The boring secrets of my exciting life

A curious reader sent me an interesting question yesterday.

I’m not sure if he wants me to share his name, but his message went as follows:

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Hey Alex!

I’ve been reading your emails for a few months now and I have to let you know how much I love them. It’s become a daily ritual to read your email right after dinner.

I especially love how you’re able to take these seemingly normal and everyday stories of yours and connect them to business-related lessons. One of the most impressive ones for me was your email about the opening scene of How To Train Your Dragon and how you connected it to creating a lead magnet.

Here’s my question to you: How do you come up with all these topics? How do you have so much to talk about that you can write an email every single day?

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And that’s an amazing question. It’s also one I get quite often.

Sharing stories is one thing. Coming up with stories to share is hard. And coming up with connections to draw between these stories and valuable lessons is even harder.

Or at least that seems to be what most people seem to struggle with.

But now here’s the thing. Many people expect some cool and sexy answer. An amazing solution that’ll solve all of their problems. A prompt they can enter into ChatGPT or a framework they can use that’ll spit out ideas and connections for them.

But it’s everything but that. The true answer isn’t sexy at all. It’s boring. So boring that I barely talk about it. So boring that I didn’t deem it worthy to talk about it in the first place.

And yet it’s something I do every single day. I wake up and it’s one of the first things I do before I start working. And then, when I’m done working. It’s almost all I spent doing for the rest of the day.

I built my whole life upon this boring and simple method to get more stories and make more connections.

Are you ready to hear what it is? Are you sure? Alright here it goes.

I do stuff. I read stuff. I watch stuff. And I listen to stuff.

That’s it. Boring, right?

Well yes and no. It sounds boring. It’s boring to talk about it. But it’s the most fun and exciting thing I do.

You’ll hear me mention this phrase a lot. But I always pursue my curiosities.

I read books I think are interesting, not books others say will make me more money. I listen to podcasts I think are fascinating, not podcasts others say I have to listen to. I watch movies I think are cool as hell, not movies that won Oscars or IMDB says have a high score.

This is the secret. I consume information I find cool and valuable. This builds my own world. This gives me my own unique ideas and perspectives.

And then after consuming all that information, I do nothing. Literally nothing. I walk. I lie down. I think. I go to the gym. I take a shower. I do fun stuff with friends & family. And that’s vital.

Your subconscious needs moments of relaxation to process all of that information and give you ideas and inspiration about what it all means. Then those stories and connections come by themselves. I don’t have to force any.

That’s the boring and simple secret.

And if you have no idea where to start. Here’s one of the latest email newsletters I’ve been reading about building creator businesses. They talk about personal branding, productivity, marketing, monetization, building authority, and much much more.

But more importantly, they interview all kinds of different big-name creators with results to prove themselves as authority, from all kinds of different backgrounds and industries.

And all these personalities hold different beliefs, opinions, and perspectives, which is by far the most interesting and enlightening thing to see. It shows you how there’s not just 1 right way to build your business. You can do it however you like, but it never hurts to get inspired by the creativity of others.

They also agreed to sponsor this email so I couldn’t be happier to share some love for them.

Check it out here: