Laura emailed me with a great question. She is a member of my newsletter community and wanted to know I find time to give so many ideas away in my newsletter, blog and on my Twitter or X account. My reply contains a really useful idea, so I decided to share it with you.
It starts with understanding that sharing useful ideas is a very different type of sharing.
- If you own 3 bars of gold and you give 1 of them away, you are left with 2 bars of gold. Give all 3 bars away and you’re left with nothing.
- However, if you give someone a useful idea, you still have just as many ideas as you had before. Plus, you have just enriched the other person. That person could tell others how your idea helped them. So you may also have made a new business contact or a number of new business contacts.
However, there’s something else about sharing useful ideas that’s extremely important.
Scaling your sharing
You need to choose a way to be generous with your ideas, which scales.
- If you give an hour of your time, to share useful ideas to each of 10 individual people, you have just spent 10 hours of your time. It doesn’t scale. It’s unsustainable.
- But if you give an hour of your time to your community every day, in a way that reaches 10 people or 10,000 people you have only invested 1 hour. Newsletters, YouTube, blogging, podcasting and social media publishing are just some of the ways you can achieve this.
Be stingy with your time
Here’s how I explain the balance required: Be stingy with your time, but not your ideas.
You have a limited number of hours available each day and you need to use them wisely. Thankfully, by scaling the way you share useful ideas with your prospective clients or customers, you can choose to give generously. You can contribute to the success of dozens, then hundreds, thousands or hundreds of thousands of your prospects. And the initial financial investment required from you, in many cases, starts at zero.
Just think about that for a moment. And if it sounds interesting, why not give it a try?