Reading · The Profitable Author: Build a Business You Love

I’ve never understood or been drawn to the popularity of Seth Godin. Smart, influential, has some good nuggets of insight for sure, but I wouldn’t, for instance, listen to a podcast interview with him on purpose. But I recently did, on accident, because he was on a show next in my queue and inertia was interfering with me finding something else.

What’s a thing he does and advises others to adopt for significant impact?

Quitting is fine, but never quit at the hard parts.

That caught my attention.

Do the hard part and then evaluate. Now that you’ve done the hard part, was it worth it? How does it fit into your larger plan?

He happens to believe in quitting actually—named the Vince Lombardi “Winners never quit and quitters never win” quip as specifically untrue. Dumb. He didn’t say dumb, but I heard it.

Sometimes…often…quitting is the exact right thing. Just don’t quit at the hard part.

Every author building a business around their books will encounter hard parts. You know them when you hit them because they produce specific feelings and behaviors: the urge to stop; resistance to move forward even an inch; a sense that you were wrong, misjudged, need to reconsider; keeping busy with items of less import to justify not doing hard.

Do you recognize any of these as hard things that made you want to quit, lower your ambitions, take a lesser path?

Approaching a bookstore cold with your books and asking the buyer to carry them
Sending an outreach email to someone who intimidates you
Pitching yourself for a speaking gig before you feel fully ready
Pricing your services or event fees appropriately and holding firm when someone pushes back
Proposing a partnership that feels presumptuous
Following up after silence when you think the silence means no
Asking for testimonials from readers you don’t want to bother
Setting a real boundary with a client who keeps testing the edges
Making the volume sales pitch to an organization that could change your year
Writing the difficult chapter you’ve been circling for months

These things are hard.

And these are the kinds of situations where many authors quit and quit again by avoiding, deflecting, blaming, justifying. But I think you can see exactly why you shouldn’t quit the hard thing. Do it first. Then make your next decision.

The hard part is a filter, not a wall. Most people stop at hard parts. It’s sort of inherent in hard—not objective difficulty, but the near-universal avoid, delay, redirect response to discomfort. But, when you push through the hard part, not only are you completing a task (that you chose or is necessary), you are solidifying a valuable skill and a practice; you are expanding your comfort zone, ability range, and sense of what’s possible for you; and you are moving into territory where others aren’t treading, increasing your opportunities as well. You have filtered yourself onto the playing field. It may be emptier than you realize. Send the email, make a pitch, request a sponsorship, create a bold offer, punch up with your next media outreach.

You’ve already paid the tuition, now do the assignment at the best level you can. Getting to the hard part costs something. Research, preparation, relationship-building, courage, time. Quitting at the hard part means absorbing all those costs and collecting none of the returns. We know, we know, sunk cost fallacy. This is not that…yet. The email newsletter you spent a tortured two hours writing, but you didn’t send (maybe it wasn’t perfect). An event you planned and promoted with others, but then canceled because ticket sales were slow. The corporate volume sales pitch you prepared…and then swallowed. Whatever you invested to get to the hard part is already spent—proceed with your attempt to collect on that. Then you can evaluate whether that was a hard (or easy, or something else) way to get what you wanted.

Quitting at the hard part resets the clock. Hard parts get easier with repetition. The first cold call to your neighborhood specialty store IS hard. It may still be awkward on your fifth retailer contact. But, but, but. Your twentieth call is just Tuesday. Keeping on keeping on is the thing. Quitting at the hard part before you see how the repetition and opportunity play out isn’t just passing on one thing, it’s sending you back to the beginning of the learning curve. How have others become good at outreach, pitching, closing a sale, at setting boundaries? Doing the hard part enough times that it stopped being hard.

The hard part is temporary; quitting is permanent. Hard parts end, and often quite quickly. You make the call, send the email, walk through the door, state the price, propose the partnership—and that’s that. You did it! Let’s face it, many of these author hard parts last just minutes. What comes after—sales, relationships, speaking engagements, collaborations, boundaries that stick—last much longer. And it’s the good stuff. Quitting, on the other hand, is permanent in the sense that you took yourself out of the game. You let an opportunity and the chance for more of the same pass you by cause hard. Bookstores move on. Organizations book another speaker. Readers look elsewhere. Hard parts are temporary by nature. The costs of quitting may stick around.

You can’t evaluate what you never did. This was Godin’s sharpest point for me about not quitting. Don’t quit because you feel uncomfortable. Do the hard thing so that you can evaluate if it was worth it. Are you getting closer to where you want to go? Doing the hard thing makes it possible to make good decisions. The only data supplied by quitting at the hard part is that you chickened out. Avoidance is not decision-making. How will you know if your outreach strategy worked if you never gave it a fighting chance? How can you improve your PR campaigns if you quit after sending a couple pitches or press releases? How can you refine an event model if the first one doesn’t happen? Do the hard parts, then evaluate from actual experience.

There are always hard parts. Stop thinking that there aren’t. And stop thinking that hard is evidence that you’re on a wrong path, that you’re not cut out for this, that the market and the universe are telling you big secrets. Business just has hard parts, especially when you’re building new understandings, approaches, competencies, and components of your business mode, which ideally is always. So, anticipate that this is part of the deal, know the hard parts are coming, then recognize it for what it is when you come up against them. Ah, this is the filter where others will quit. Not me.

Just do it. Just do all the hard things. Remind yourself that under no circumstance are you quitting because and when something is difficult.

Quitting after honest evaluation is wisdom. Quitting at the hard part, before you have any real data, is just discomfort pretending to be a decision.

What’s the hard part you keep quitting at in your author business? What would change if you did it anyway—just once—and then evaluated it from the other side?

Authors, Why You Should Never, Ever Quit at the Hard Parts

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