Why I Failed at Productivity Coaching

tl;dr - people don't like being told to do things 😂

Nov 01, 2024

I have totally failed at launching a productivity coaching business.

I want to stress that this is not a rant post, or a whiny post, or a pity post! I actually find the whole thing hilarious, and it falls under the “do as I say, not as I do” umbrella.

And, importantly, I still do productivity coaching for writers!

I am very good at helping authors figure out the what, how, and when of what they want to accomplish. It’s more like a 1:1 mastermind, and I’ve been told that I am “the cure for analysis paralysis!”

But is it a successful business model for me?

No. No, it’s not.

Alas.

See, here’s the thing: most people, and especially creative people like writers and artists, do not like being told to do things.

Which most personal coaches know, to be honest. There is a fine line between being bossy and being a coach, and the best coaches walk the razor’s edge of making their clients think that all their plans are their own ideas.

(They are wrong.)

I can softball too, but not for long. At some point, I usually get to the stage of saying “if you fail to do the work, then you are working to fail.”

And whew people do not like hearing that!

But! I don’t think it is an issue of them being lazy, or not wanting to put the effort in. Usually these same people work incredibly hard from morning to night, doing things like being parents, caretakers, business owners, students, authors, artists, and community members. Yet, with so many of them, we get to a stage where I have to point out that they are continuing to not do the thing they swear on their own grave that they want to do.

So what is really the problem, here?

This might be due to a perfectionist drive, or insecurity, or fear of success. Maybe all of the above!

More often, though, my clients feel immobilized because they believe they have to know how to do the thing correctly first. Why? Because they believe at an almost superstitious level that doing it correctly in the proscribed way will insulate them from failure.

But here is the hard truth which is my job to deliver to them: doing the thing is more important than doing it correctly.

This is, of course, not always true. I want a surgeon to do correct surgery, for instance. I prefer that people drive their cars correctly in the proper lanes and obeying the traffic laws. Please I beg!!!!

But when it comes to personal goals, and especially creative goals, there is rarely just one path to take. Even when two people have very similar aspirations, the steps they each need to take can be wildly different. There are many ways to be an athlete; there are many ways to be an author; there are many ways to paint a picture.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a deep-seated human drive to discover how to do something “the correct way,” believing that finding that correct way will make everything easier and make them more successful. It’s why how-to books, YouTube channels, and short vids are so damn popular. You can tell we are a predator species because we are always relentlessly hunting down instructions.

Sure, some of us vibe with winging it, and six or seven times out of ten that works for us. (Guilty as charged!) But when the process, or the bookshelves, break down, we retreat to our corner and hope to gods that someone on reddit solved our problem first.

Tip jar!

Yet, for all that we want to do things correctly and we want clear-cut instructions on how to do that, the vast majority of people simply do not enjoy being ordered around (unless they do, which is an entirely different topic for an entirely different blog! LOL!).

Industry and, by extension, capitalism have been trying to corral us for centuries. But don’t forget that military organizations got there first: follow orders, wear the proper uniform, do your time, don’t talk back. But it’s not easy, which is why boot camp has such a reputation for brutality: the goal is to break down the recruit and build them into an obedient soldier who follows orders without question. That goes against the natural instinct of the majority of humans, which is why the breaking-down part is so crucial to the process.

It is this clash of competing desires that results in a quandary: “tell me how to do something correctly but don’t tell me to do it.”

When I work with clients, I’m often in the awkward position of suggesting the exact opposite: telling them to DO SOMETHING while also telling them that there is no one, single, most correct way to do it.

Instead, they hold out for better instructions, or perfect weather, or the most high-end tools. Often, they turn the whole experience on its head: “I’ll start painting after I’ve learned everything about technique and bought all the best, most expensive materials.”

Learning technique and using top-grade materials will help you become a better painter, absolutely true! But first ya’ gotta paint some shit.

When I started podcasting I was super concerned about sounding professional. I wanted the best equipment I could afford, I tried to learn everything about sound editing/processing, I fussed over all the details. Regardless of all that effort, my early podcasts were not very good, and I was so defeated! Yet nowadays I think I do a pretty good job podcasting both on my own shows and as a guest on other people’s. The reason for that is not that I upgraded to high-end equipment or better cover art, it’s because I’ve been doing this for going on six+ years—not consistently, and not always well, but persistently.

Take any podcaster or vlogger you like and go back to their early work, and you’ll see a similar arc. They improved over time by getting more comfortable doing the work and becoming more familiar with what works for them in that format. Read the early work of your favorite author and you will probably be amazed at how much worse it is than what they produced later in their careers.

You can read every book out there on how to write a novel and listen to every podcast that exists on how to be a better writer, but the only way that you will actually accomplish either goal is to sit down and write.

In the end, my advice to my clients is always the same: worry less about doing everything perfectly and just do the work.

I never offer short cuts or sure things—there is no guarantee of success based on a formula on “how to do it BEST.” Just the same old advice, often repeated and rarely heeded: Do the work.

But people don’t like being told to do it.

Which is why I’m a failed productivity coach. 🤣