Here’s the thing about questions, they can mess with you.
Not the surface-level, motivational quote type. I mean the kind of question that crawls into your brain at 2:17am, wedges itself between your doubts and your dreams, and then refuses to shut up. Those questions? They change you. Or break you. Or push you into figuring things out in a way that bullet points and step-by-step list-building guides never could.
I didn’t get serious about email until, honestly?, I got tired of chasing ghosts. Algorithms. Likes. A hundred ways to grow an audience, all of them noisy. Shiny. Forgettable. I needed something steadier. Something that felt like mine. That’s when the question hit me.
“What if this list was the last thing I ever got to build?”
That sounds… dramatic. I know. But hear me out.
What if you stopped treating your email list like a numbers game, and started treating it like a legacy project? Like the place you’d send your weirdest, most honest thoughts? The stuff you actually believe, not just the stuff that gets clicks?
Because when I asked myself that? Everything changed. My welcome sequence stopped sounding like a corporate brochure. I started writing like I’d already earned someone’s attention. Like they mattered. Because they do.
“Would I open this email if it landed in my inbox?”
It’s wild how many people forget this. We become marketers and suddenly start talking like we’ve been possessed by LinkedIn ghosts. Formal. Distant. Stiff.
I used to write these long, keyword-stuffed intros. Polished. Impressive. And totally boring. Then one day, I wrote an email about burning pasta while crying over a $19 Stripe payment. That email got 56 replies. One person offered to send me groceries. Another said, “I thought I was the only one.”
That’s when it clicked. Realness cuts deeper than polish. Always.
So now? Before I hit send, I ask that one thing: would I open this? Or would I scroll past it while waiting for my UberEats driver to show up with soggy fries?
“Am I building this list to help people, or just to feel important?”
Yikes. This one stings a little.
There was a stretch where I obsessed over subscriber count. I refreshed ConvertKit like it was a stock ticker. Watched unsubscribes like betrayal. I thought growth equaled impact. But it turns out? Not always.
Impact shows up in smaller, quieter ways. Like the single mom who replied, “I used your freebie and finally landed a freelance gig.” Or the student in Cape Town who said, “You reminded me I’m not invisible.”
You can have 10,000 subscribers and still be yelling into a void.
Or you can have 173, and change lives. Yours included.
“What would this look like if it were easy?”
I stole this one from Tim Ferriss. But I ask it almost every week now.
Because we make things harder than they need to be. Like, wildly harder. I once built an entire 5-email nurture sequence, rebranded three times, agonized over the font pairing, and forgot to include the opt-in link.
Meanwhile, a friend sent out a plain-text email with a Google Doc link and made $2,400 in two hours.
We confuse fancy with effective. But sometimes? Easy is the strategy. A one-page lead magnet. A story instead of a funnel. A direct ask instead of a complicated automation. It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. It just has to be useful. Or kind. Or honest.
“If I disappeared tomorrow, would anyone notice?”
Okay. Dark. But necessary.
There was this moment, I remember it too vividly, when I hadn’t emailed my list in over a month. Life had been… life. Burnout. Some family stuff. An identity crisis about selling digital products. I told myself no one would care.
And then one day, I get this email: “Hey. Haven’t heard from you. Just checking you’re okay.”
From a stranger.
That wrecked me, in the best way. It reminded me this list? It’s not just marketing. It’s a relationship. People are paying attention. Quietly, sometimes. But still.
You’re not yelling into the void. You’re whispering into someone’s Tuesday morning. Their inbox full of crap. And maybe your words are the only human thing they’ll read all day.
That matters.
So yeah. Ask better questions. Not just about tactics, but about truth. About the kind of impact you actually want to make. Because list building isn’t just about growth.
It’s about resonance.
Clarity.
And a kind of quiet, email-sized intimacy that no algorithm can replicate.
Let it be messy. Let it be inconsistent. But let it be real.
So… what question will you ask today?
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