📰 Ten people who want to hear from you

A neighbor caught me at the mailbox last week and asked how I keep my photos from vanishing every time I change phones. I showed him on his own screen. It took maybe four minutes. Walking back up the driveway, it occurred to me that I had never once thought of that as something I knew. It was just something I did.

By the end of this, you will:

The last two issues circled the same quiet fact: the things you know best are the things you stopped noticing. Thirty years of a trade. A hobby you got quietly good at. A problem that cost you two years and would cost somebody else ten minutes if you simply told them how.

I am not going to make that case again. You have heard it. What I have not told you is what it is actually for.

Let me say plainly what I mean by a list, because the word gets used loosely by people selling things.

A list is a group of people who gave you their email address because they want to hear from you. That is the whole of it. Not followers. Not an audience. Names and addresses of people who said yes, send me that.

Here is why it matters more than it sounds.

Everything else online is rented. A page on a social platform can go quiet tomorrow because somebody changed a setting you never saw, with no warning and no say in it for you. A list is about the closest thing to yours that exists online. It is far harder for anyone to take away, and nobody stands between you and the people on it.

The number matters far less than people pretend. Ten people who want to hear from you are worth more than a thousand who scrolled past you once. Ten is enough to find out what people actually want. Ten is enough to learn whether the thing you know how to do is useful to somebody who does not.

And a list is not something you go out and get. It collects slowly around a person who is useful about one specific thing. Which puts you straight back at the question of what you know.

That is what the nine questions are for.

If you were here on Saturday, you have already met this one. I am putting it in front of you again on purpose, because plenty of people read that issue, thought it sounded useful, and then Saturday happened.

It is called What You Could Teach. It asks nine plain questions about work you have already done: jobs, problems, hobbies, the things people come to you about. Then it hands back what you could teach, along with an outline for a short guide on it. It emails you a copy, so there is nothing to write down. You will need to put in your email address, the same one this newsletter comes to, and it will not sign you up twice.

Fair warning about where it leads. The tool hands you into the second part of a short course I wrote. That part is free, and there is a paid part further along. Nothing is asked of you today.

A word about pace, before you go. A 2024 review of twenty studies, published through the National Institutes of Health, found that a new habit takes roughly two to five months to feel automatic, not the twenty-one days people repeat everywhere. The same review found that habits people picked for themselves held up better than habits handed to them.

So if you have started something before and it did not stick, the timeline was probably wrong. Not you.

Three things worth knowing before you start:

Answer the nine questions →

If you answer the nine questions, you will most likely finish with one sentence about yourself that you did not have this morning. That is all it is. Not a business, not a plan. A starting point.

If you skip it, nothing bad happens. Next Tuesday arrives the same as always. The only cost is that the thing you know stays exactly where it has been sitting for years, useful to you and invisible to everybody else.

You do not have to know where any of this goes. Commit to ten minutes, not to a plan. That is the whole ask.

I am curious where you are sitting today. One tap, and nothing is shared.

There is no wrong answer here, and "not yet" is a perfectly good place to be.

Talk soon,
Bob

A short story from my place, about the dog who gets me out the door every morning at 78 – no sales in it.