How to get ideas for your daily emails

Okay, here's why daily email works, beyond just the numbers…

A few days ago I showed you all the stuff you can put inside a spreadsheet. But then there's the intangibles. The stuff you can't really measure as you’re going along... you can only look back later and realize how big of an impact it’s made.

For example…

If you’re forced to articulate something new and interesting about your craft every single day, you get better faster. The version of you who does this is at an extreme advantage compared to the version of you who doesn’t.

And yeah, writing isn’t the only mechanism…

The person who’s busy doing “Warrior II” might technically get better at yoga faster than the person writing an email about “Warrior II”. But the person writing about “Warrior II” is becoming the person who can explain it, teach it, sell it and to be honest, even just picturing yourself doing “Warrior II” while writing about it makes you physically better at it. And when it comes down to it, nothing in this world is purely physical anyway.

There’s always the mental, emotional, and spiritual elements too.

And the writing element benefits them all.

But it’s not just writing. A YouTube video would provide much of the same benefit. But the point of all this is to say: the act of articulating your craft on a regular basis makes you better at it. Better at doing it, better at communicating it, and better at marketing it all at once.

So that’s the personal growth side. But then there’s the part that’s easy to overlook…

The relationship side.

And this is the real benefit of writing daily emails. There’s a lot of people out there who hear “Daily email” and flinch. They think “too many”, “unsubscribe”, “it’s spam”, “blah blah blah”, but that reaction only comes from people who used to being marketed at and they assume daily email means daily coercion.

When in reality it’s: here’s something useful, every single day.

Something you can actually use to get where you’re going. And when you’re ready for more, I’m here. And if you’re never ready, that’s fine too… I hope you get something out of it anyway. And even though I’ve never spoken to a lot of people on this list one-to-one, many of them I have. And that’s who I’m writing to. It often looks like a one way communication but it isn’t.

Right now I’m talking more than you are, sure… but you’re probably have a conversation in your head while reading this, and maybe someday we’ll get to meet and I’ll hear your side of it. Or maybe you’ll just reply and tell me now because I read those too.

All to say, you will probably always underestimate how much you’re actually depositing into the relationship bank account by showing up like this.

It’s not about just marketing your stuff every single day. It’s about being generous with your craft. And when you do that, your marketing gets so good that the selling becomes irrelevant.

Which brings to the question I hear more than any other:

“Where do I get ideas for writing emails every single day?”

First thing I'll point you to is a tiny little book called "A Technique for Producing Ideas" by James Webb Young. You can read the whole thing in an afternoon. And it's the book that helped me get to writing daily emails again after a brief intermission. And it’s the book that helped me get to posting four times a day on Threads over the past three years in just a few hours each week.

These days, I can put out a mountain of content without much effort, and huge chunk of why is sitting inside those pages.

And the whole premise of the book is that ideas are nothing more than a new combination of old elements. You don’t manufacture ideas out of thin air. You gather the raw material, turn it over in your mind, and when you walk away, your ideas magically appear.

So if you’re wondering where those ideas are going to come from, I’d start by taking a look inside that little book.

That's it for today.

Talk soon,

Kevin Hood