Do less better

August 16, 2021 (3y ago)

A Lebanese saying:

🍉

"You can only hold one watermelon in each hand, else you drop them all."

A few minutes of automation setup in Zapier later, and I now get a text every morning as a reminder to stay focused.

With a baby on the way, I've been thinking a lot about how to manage my time. I imagine a newborn has no respect for regular working hours!

My goal is not to do more and be more "efficient", but to design my life in a way that makes it possible to spend as much time as possible with family and our new child.

"What can I do today, that will make my future self proud and not regretful."

This quote from Sam Parr on the My First Million podcast has really helped frame how I am prioritizing my time and choosing what to work on before October.

The one thing that I know I can do today to help my future self is to invest in creating assets that:

a) Are created once and sold many times over b) Compound in value over time

A framework I've found helpful to "create" more consistently is repackaging.

There are 3 steps to this framework:

  1. Make an amazing original asset
  2. Isolate small useful pieces inside it
  3. Present them in a new context. Repeat.

Good content is, at its core, a valuable asset that resonates with your audience.

But not all assets are created equal when it comes to people being able to extract the value from them.

So, if you view every asset you create as an investment, repackaging is one way to make them easier to consume, increase their value and generate the best return over time.

Some examples:

  • Podcasts - Blog posts, Twitter threads, Audiograms
  • Webinars - Video highlights, Ebooks, LinkedIn posts
  • Workshops - Step-by-step guides, Email courses, Downloadable templates

When you repackage something valuable in a format that’s easy to consume and engage with in the channel you’re distributing it in, you’ll also generate new conversations with customers or prospects.

These conversations are a rich source of additional ideas and new directions to explore.

You can also use these conversations to explore the original asset (or parts of it) in further detail.

Ultimately, you wind up with a network of valuable content that’s resonating with your target audience(s), in multiple ways, across multiple channels, and compounding your returns.

As you repackage and redistribute your content, you also make it easier for others to interact with it and re-share with their networks.

This isn’t just a seriously powerful feedback loop — it’s sustainable

Instead of banging your head against the wall searching for “net new” ideas you can look at what's resonating and repackage it in a different context.

This is the approach I’ll be using to double down on content I've already published, create new assets from the conversations I have sitting idle on my hard drive, and ship more consistently.

Do less, better.