“I don’t want to limit my readers’ access to my work, but I do want to grow my email list to support my career as an author,” I told my friend Herbert. “I don’t want to have calls to action everywhere, drown them in ‘content upgrades,’ or be super pushy with my signup forms. But if I don’t—and, right now, I’m not—my subscriber base stagnates or goes down.”
Herbert also is most generous on his daily blog. There are no ads. No popups. No intrusions of any kind. Unlike me, he doesn’t even have an email signup form at the end of each post. Only a single page where readers must deliberately go in order to join his newsletter.
Referring to one of our mutual role models, Herbert told me: “I appreciate how Seth Godin just publishes ebooks and PDFs without gating. There is something really confident about that.” I jokingly responded that Seth also hasn’t had money problems since selling his company for over $20 million in 1998, but that just might be part of the point: Had it not been for his unapologetic generosity, Seth likely never would have gotten to where he is today.
A scarcity mindset can twist our perception in the strangest ways. “Do I try to sell 10 units of this for $100 each? Or do I give it all away?” “Do I share the best idea up front, or do I make people give me their email for it?” The answer depends on the situation, but the path to getting to that answer is always obvious: Which one is the right thing to do? And if you find yourself wondering, “Can I afford to do this?” that’s how you know the scarcity trap has already snapped.
Most of the time, we’re perfectly capable of doing the right thing. We’d just rather take a shortcut. Instead of accepting a short but guaranteed delay in arriving at our dream destination, we’d rather risk driving off a cliff. Isn’t that silly? I know, right? It’s totally silly.
Don’t sweat. You can afford to do the right thing.