How I Started To Enjoy Pitching | Thinkwell Issue #4
I embarrass myself at the beach, outsource the tasks I hate doing, and share my favourite writing tip right now.
Geia Sas!
A little late this week. I tried to do a muscle-up on some playground equipment at the beach and pulled a muscle that made it painful to sit upright at my desk over the weekend 😬 How did I get so unfit?
Anyway, now that the pain is just a twinge I’m catching up!
On thriving as a nomad 🍃
I liked Athens, but I love Crete. I’m staying close to Agapi Beach Resort, an all-inclusive hotel on a stretch of golden coastline. It’s a tourism heavy area, but it’s off-season right now so there’s nobody around. I love it.
The weather is fair, I’m 100m from the beach, and the only in person conversations I have are with cats. It’s the perfect place to rest and recuperate after an adventurous, difficult month in Athens.
I’ve always preferred off-season travel. It’s cheaper, quieter, and much less stressful. I know it’s not an option for some people who might be constrained by school holidays etc. but if it’s an option for you I recommend it. It took coming to Crete for me to realise how much I needed a break from city life.
On building a business of one 🤹🏾♂️
As you know, I’ve had some trouble recently with keeping a consistent habit of pitching for work opportunities. This week I tried something new, and it’s been a game-changer. I’ve sent a dozen pitches this week and had some promising responses- a much needed confidence boost.
What did I do differently?
I outsourced some of the work.
Before you can pitch, you must find opportunities to pitch for. That means scouring job sites like Reed, Twitter hashtags like #journojobs and freelancing sites like Fiverr or Upwork. Trying to find opportunities that are in date, relevant to your skillset, and pay well enough… It’s exhausting. That’s just the first step-then you have to pitch.
I subscribed to a paid newsletter where someone compiles a list of all the new writing opportunities across the web into one list, with the key details. For $3 a month I’ve saved myself hours of work, because now I can scan through, pick the opportunities that sound good and get straight to pitching.
It turns out, I like pitching. I’m good at sales, especially when it’s my own strengths that I’m selling. It was the web-crawling that I was struggling to motivate myself to do.
There’s an important lesson in this. You don’t have to be “successful” to start outsourcing work. There are always cheap ways to reduce your workload and when you’re a business of one 🤹🏾♂️ cutting down your to-do list is invaluable.
On creating content that impacts 💥
There’s one rule of editing I follow, which will improve your writing instantly.
Once you think you’ve finished editing, cut 10%.
My process when writing is to do a quick first draft where my goal is to get words onto a page. Then I correct spelling and grammatical errors, rewrite, and reorder sections. At that point I have something that looks like a finished draft.
Then I take note of the word count and cut 10%.
I can cut about 5% by eliminating unnecessary words like “very” and “only”. I find the other 5% by cutting whole sentences, even if I think they could stay in.
Being concise in writing and speech is a skill that I’ve been practicing for years, and I think it’s one of the best things you can do to improve your communication. Even if you think everything you have to say is “good stuff” it’s logical that by eliminating the worst 10% you improve the piece.
That said, I’m confident this rule works for me because I’m naturally verbose. If you’re the opposite, the kind of person who’s naturally blunt, then maybe this isn’t advice for you. In that case, what do you do? Do you have any rules to counteract your bluntness?