Beyond the Book Podcast: The Investor v.s. Day Trading Approach to Publishing

Hey sidekick plus members, I want to share this brief video on a mindset that honestly changed how I look at publishing. And it's the investor versus day trader approach to authorship. So let me walk through both. An investor is someone who sees a market, sees intellectual property, or wants to create, that wants to build a readership where they're going to build value over time. Oftentimes when you're truly investing in a business, it doesn't grow overnight. It takes years to build and compounds over time. But that compounding is really powerful. And staying in the game, not pulling out, right? That's the whole thing with investing. Keeping your money in the SP 500 or wherever else you invest for a long period of time is how you win. And it's those authors who build up those readerships who really are investing in an area of the market where there's been a defined readership for a long time, where they're creating great products and great stories and building up a backlist over time. That asset and that readership is going to keep compounding, where all of a sudden all that hard work you put in is going to pay off. And you know, 10% a year growth, which is what the S and P tends to grow at, that feels like nothing in the beginning, but then becomes everything but. There's another approach to creating content, there's another approach to publishing. And I think so many of us are often pulled to this approach even when it's not right for us. And this is the day trading approach. And I think so often our society glorifies the notion of day trading literally in stocks. Like if you are someone who invests your money for your retirement picking the next great stock, right? But likewise, it's finding that next great story idea, that next genre that no one's reading in that next market, where you just hit a vein and can find an arbitrage, really, where there's ideally less people creating content than the demand and you're able to exploit that and make a lot of money quickly. That's the day trading approach. There's nothing wrong to that. Sometimes it just leads to way higher ups and downs. And this career already has a lot of high ups and downs. And if you are feeling defeated, you have to sit back and think to yourself, are you continually day trading over and over again, taking one hit, then another hit in a completely different market or industry and almost starting like 10 different penny stocks at once? Or are you being an investor and have you just not had that big hit yet? But it's okay because things are compounding slowly over time. I don't know about you, but this approach really helped me and I love to be an investor. Ideally I want to grow as fast as I can, but I'm doing so in a way in which I'm taking long term bets and putting my all into something specific, genre specific areas of content and niches that I'm creating in that I believe in. But I won't hate it on a day trader. I won't hate on a day trader. Just know the game you're playing and know why you're playing it. And then when things maybe don't go according to plan or things don't grow as fast as you want, you now understand huh, I'm playing the investor game or huh, I'm playing the day trader game? That trade lost so I gotta try and win the next one. So everyone has an amazing rest of the day. Happy Sunday. In this email that you just got, you got a lot of information about our first ever Sidekick plus chat. Super pumped for it. I'll see you then.