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Eight Writer Archetypes: Which One Are You?

As writers and content marketers, most of us fit more than one writer archetype.

Not the kind of writer. I don’t mean classifying writers by fiction or nonfiction, business or technical, poet or PR flak, or even a specific genre. Rather, I’m referring to your tribe of fellow writers who do the same style of work you do, even if it’s for a different company, publication, or industry.

Carl Jung originally used the term archetype to refer to a collective pattern of thought present in every individual — self, shadow, animus, anima, and persona.

We have seen other archetypes in different books, plays, and movies throughout the centuries. Here are a few examples.

  • Hero: Luke Skywalker, Rey Skywalker, Diana Prince (Wonder Woman), Harry Potter.
  • Wise old man: Often the mentor in the Hero’s Journey. Obi-Wan Kenobi, Dumbledore, Patches O’Houlihan.
  • Great mother: Cinderella’s fairy godmother, Queen Hippolyta, Minerva McGonagall.
  • Trickster: Deadpool, Loki, Bugs Bunny, Zaphod Beeblebrox.
  • Child: Peter Pan, Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes, Forrest Gump.
  • Devil: Voldemort, Darth Vader, Cinderella’s stepmother

And on and on. Basically, if you recognize these archetypes, then you know what an archetype is.

Writers can be collected into different archetypes as well. Different collective patterns of thought help us define who we are. We may not know it or put words to the ideas and motivations, but these collective patterns are what drive our work. You could almost say they’re the ultimate purpose that we’re feeling.

I’ve been thinking about writer archetypes and came up with my own classifications. Based on my own extensive research — I did three different Google searches — I can’t find anything else like it. (Which is odd because writers love to talk about this kind of thing.)

The Eight Writer Archetypes

So here are the eight Writer Archetypes I’ve come up with. Which one are you?

  • Informer: These are the journalists and the news writers. They tell us the who, what, where, when, why, and how of the world. If you read it in a newspaper or watched it on the news, you’re hearing from an Informer. Sportswriters and entertainment reporters are also Informers.
  • Analyst: What does the news mean? What can we infer from the latest political polls? What will the U.S. pandemic relief package do to the economic recovery? The political pundits, the economists, the financial gurus are all Analysts. The Informer gave you the latest Dow report, but it’s the Analyst who goes on CNBC and tells you why it’s good or bad. A news story will tell the latest job numbers, but the economist tells you whether that means the economy is up or down. Sports columnists are often Analysts.
  • Educator: Writers who convey knowledge to help others learn. It’s more than just being an Informer because their readers presumably already know how something works. Whether it’s a textbook, a technical manual, or even just a series of blog posts that teach you about trading cryptocurrency, the writer who writes to intentionally teach is an Educator. Many bloggers and business book authors live in this space, choosing to build their personal brand and expertise by teaching instead of selling directly.
  • Chronicler: The Chronicler is the observer of the human condition. You find a lot of newspaper columnists here. They’re not quite news-tellers (Informers), but they don’t fit anywhere else. Scott Maxwell of the Orlando Sentinel is one, as was Studs Terkel and his 45-year radio program. Historians are usually found among the Chronicler ranks, as are a few novelists and many creative nonfiction writers.
  • Advocate: The rabble-rouser with a pen. They observe the human condition, but they speak for those who have no voice to effect change. The Advocate brings awareness to a cause to get people to care about it and be informed. The Bilerico Project is an Advocate for the LGBT community, Our Human Family advocates for racial equality. (Disclosure: I write a monthly column for OHF and serve on their board.) You can even learn to be an activist writer at Bowling Green State University.
  • Persuader: One step beyond the Advocate, the Persuader works to get people to take action on something, but not necessarily a social cause. Political speechwriters are Persuaders, people in ministry are Persuaders, as is anyone who wants their reader to change their mind about a belief, opinion, or value. Public relations people work here, but marketers do not. That’s because a marketer is actually a. . .
  • Merchant: The Merchant is a Persuader who gets people to spend money. You could call this a subset of Persuader, but this is the only writing archetype where the primary focus is to get people to spend money. The other writers may hope to get money for what they do, but it’s not their function. Advertisers, grant writers, content marketers, and sales copywriters are Merchants.
  • Entertainer: Writers of fiction, poetry, stage plays, screenplays. Anything you would read, watch, or hear for entertainment or escapism lives here. You read a novel, watch a play or a TV show, or listen to a radio play written by the Entertainer. Many Entertainers can easily put one foot in the other archetypes — the Chronicler novelist, the Educator radio theater playwright, the Advocate stage playwright, but if they can only wear one hat, it’s the Entertainer’s.

As I imagined and developed these archetypes, I envisioned them on a wheel. Each writer archetype is a modified version of the one that came before it, and it sometimes dips into the next archetype. The Analyst builds on the work of the Informer, while the Educator teaches you to understand what the Analyst meant. The Chronicler educates people about life in another place, and the Advocate wants you to know how important that place is. And so on.

Writer Archetypes
The 8 writer archetypes. Each one is a progression of the one that comes before it.

The Writer Archetypes are NOT a Process. And You’re Not Limited to Just One.

But, this is not a natural process of writing. You don’t start out as an Informer and move around the clock as time goes by, progressing from one role to the next. You can make the jump from archetype to archetype within a career, a year, or a single day.

There are plenty of journalists (Informer) who became novelists (Entertainer), or Educators who take the plunge into the marketing world (Merchant), especially as content marketing becomes more educational in nature. And, of course, there are plenty of people who stay in the same archetype their entire lives.

And in some cases, you may even be working under two or even three archetypes at the same time: For example, someone in content marketing could be an Analyst-Merchant. People who write (and teach) about social justice issues are Educator-Advocates. And I’m sure there are more than a few Entertainer-Chroniclers out there.

I’m still fleshing out this idea and trying to develop it further. If you have any thoughts, ideas, or recommendations, let me hear about them. Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

(This post was originally written on March 14, 2013, and it has been edited, revised, and updated.)

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What is the Ideal Paragraph Length?

What’s the ideal paragraph length? Is there an ideal paragraph length? Are there hard-and-fast rules that govern how long our paragraphs — “grafs,” if you’re cool and/or “in the biz” — or can you just create paragraphs of different lengths willy-nilly, like some damn hippie?

The latest episode of Grammar Girl’s podcast opened with this horrifying story:

At one university, a professor will measure what he or she thinks is an ideal paragraph length. This is a photo of a section of a tape measure.

A while ago, I saw a comment on Facebook about professors who are teaching college students to make all their paragraphs the same length. The woman wrote, “There are professors at my school who deduct points, sometimes even letter grades, if paragraphs aren’t the same exact length throughout a paper. Because writing should be ‘balanced’ and it can only achieve ‘balance’ if all paragraphs are equal in length.”

Since this is one of the most preposterous things I’ve ever heard, I thought I must have misunderstood, but I asked for clarification and learned that the “uniform paragraph length rule” is so pervasive at this university that one professor uses a ruler to measure physical paragraph length in an introductory English class.

Let me say it right now, upfront.

There is no one ideal paragraph length.

According to Grammar Girl, both the Yahoo! Style Guide and the college handbook A Writer’s Reference (affiliate links) say the ideal paragraph length is between 100 and 200 words. However, “good writers treat this as a suggestion and not a hard and fast rule.”

The problem is, we live in an age of skimmers, not readers. If you’re a content marketer, blogger, or essayist, you don’t have the luxury of getting people to dig into a block of text between 100 and 200 words. Large blocks of text without any white space make our eyes glaze over — at least mine do — and we just zone out and get the early morning stares. A big block of text just looks boring as shit. People ignore long paragraphs because they’re dense, so we should avoid cramming in that many words, of which this is the 100th.

Seriously, that graf is exactly 100 words long.

That one was eight.

And that one was four.

Do you see the difference? Do you feel how much easier it felt to read the short one-sentence paragraphs instead of that 100-word monstrosity?

Like it or not, people don’t read, they skim. They prefer short paragraphs, not long chunks of text. Sure, you can slip them in once in a while, but people tend not to read them. Did you even notice I said “shit” in that 100-word paragraph up there?

Unfortunately, writing teachers tend to give young writers bad advice, which is why there are “rules” about paragraph length.

Just remember, there’s the right way to write, and the school way. And the two are frequently different.

Paragraphs Aren’t a Part of Your System, Man!

Paragraphs can — and should — be varying lengths. If you want to write 200-word paragraphs, go ahead. If you think you can manage several 200-word paragraphs in a row, be my guest. But I’ll bet if you were to do a heat map or readability study of your work, you’d find that very few people are slogging their way through that bog.

There are already several “rules of English” that we can safely ignore. Either they’re obsolete, the language has changed, or they never should have been a rule in the first place.

I’ll admit, I’m not a big fan of some of the changes that are happening to the English language. Like the fact that “literally” now means figuratively. (Seriously, go to Google and enter “define literally!” That irritates me to no end!)

A screenshot of Google's search for the phrase Define literally. It says used for emphasis to express strong feelings while not being literally true.Conversely, some things were incorrect in the first place, and they’re only now being fixed, like the whole “don’t end your sentence with a preposition” thing.

Teaching students that a paragraph must be of a certain length is also terrible teaching. Good writing will have paragraphs of varying length, from a couple hundred words (Yeesh!) to just one word. To teach otherwise is a disservice to your students because many of them will go through life thinking it’s a requirement when at best, it’s a guideline.

And before you tell me, “You have to learn the rules before you break them,” I would say 1) there’s not a real rule about paragraph length, and 2) you can teach people that paragraph lengths vary without blowing their minds.

They can make the leap from not knowing how long a graf is to knowing that it can be different. You don’t have to spend an entire semester teaching them this one rule, only to tell them, “Just kidding!” at some undetermined point in the future.

Bottom line: there’s no ideal paragraph length, and you can make them any size you want.

Seriously.

Photo credit: Qimono (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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What’s the Difference Between Satire and Parody?

Although the two words are used interchangeably, there’s a difference between satire and parody.

For one thing, parody is considered an element of satire. Both use exaggeration humor, and irony. But HG.org considers parody to fit within satire.

Or as, British writer Luke Edley said, “parody is a brick, and satire is the wall.”

So what’s the difference?

In essence, parody makes fun of an original work. The Copyright Alliance says it’s a comedic commentary about a work, that requires an imitation of the work. On the other hand, satire makes fun of an aspect of the world but doesn’t rely on a previous work to do it.

So parody uses (usually) copyrighted work for its commentary, while satire doesn’t.

A Mind Map of Satire & Parody by Austin Kleon
A Mind Map of Satire & Parody by Austin Kleon
It’s the difference between Harvard Lampoon’s Bored Of The Rings or Barry Trotter and The Unauthorized Parody and my own book, Mackinac Island Nation

Bored Of The Rings is a rip-roaring retelling of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings and Barry Trotter rips off the more popular Harry Potter series. Meanwhile, Mackinac Island Nation is an original work that does not draw on any previously copyrighted work at all. (And it sold a lot less than either of the books. Shut up.)

Mackinac Island Nation makes fun of, and draw attention to, the attitude of a certain segment of American society, while Bored Of The Rings and Barry Trotter just make fun of popular fantasy/urban fantasy novels.

(Also, both parodies rely on the cardinal sin of using joke names, which, to my mind, is the lowest form of humor. Lower than puns even! I can deal with puns, but Frito Bugger and Spam Gangree, or Barry Trotter and Lon Measley of Hogwash School of Witchcrap? BLEAH! Joke names are never funny and the authors should be ashamed.)

Parody can also make fun of public figures, such as politicians and celebrities, in order to make its (satirical) point. Saturday Night Live is an example of parody and satire coming together, and it will sometimes parody characters, TV shows, and popular movies.

On the other hand, South Park is usually satire without being parody. They don’t borrow from original source material, but they do make fun of public figures and current events.

Are parody and satire considered protected speech?

Satire and parody are used primarily, says the Freedom Forum Institute, “to attack and ridicule individuals’ moral and character flaws, such as vice, unfairness, stupidity or vanity.”

According to the website HG.org, satire is certainly protected by the First Amendment:

This makes both satire and parody powerful tools when making fun of, and pointing out the foibles of, politicians, celebrities, athletes, and other public figures, as well as certain political attitudes and beliefs.

From Wikimedia Commons: This would be the evolution of violence: starting from a raving primate, we develop into a nose-detecting homo habilis, then a greek hoplite looking at the next man, a roman legionary, who sits weeping because of the mockeries of a satiric poet.
From Wikimedia Commons: This would be the evolution of violence: starting from a raving primate, we develop into a nose-detecting homo habilis, then a greek hoplite looking at the next man, a roman legionary, who sits weeping because of the mockeries of a satiric poet.

Just remember that the First Amendment only applies to the government and government agencies limiting your freedom of expression. Private entities, like a social media site, retail store, or even an individual, can make rules about what you can and can’t say when you’re on their website, in their store, or in their home.

Even if you wrote a great parody about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg (and called him — God help me — Fart Zucker-booger), Facebook would be allowed to delete your otherwise brilliant parody from their website. Even though Mark Zuckerberg is a public figure, and you’re allowed to parody him in a story, Facebook is a private entity and they can remove your content.

But if you hosted it on your own website, then there’s nothing Facebook could do about it.

What’s the difference between pastiche and parody?

A pastiche is like a parody, only there’s no intent to ridicule or attack. The whole point is to recreate and replicate the original work, and to recreate the original experience.

For example, there are hundreds of Sherlock Holmes pastiches. Bill Peschel (who said the above line) over at Peschel Press has published a couple hundred of them, while Otto Penzler of Mysterious Press published The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories.

There is even a database of over 9,000 entries of different Sherlock Holmes pastiches, as maintained by Philip K. Jones (link downloads an Excel [.xls] file).

The whole point of reading most of these pastiches is to make you think there are some additional Sherlock Holmes stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle. You’re meant to experience those same feelings that you had when you read the original 60 stories in the Sherlockian canon.

A parody is not meant to create that feeling, it’s meant to (usually) get a laugh by using the original source material.

In other words, a parody could be considered a pastiche, but not all pastiches are parodies, simply because they’re trying to replicate the original work and recreate the original experience.

Photo credit: Austin Kleon (Flickr, Creative Commons)
Photo credit: Utente:M1ka1L (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons 3.0)

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Content Marketers Need to Study Sportswriters

Sportswriters are some of the best writers around.

Period, end of sentence.

Especially the sports columnists.

Go into any newsroom anywhere, and read samples of the best work from each writer, and the sports columnists will have some of the best writing in the entire room.

That’s because they’re some of the best storytellers around. They can tell a story about any person, pulling on a tiny thread in a person’s life, and discover some of the most interesting, little-known revelations about a person that lives such a public-but-unknown life.

They’re the ones who ask an NFL running back about his mom and write about how she worked three jobs but never missed a game. They write about a pitcher’s relationship with his dad, and how they still talk on the phone after every game. They tell you about how a basketball player missed her senior year of high school with a knee injury and spent nine months in painful rehab just to be able to walk again, let alone get drafted in the first round.

Anyone who’s a fan of sports, a fan of good writing, or both, knows the sports columnists who have a mastery of the language, can tell a great story, and pull something interesting out of tiny details. These are a few of my favorites:

Grantland Rice, one of the best sportswriters in history
Grantland Rice, considered by many to be the father of long-form journalism.
  • Tom Junod, the guy who wrote the Mr. Rogers story, Can You Say Hero?, that made me cry three times as I read it. (It’s the story that got turned into the Tom Hanks movie.)
  • Tom Verducci, baseball writer extraordinaire. When Hank Aaron died this past January, there was only one person Sports Illustrated could ask to write his obituary. If you only like baseball a little bit, read Tom Verducci; he’ll make you love it.
  • Pat Jordan. I’m reading his Tom Seaver And Me book right now. I picked it up with the intention of reading two pages on a quick break from work today and ended up reading for 30 minutes.
  • Roger Angell, the centenarian baseball writer for the New Yorker, and the guy who made me believe in long sentences again. I have five of Roger’s books and am always on the lookout for more. His story, “Three for the Tigers is my favorite Angell story, and his line “Everything you do in life, you do so that your son will go to ball games with you, and then he doesn’t want to,” broke my heart.
  • Jemele Hill takes shit from no one. She called Donald Trump a white supremacist in 2017 and would not apologize. She even worked here in Orlando as a columnist for the Orlando Sentinel for two years. She writes about social justice issues in sports and makes me understand how the two are related.
  • Sally Jenkins’ stories on the NCAA, tennis, golf, and women’s sports has earned her numerous Sports Columnist of the Year awards. Her February 5th column on Patrick Mahomes made me question whether he could outthink Peyton Manning, and whether I wanted to become a Patrick Mahomes fan.
  • You can hear interviews with many of these writers on Jeff Pearlman’s Two Writers Slinging Yang podcast. If you want to be any kind of writer, every episode of this podcast has a nugget of great writing advice. And his book on the USFL (Football For A Buck is the definitive history on the renegade league of the early 1980s.

There are dozens — hundreds, even — of writers I could name, but I don’t have the room. These are just a few of my favorites, but I’ve got a few dozen sports books from a variety of writers, some on topics I know nothing about. Even if I’m not a fan of the sport or the athlete, I’m a fan of the writer.

(My one non-sportswriter recommendation would be Dave Thompson’s book, Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell: The Dangerous Glitter of David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed.)

Why Should Content Marketers Study Sportswriters?

I’ve often said that content marketers need to read daily

I’ve also said they need to stop reading blogs.

Bad writing breeds bad writing, and reading bad writing will infect you with bad habits and sloppy tendencies. Most blogs tend to be poorly written — read my post “Half of All Written Content Online is Sh*t” — and you’re not going to improve by reading someone worse than you.

Instead, I usually recommend that content marketing writers read fiction books by established writers. Find your favorite writers and genres and devour several of them. Pay attention to their writing style and voice, and figure out how you can steal emulate parts of their style.

But you can also find some of the best creative non-fiction writing among the sportswriters and sports columnists. Pick a few and learn their style, then expand to their colleagues and see what it is that they do so well. Pick up one of The Best American Sportswriting annual books (or get The Best American Sportswriting of the Century) and read what some of the finest sportswriters in the country have done.

Then, once you have your favorites, find out who their idols and favorite writers were, and read their work. And if you can, find out those writers’ idols and inspirations, and read their stuff. I’m now reading works by Ring Lardner from the 1910s and 1920s, and Red Smith from the 1930s – 1970s, as I follow the sportswriting family tree to its roots.

Who are your favorite sportswriters? What’s one sportswriter you want to read more of or learn more about? Do you have a favorite or one you don’t like at all? Share your comments.

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Half of All Written Content Online Is Sh*t

To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, half of all written content is shit.

While he actually said “the first draft of anything is shit,” I would maintain that this applies to all online content in general for a couple of reasons:

  1. If we look at a normal bell curve of distribution, you know there’s a halfway mark where everything above it is average, above average, and excellent. That means that the other half is average, below average, and terrible.
  2. Most content marketers publish their first draft.

Illustration of a Bell Curve by Abhijit Bhadur. It's a great representation for the quality of written content available to us.That doesn’t seem like so much until you realize that there are 70 million blog posts being produced on WordPress.com alone.

In other words, of that 70 million, exactly 35 million of them are above average, and 35 million are below average.

This does not include all the articles appearing on Blogger, Tumblr, LiveJournal, and all the other self-hosted blogs and websites. Let’s be generous and say there are 200 million articles posted every month.

I’ve lost count of the number of so-called content marketers and personal branding experts who publish sub-par blog articles on a daily basis. They issue a warning statement boast about how they wrote their entire week’s worth of blog articles on a Sunday afternoon, taking only two hours to complete the entire week’s work.

That works out to roughly 24 minutes to write a single blog article.

It shows, guys! It shows!

If what Ernest says is true, and the first draft of anything is shit, and half of anything is worse than average, there’s a very good chance that your 24-minute article is hot garbage.

So if you think you can get away with writing a single blog article in less than 30 minutes and expect it to be any good, you’ve got another think coming.

5 Quick and Dirty Tips to Improve Your Writing

Ernest Hemingway at the typewriter. He would agree that half of all online content is shit.There are entire books that will help you improve your writing, but let me give you these five quick tips to improve what you’ve already written. Even if it’s something you wrote a few weeks ago, you owe it to yourself and your readers to practice these five steps.

  1. Adopt a process of Write, Rewrite Twice, Polish Once. (Trust me, this one tip alone will make all the difference in the world.)
  2. Use Grammarly.com to find and correct any issues. Download it for Mac or Windows, and install the plugin on your web browser(s). Grammarly will check your writing anywhere and everywhere, which means it can help you identify problems in your email, tweets, and Facebook updates, which can help you correct some bad habits.
  3. Read your work out loud. If necessary, change the point size so the text lays out differently on the page. This forces you to look more closely as you read. You’ll catch double words like “the the” or sentences that you forgot to.
  4. Use Hemingwayapp.com. This works much in the same way that Grammarly does, but it forces you to look at sentence complexity, adverb usage, and reading level. (Remember, you want a lower reading level, not higher.)
  5. Edit paragraphs so there are no orphans. “Widows and orphans” is a typography term. (Read about it here.) In this case, orphans are single words on their own line at the end of a paragraph. As you’re writing your piece, edit each paragraph so there are no orphans. This will force you to tighten up the entire paragraph until you can pull that orphan up to the previous line.

    6. Excellent Work Is Being Buried Under Mountains of Shit

    There’s enough content online that the good stuff is getting buried. Remember, we estimated 200 million blog articles per month?

    Even if we created 5 million “excellent” pieces of work — something that’s two standard deviations from the dead-center average — it’s being buried by 195 million pieces of everything else.

    While you probably won’t write THE ABSOLUTE BESTEST NUMERO UNO BLOG ARTICLE OF ALL TIME!! this month (you have a 1-in-200-million chance), you can at least write a very interesting and memorable article that your readers will remember, love, and be inspired by. And you can get more of them if you can share it through social media and some clever SEO.

    If you can do these five things — especially #s 1 and 2 — you’ll greatly improve your written content online. At the very least, you can get it above that halfway mark in the distribution curve. It’s not that hard, you just have to spend a little more than 24 minutes on a single blog article.

    Photo credit: Bell Curve by Abhijit Bhaduri (Flickr, Creative Commons 2.0)
    Photo credit: GPA Photo Archive (Flickr, Creative Commons 0)

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Develop Your Strengths, Not Your Weaknesses

Several years ago (in the pre-social media days), I was the director of sales and marketing for a software company. My job was to promote our software and to make sure that people, organizations, and state governments bought it.

I was in charge of trade shows, the website, brochures, press releases, and so on, not to mention selling the product all over the United States, as well as other parts of the world. I was making sales calls, traveling, designing, and doing things the sole marketing person in a company does. These were my strengths, and they were the reason I was hired.

Which is why my boss said I should develop my customer support skills.

“Why would I do that?” I asked. “I don’t do customer support.”

“I just think it’s important that you strengthen your customer support skills, since you don’t do it very often.” He added, “I may even have you start learning some coding.”

“So will the customer support team learn how to work trade shows and create brochures?”

“No, why would they do that?” he said, completely seriously.

His rationale was that, since I didn’t have strong customer support skills and I didn’t know how to code, I needed to learn or improve these skills.

It's important to get better at your strengths, rather than trying to improve your weakest areasI asked him if it wouldn’t be smarter for me to just focus on getting better at marketing or graphic design, and he said he didn’t think that was as important. I needed to be well-rounded and well-versed in everything the company did. (I was also the only one in the entire company that he thought needed to be this well-rounded.)

Your Strengths Make You Money, Not Your Weaknesses

I see a lot of companies make this mistake, whether large or small. They think they and their employees should be jacks- and jills-of-all-trades. Everyone should be a generalist. Everyone should know how to do everything. As a result, no one is great anything, they’re all just mediocre at a lot of things.

(It’s no surprise that these companies are not leaders in their industry.)

The pressure to be a generalist is especially high for entrepreneurs. We often have to do everything because there is no one else.

That pressure wastes more time and kills more businesses because we spend all our time doing the things we’re not good at, which takes us away from our strengths, which is how we make our money.

The dentist who spends four hours a week handling her bookkeeping and staffing requirements is missing four hours of billable time. That’s four hours’ worth of patients she’s missing out on. And if she tries to do her administrative stuff in the evenings and on the weekends, that’s just cutting into personal time, which wrecks her work-life balance, which is the whole reason she started her practice in the first place: to have a fulfilling personal life.

The bookstore owner who spends an hour or two a day handling his inventory and fulfilling ecommerce orders is losing the time spent dealing with face-to-face customers. To solve the problem, he’ll end up hiring someone to help deal with customers when he should really hire someone to fill orders and count inventory.

The consultant who spends three hours each week researching possible new clients instead of actually dealing with client work is losing 156 hours of productivity per year (3 hours x 52 weeks/year = 156 hours). That’s nearly an entire month of time wasted on not creating products or writing reports that help him get paid. In effect, he only worked for 11 months in a year.

In all of these cases, the business owner is spending time doing the things they don’t really need to be doing. Instead, they’re doing things that take time away from the things they should be doing. Their weaknesses are sapping their strengths and they’re losing money.

And instead of trying to solve that problem, they’ll find ways to improve their skills in that weak area. The dentist will invest in bookkeeping software and watch videos on how to use it. The bookstore owner will get better ecommerce software (and learn how to program it), and work to streamline the shipping process. The consultant will invest in business databases or lead gen software and spend more time writing the content needed to bring in new clients.

This is a terrible waste of time, and we need to stop it. This is where it makes sense to hire someone else to do the things we’re not good at.

The dentist can hire a bookkeeper to manage the books for 4 hours a week. The money she spends will be a lot less than the money she makes in seeing patients for 4 hours.

The bookstore owner can hire a college kid to handle the shipping and inventory. Let them streamline the process for you and figure out a way to make it more efficient, then they can teach it to the bookstore owner.

The consultant can hire a virtual assistant to do all the client research for him, even setting his sales appointments.

Don’t spend time or money trying to develop your weak skills. Hire someone whose strengths fill your weak areas so you can focus on getting better at the things that make you money. Try to become one of the best at the thing you do. Get great at your strengths, not slightly better at your weaknesses.

If you’re a writer, take writing classes or read books on writing. If you’re a graphic designer, watch design videos and practice on pet projects. If you’re a dentist, go to conferences and take continuing education classes. If you own a bookstore, focus on your customers and finding new ways to bring people into your store.

For the things you’re weak at, hire a professional to get it done. Hire the graphic designer whose work is continually growing. Hire the writer who creates great work. Work with the consultant who produces great results for their clients.

Trying to strengthen your weaknesses, especially those so completely unrelated to the thing you actually do, is a colossal waste of time and can have a negative effect on the growth of your company. Get better at what you’re good at and you can charge more and work less.

Photo credit: Stocksnap (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)