Why You Don’t Need Another Life Hack, Success Formula, or Marketing Tactic

These days, we are inundated with endless offers to hack our lives. We are surrounded by opportunities and strategies to use this “proven tactic” or formula to achieve this result or that. But the problem is tactics and formulas don't actually get you what you want.

There's always another trick. Always another strategy. Another event to attend or way to get your work out there. And I think these areas are important, but there are always obstacles standing in the way of your ultimate success. So let's look at three of the big ones.

Distraction #1: Fame

Let's be clear: marketing is part of the job. If you're a writer, creative, or artist, and you think that you can just make stuff and people will care about it, you're kidding yourself. Or at very least, you're rolling the dice. As Austin Kleon says: “talking about the work is the work.”

So you can't completely neglect marketing. It's a noisy world out there, and it's a hard sell to get people to notice something new, not to mention getting them to care about someone they've never heard of before. You have to earn influence. Nobody is a bigger advocate of this than me.

But there's a difference between doing your diligence to promote work you believe in and endlessly pursuing more opportunities to be famous. And here's the thing: there's always another marketing tactic. So at a certain point, you just have to stop the book signings and tours and online summits and go do your work.

No strategies. No gizmos or gadgets. No upsells, downsells, or whatevers. Just the work. And call me naive but that had better be enough.

Distraction #2: Money

Making money is also a part of the job. But this can be a slippery slope. There's always more money to make. As Walt Disney once said, “We don't make movies to make money. We make money to make more movies.”

Use business as a way of doing more of the work that matters to you. Money means capital to invest in your next project. When John Green, one of today's top-selling authors in the world, made millions of the success of The Fault In Our Stars, he told me this wasn't a license to stop working for the rest of his life. Rather, what excited him was the opportunity to finally be able to pay for all the creative projects he wasn't able to afford before then.

Money makes a better means than a master. Don't get caught up in the endless thrill of adding more zeroes to your paycheck if that's not what you set out to do (and if it is, that's okay — just own it).

Distraction #3: Success

Almost all of us, at some level, want more of whatever it is we have. More love. More acceptance. More acknowledgment or affirmation or the ability to take better care of ourselves and our families. These aren't bad things, necessarily. But they are distractions from the work we originally set out to do.

And so when the next opportunity comes along, it can be hard to turn down… even if we don't need it. Because you can always be more successful, right? And you wonder: Will this be the last chance to make it? To be part of this group? And if I do decline, will I miss out?

To be certain, at the outset of your career, you may have to take more gigs than you want and say yes more than no. But once the avalanche of opportunity comes, it can be hard to slow down.

At this time, we must remember why we got into this not because we were going to be famous or successful, but because we couldn't imagine getting to do this all day long. It was the dream. And here we are — writing our books or composing or songs or building our businesses — and it just doesn't feel good enough.

These are the times when you must stop, remember what success really means to you, and focus on the work at hand.

Focus on the deep work of craft

For me, this means saying no to that webinar or that summit or that thing that would help get my work out to more people, to make more money, and have more impact. All good things. But if you make things, which is what I do, there comes a time when those opportunities stand in the way of your craft.

And if you neglect your craft, eventually this whole thing falls apart.

Which is why this year I'm focusing on the theme of not more, but better. “Making magic,” as my friend Sean D'Souza says. Doing it for the love of it. Getting your due reward and not failing to promote stuff you believe in, of course, but also not getting caught up in the insatiable greed of just wanting more for the sake of more.

So that's my rant. Make more magic. Focus on your craft. And see these benchmarks of fame, money, and success as the means they are, not the end. And maybe, just maybe, that means you say no to the next big opportunity or the latest marketing strategy.

Just because it works doesn't mean you have to do it.