Personality

I might not be the person I thought I was

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If you’ve ever taken a personality test before, you may have been asked a question such as “do you enjoy following a routine?”

I, for as long as I can remember, would always answer ‘no’ to that question. I never liked to follow a routine. Give me the feel of unbounded freedom. Give me a purpose, some tasks I need to accomplish and then just let me do whatever I feel like doing at that time, in whatever order I desire, based on nothing but pure intuition and “willingness to act”.

In fact, I adapted a similar system for reading as well.

At any one time I would be reading 8 to 12 different books, perfect for moments when I want to read but don’t feel like reading that one particular book, so I just pick up another one.

For some people a free, completely unregulated, routine-less schedule, able to fill in however you like, would be total chaos. For me, it’s heaven…

Or at least it was…

Not that it’s not anymore. A system like that sounds lovely. But as I look more closely at what I do, how I spend my time, and most importantly, how I decide what to do and how to do it, I find I’m, more than ever before, sticking to the same fixed routine day-in, day out.

I wake up at the same time every day. I take a walk at the same time every day. I even walk the same route every day. I work, eat, relax, write, read, learn, workout, and sleep at almost the same time every single day. I still, at the time of writing this email right now, have exactly 12 books on my “currently reading” shelf… but about 8 of those haven’t been opened for quite a while because I find myself focusing on reading the same 2–3 books until I’ve finished them before moving on to the next.

So did I change my preference?

Or did I always enjoy following a routine, yet never realized it because the allure of a “chaotic day without artificial barriers and obligations” sounded like something straight out of a fairytale for me?

Who knows.

All I can say is that having these routines in place made me much more productive than I’ve ever been before. And sure I do miss certain days. I do “mess up” my routine occassionally—don’t we all? But the thought, the intention, and the schedule is there. And so is the execution of the plan and most days of the year.

Occassionally I also like to switch it up. Throw the routine out the window, see what happens. Nine times out of ten, the quality of everything I do worsens… yet I still like doing it for some reason.

I fear I’ll never understand why…

Something I do understand however, is that writing and sending daily emails people love to read and buy from is a great way to strengthen your relationship with your readers, improve your writing skills at the fastest possible rate, and, generally speaking, is far from the worst thing you could try to improve your business success.

So if you’d like to learn more about that, then check out my flagship course, Email Valhalla, right here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla/


Should you create your own email list?

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I had a small back-and-forth with a long-time reader a short while days ago (not sure he wants me to name him).

To give some context:

He’s a passionate game dev and has been thinking about starting his own email list about game design.

Note: “thinking about starting”.

When I asked him what’s been holding him back he gave 2 reasons:

(This is how I summarized it based on his response

1) He doesn’t believe he’s “big/successful” enough to have something to offer. So why should people listen to him?

2) He prefers creating games more than writing about them, so why waste time with an email list when he could create more games instead?

Both of these are valid and popular, but ultimately flawed, responses—making this a great opportunity to share my answer publically.

So let’s talk about why those two reasons aren’t as important/valid as you might first expect.

First off, if only the biggest and most successful people could build an email list, then there’d only be a handful of lists and every market. Which simply isn’t the case.

The truth is…

People care more about people than anything else. Someone might be a lot more successful and have 10 more years of experience. But if you’re the more entertaining person while caring about your audience and actually, from the bottom of your heart, want to help your audience succeed as best as you can, then you’ll be the one they want to be around and listen to.

That’s just how it goes.

There’s no ifs, buts, or maybes about it.

Secondly, and this might not seem directly obvious when looking at it at first glance. But building your email list actually helps you free up more time (making it so he could create more games in this case).

Here’s how that works:

Instead of focusing all his effort on writing articles, social media marketing, reaching out to people, “networking”, taking on projects you don’t care about just to make ends meet, and god knows what else… You could instead focus solely on building and writing to your email list, which will take care of all your financial issues if done right, freeing up your schedule of all other things you had to do till now.

Now you’ve freed up so much time. Time you can choose to spend on creating more, writing emails (if you so choose), or just plain relaxing, whatever you choose.

Anyway.

If you haven’t started your email list yet, now’s the time.

And if you’d like some help figuring out how to get everything up and running, then check out Email Valhalla here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla