Stop confusing hard work with smart work
Why your career feels so overwhelming
Hi,
I see too many talented entrepreneurs drowning in overwhelm, and it’s not usually because they don’t have enough time.
Don’t get me wrong, they do have very little time. I’m not dismissing the reality that they’re time-starved. Most people are juggling day jobs, families, and the other responsibilities that demand their time.
You genuinely don’t have much time. I get it.
On top of that, humans are great about feeling guilty when they have even the smallest amount of space in their day, and stuffing more and more into the void to numb their anxiety.
But everyone has a little time, right? Otherwise, how would they even have a business in the first place? More often than not they make poor time choices with what little time they do have.
When I coach people who are overwhelmed, what I generally find are people who make terrible time investments.
To help those entrepreneurs find frictionless growth, it usually comes down to showing them how to making a better return on their limited time investment (ROI).
Once we have that sorted, those better investments compound over time and most of the rest takes care of itself.
I’ve identified five primary growth paths that exist outside of creating and shipping products:
Virality – Creating content that spreads organically to the biggest audience.
Thought leadership – Establishing expertise and authority that drives trust in your brand.
Launch cycles – Strategic book releases and promotional campaigns that drive attention to your brand.
Evangelism – Building passionate reader communities that spread the word eagerly to new people.
Partnerships – Collaborating with other authors and brands to expose yourself to new markets.
Each of these paths is legitimate and they all can work for you, but they won’t all work for you at the same level. Each growth path returns a dramatically different ROI depending on your natural tendencies.
Imagine you have one unit of energy to spend. Maybe it’s one hour a day. Maybe it’s $300/mo. Maybe it’s 200 miles of driving a month. Whatever it is, it’s finite and precious. Personally, I like to think of it like a pink energon cube from the old Transformers animated TV show.
When you invest that same unit of energy into those five different growth paths, you don’t get equal returns.
One path might return 1.5 units of energy for every 1 you invest. Another might return 5 units. A third moght return .8 units. A fourth might return 7 units and the fifth 15 units.
If you charted it out, your ROI might like the below:
As you can see, you would get good returns from multiple of these, path but the Evangelism path gives you double the ROI as the next closest path. So, if you only have one unit of energy, you should be investing 100% of it into the growth path with the highest ROI.
But we don’t do this, do we?
Instead, we scatter our energy across all five buckets. Worse, we typically invest most heavily in the path that gives us the worst return.
Why? Because we’ve been conditioned to conflate difficulty with value. Thank our Puritan Work Ethic for that one.
If something is hard, grinding, and makes us feel like we’re “really working,” we assume it must be the “right thing to do”. We wear our exhaustion like a badge of honor and mistake friction for progress.
Meanwhile, the path that would actually create momentum sits neglected because it feels “too easy” or “not serious enough.”
We’ve internalized the narrative that suffering equals significance, but the most successful entrepreneurs I work with aren’t the ones working the hardest. They’re the ones who figured out their leverage point and doubled down on it with ruthless focus.
We feel overwhelmed because we’re doing the opposite of easeful work.
When you invest your limited time into the highest-ROI growth path, you get exponentially more in return. That return creates space in your life, which creates more money, which gives you more energy, which gives you more breathing room.
Then, you can then reinvest that space into creating even more space.
It compounds, multiplies, and creates the very time affluence you’ve been desperately trying to manufacture through sheer force of will.
Once you’ve maximized that primary growth path, then you can start investing in the other paths to become time rich, then actually rich.
This is how entrepreneurs go from “I can barely keep my head above water” to “I have options” in what feels like a surprisingly short window.
It’s the difference between addition and multiplication.
So, how do you identify your highest-ROI path?
This is a tricky bit to solve for by yourself because your highest-ROI path is probably not the same as the entrepreneur you’re comparing yourself to on social media, especially since their highest ROI path is probably virality or thought leadership, and it’s likely yours isn’t the same.
The question isn’t which path is objectively “best.” The question is which path gives you the highest return for your specific skills, audience, and season of life?
Here’s how to figure it out:
Look at your data from the past year. Do a time audit. Look backwards at all your marketing tasks for the last year. Analyze every push you did, and how much it returned in the form of customers, energy, and attention.
Make a column next to your list labeled EFFECTIVENESS. Rate them 1-10 (without using 7). Seven is the default when you don’t want to make a hard choice, so you can’t use it here. You must choose either a six or an eight, for reasons that will be clear very soon. What does effective mean? That depends. What does effective mean to you? Most money? Most attention? My new subscribers? Effective means what effective means to you.
Once you have your list, it’s time to make a hard break between 1-6 and 8-10. This is why you can’t use seven. Everything on the 1-6 side falls on the INEFFECTIVE SIDE side of the barrier. Everything 8-10 falls on the EFFECTIVE side of the barrier depending on the column.
Draw five columns. One for each of the growth paths, and drop each item into them. Then, tally up the total number in each column. One should stand out the definite winner.
How does your marketing spread look? Do you have equal numbers in each column? Are you overindexing on the ones with the highest effectiveness? If you don’t have any in one column, why not?
Examine whether that feels right. Once you sit with this list, you should instinctively know whether that looks right, and the secret is that you knew the right answer all along. This was just a thinly veiled way to make you realize the answer was always inside yourself.
Does that path still feel fun? Does focusing on that growth path sound fun for you right now? The secret here is that it doesn’t matter if you do the thing with the highest ROI. What matters is you make a decision based on good data.
You might be thinking: “But what if I choose wrong? What if I invest everything in one path and it doesn’t work?”
The truth is that you’re already choosing. Right now, by splitting your focus across multiple low-return activities, you’re choosing guaranteed mediocre results. You’re choosing to be slightly visible everywhere instead of impossible to ignore somewhere.
The “risk” of focused effort is actually far lower than the risk of continued diffusion.
And if you do discover after three months of genuine focus that a particular path isn’t your highest-leverage opportunity? You’ll have learned that lesson in a quarter of the time it would have taken to learn it while juggling four other strategies simultaneously.
You’ll pivot faster, with more clarity, and with better data.
The overwhelm you’re feeling right now isn’t a sign that you need to do more things. It’s a sign that you need to do fewer things better.
I know this feels counterintuitive, but the thing that probably gives you the highest ROI is probably the one that’s the most fun for you, too.
We think the answer to overwhelm is to “work our way out of it”, but that’s the worst thing you can do. When you’re running up against a brick wall, the answer isn’t the get a sledgehammer.
The answer is to see where the closest alley is, or find a door that leads you inside. You shouldn’t ever need to smash through a brick wall because…well, how many times have you actually smashed through a brick wall in your life?
Aside from working on a construction site, the answer is probably zero.
You’ve gotten to be this many days old walking, running, driving, planing, and generally existing in the world, getting around just find without ever finding one sledgehammer, so why do you think you need one in your business?
Doesn’t that feel weird to you? Animals aren’t meant to spend unnecessary effort. We are meant to be ruthlessly efficient with the energy we have to give.
Stop spreading yourself thin across activities with diminishing returns. Find your highest-leverage path and commit to it completely.
The space you’re looking for is on the other side of that decision.
Stop confusing exhaustion with productivity. Stop mistaking complexity for sophistication. Stop wearing busy-ness as a badge of honor.
Find the one thing that works for you and compounds with the least effort. Then do that thing until it stops working or until you’ve extracted every ounce of available ROI.
The sustainable author career you want is built on leverage, not martyrdom.
So, What’s your highest-ROI growth path right now? And more importantly—what are you going to stop doing to focus on it?
Let us know in the comments.
