One of my favourite things about building a business is creating new things and as part of this process, learning how to create those things. Over the last few years, I’ve had fun making a number of things:
- This website for starters.
- Email courses.
- eBooks.
- Audio books.
- All the branding and images that come with them.
- Training videos.
- Free resources.
- Automation systems.
There have been times during my creation process where I’ve thought “I could make this a lot easier by getting someone else to do this”. But where’s the fun in that? The majority of the fun that comes from the creative process (for me anyway) is learning how to do things. I also like the idea of operating as a “one-man shop” where I don't have to depend on other people (control freak or what?).
Sure, it may not be the most efficient way to do things, but work isn’t always about getting things done quickly. By improving my skill set I’m achieving a different kind of goal.
Here’s a recent example – Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on an update to my ebook, Guidelines. For the last edition of Guidelines, I outsourced the creation of the .mobi version to someone on Fiverr. For this update, I decided to handle the conversion myself. This meant learning how to create an ebook in Ulysses (which I use for most of my writing). I spent an unnecessary number of hours reading about ebooks and how to create them inside Ulysses. I even went a step further and created my own CSS style sheet for the book so I could customise the layout.
The good thing is, the next time I want to create an ebook, I can achieve the same result in a quarter of the time. This little time investment will pay for itself in the future, but even if it doesn’t, that’s fine too.