care much more about making the best thing than making the thing people think they want now.

Sometimes those things align, but almost never with things I create personally. Instead, it’s usually easier for me to find people that align with me and have made something amazing that already has product-market fit. Then, I can help them throw lighter fluid on the fire they already built.

If it works for my hyper-weird stuff, then it almost certainly will work for somebody else. Sometimes, when I’m feeling particularly saucy, I will say to potential clients:

“Pay me a pittance so you can make a fortune.”

I make things that change paradigms, which takes the kind of nuance that doesn’t sell well on the surface. It takes the kind of complexity that can’t be boiled down to a soundbite or a catchy slogan.

It’s the kind of thing that takes 16 emails and a 1,900+ word missive like this to even scratch the surface of, and that’s okay.

To make money quickly, your best bet is to find something people already want or need and pair it with a group of people who already have the money to solve it.

My career has been more about finding something that people have no idea they need, yet will undoubtedly change their lives for the better, and talking about it incessantly for years until I move the Overton window enough that mass adoption becomes inevitable.

Ironically, solving these kinds of problems is exactly what I’m digging through with 🦄Hapitalists every time we meet.

Lining up the right problems with the right solutions is something that everyone deals with all the time. Since this is where I live the vast majority of my existence, I thought I would share with you the three questions I ask all the time, and have been the most helpful reframes inside 🦄Hapitalist.

What am I missing here?

This is my favorite single question I’ve ever asked in my whole career. No matter how much knowledge we have, we are always filtering through our own lived experience and always missing something.

As Donald Rumsfeld said:

“There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

He got a lot of flack for it at the time, but there’s not a month that goes by I don’t think about, quote, and/or ruminate on this idea. No matter how much we know, there are always unknown unknowns, and this question allows us to acknowledge that truth and pull them out of ether without judgment.

Is that even true, though?

Recently on a call, somebody brought up the fact that online connection wasn’t the same as in person connection, which caused me to push back and ask:

“What if connection could be the same, though? What would that look like?”

Connection being inherently different online than in person doesn’t actually make sense when you think about it, does it?

I mean we write books that people connect to without ever hearing our voice. We text friends and connect without seeing them. Telephones are still great at developing connection even though we’re not in the room together, so it’s not like people have to be in the same place to connect. Even Zoom calls with my neice are amazing at connecting with her.

I don’t discount that online connection doesn’t feel the same all the time, but sometimes it does, right? Sometimes, in the comments of a post, you’ll connect with somebody very deeply, or through a group text chain, or even in an email like this one.

Why would I even bother to write this and send it out if I thought deep, meaningful online connection wasn’t possible?

It would be pointless, and most every email we send is likely built on this same premise.

In fact, 🦄Hapitalist was built on the premise that online connection can be as good, or almost as good, as in-person connection, and it broadly works pretty great.

Funnily, this person not only found me online originally, but then built a connection with me deep enough to come to our mastermind in person, and then joined 🦄Hapitalist, almost exclusively by connecting with me online.

So, something about online connection works, and we should be asking how we can get more of that, instead of making a blanket statement that blocks our ability to solve our real problem.

I love The Royal Tennebaums, and the quote I think about all the time related to this topic is Owen Wilson saying:

“Well, everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What this book presupposes is... maybe he didn’t.”

So, what is the presupposition that you can turn on its head to help unblock what’s blocking you? Because that’s where you’ll likely have a breakthrough.

Is this even solving for the right problem?

In another recent call, somebody said:

“I would love to grow my audience by going to live shows, but I don’t think they’ll be profitable.”

This made my ears perk up, and I pushed back saying:

“But that’s an income block. You can’t solve an audience problem using income logic”.

Last year, I spent $50k growing the audience to this publication, which left me -$28k in the hole. It caused a massive income problem, but it solved my audience problem.

Now, I don’t recommend blowing so much money fixing one problem only to cause another, but we often limit our problem solving by throwing up irrelevant roadblocks.

Yes, losing money at conventions could cause an income problem, but if you have a job and stability, that might not even be a problem. Maybe you can blow money doing unprofitable things to bolster future you. After all, that’s one of the great things about having a full-time job, right?

If you have the money to blow, or a way to replace it, then the income problem isn’t actually a problem, and yet it’s blocking you from solving your actual audience problem.

The only reason I was able to blow so much money on growth is because I spent several years building up a nestegg for exactly that purpose. Yes, it meant I had to live low on the hog for a long time once it failed, but it didn’t bankrupt me, and I’m roughly back to how much money I had in my war chest after chilling out on audience growth and book production for a year.

If I put up an income block, even though I didn’t have one, it would have prevented me from solving my audience problem.

So, what really is your biggest block and how can you actually solve it?

If you found this interesting, then I invitew you to join us in Hapitalist.

There are over 600 exclusive posts available behind the paywall, including tons of interviews, courses, books, and more to help you on your author growth journey.

As a Hapitalist, you’ll get access to all my most powerful courses, monthly breakthrough sessions, and a digital brain trained on 6.5+ million words I’ve said or written over the last 15 years.

Photo by Vardan Papikyan on Unsplash