Let’s talk about the lie of doing more.
You know the one. The grind-all-day, out-hustle-everyone, build-17-sales-funnels-and-make-six-figures-before-lunch myth. It’s everywhere. It creeps into your browser tabs, slithers into every YouTube tutorial, whispers at 2 a.m. that you’re behind, you’re not doing enough, someone else is already winning.
And if you’re like I was? You believe it, at least a little. Maybe more than a little.
But here’s what they never really say: more doesn’t always mean better. Often? It just means more tired. More scattered. More burnt out with nothing left in the tank except a half-written blog post and a caffeine headache.
That realization? It doesn’t always come gently.
More Content Isn’t More Value
Okay, first myth. You’ve been told you need to post daily. Weekly. Consistently. Everywhere. Email. TikTok. LinkedIn. Heck, maybe even MySpace for good measure. (Kidding. Sort of.)
But what if, hear me here, what if no one is actually reading all that? Not because your stuff’s bad, but because we live in the era of infinite scroll. You could write the cure for entrepreneurial burnout and someone might skip it because their phone pinged.
I once published three blog posts in a week. By Friday, I had… maybe 12 views? No comments. Crickets. My dog was more engaged than my readers.
Then I published a raw, messy piece about failing a launch and crying in my car outside a grocery store. That post? 47 shares. Dozens of emails. People telling me they felt seen.
Less content. More connection. Funny how that works.
More Tools Don’t Equal More Success
God, the tools. The stacks. The subscriptions.
You ever look at your browser and realize you have like, seven tabs open to platforms you’re paying for but don’t use? Email platforms, scheduling software, analytics dashboards, AI generators that promise a Pulitzer.
I once spent $297 on a plugin because some dude said it tripled his conversions. Didn’t read the fine print. It was for Shopify, I was using WordPress.
Here’s what I’ve learned: simplicity scales. Complication stalls.
One friend built a 5-figure email list using Gmail, a free Notion board, and, wait for it, a Google Form. No ConvertKit, no webinars, no funnels.
Leapfrogging the chaos means skipping the noise. Pick one tool. Learn it deeply. Forget the rest.
More Offers Can Dilute Your Message
This one stings, I know. Especially if you’re multi-passionate (guilty) or have 16 product ideas scribbled in a notes app from 2020.
The old-school advice? Make more offers. Upsells. Downsells. Tripwires. Lead magnets for the lead magnets.
But too many offers? Confuse your audience. Hell, they confuse you. You forget what you’re actually trying to help people with.
At one point, I had four different courses running. Affiliate links in every email. Freebie PDFs with contradicting strategies. I burned out, hard. And my subscribers? They disengaged. Click rates tanked. Refunds trickled in.
Then I deleted everything but one offer. One.
Revenue didn’t drop. It doubled.
Sometimes clarity sells more than creativity. Or, more accurately, clarity allows creativity to breathe without suffocating.
More Growth Doesn’t Mean Deeper Impact
Ah, the numbers.
We chase follower counts, email subscribers, traffic spikes. But it’s easy to forget: a bigger list doesn’t mean a better list.
I once bragged (cringe) about hitting 5,000 subscribers. But when I asked a simple question in an email, only three people replied. One of them was my cousin. Another? A bot.
Compare that to a 300-person list I ran a few months later, intentionally small, personally curated. I got 97 replies. Seventy-nine opened every email for four straight weeks.
Vanity metrics scream. Quiet metrics whisper, and whisper truth.
More Hustle Doesn’t Guarantee More Freedom
Isn’t that why we do this in the first place? Freedom. Flexibility. Autonomy.
But if your business owns you, if you’re chained to your inbox, drowning in a backlog of SEO updates, repurposing content until your soul leaks out, it’s not freedom.
It’s a prison made of productivity hacks.
And yeah, I’ve been there. Hunched over my laptop at 11:42pm on a Friday night writing Instagram captions for a client who ghosted me two weeks later.
Now? I schedule two days a week for work. The rest is margin. Life. Reading. Hiking (badly). Being a human.
And guess what? The business didn’t die. It got sharper.
So here’s the thing.
Doing more might make you feel productive. But feeling productive and actually progressing? Two very different animals.
You want traction? Trim the fat. Say no to the noise. Build slower, smarter, simpler.
That’s the shift.
That’s how you win.
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