How to get your business to pull you forward

For me, there are two major reserves of energy. Drawing on grind energy drains you until you complete the task. The small hit of dopamine upon completion rarely feels worth it. You use grind energy to complete tedious but necessary tasks that you don't particularly enjoy. Pull energy is how you feel when you look forward to the work and can't stop yourself from starting on it (and maybe even completing it!). Pull energy gives you joy and makes your work feel like play.

All of my best work has been done under the influence of pull energy

The goal of this article is to pick out the situations which created pull, so I can replicate them more consistently.

I've read about different kinds of authors, and there is a parallel between those who meticulously plan their book (grind) vs those who let it flow out of them fully formed (pull).

Work which pulled me, that I could not resist doing:

Do you see the pattern? Someone had paid me, asked for my help, or I felt the pain myself

So, how can I create more pull energy?

How do we create virtuous cycles of pull energy that never run out?

The best work is work you can't resist doing. The best marketing is marketing you can't resist doing. The best money is money you couldn't resist making.

They say content marketing takes 6 months to kick in. You may not realize it when you first start, but you're probably going to spend at least 12 months trying to make your niche work. It is worth starting right away, but how do we may writing enjoyable? I haven't taken Amy Hoy's 30x500, but I have read Year Of Hustle and both Jonathan Stark and Philip Morgan have told me how much they look forward to speaking to their audience.

How I'd create pull for myself in my next business:

You'll notice this is almost exactly what Amy recommends.

A very low amount of grind activation energy is needed to begin:

Once you have set up the preceding virtuous cycle, you can repeat it with new products and services, and only include CTAs to what people haven't already bought. This idea is Brennan's. Brennan: thanks for coming over for steak before I'd even begun solo-consulting and recommending that I read The Brain Audit (my #2 favorite book); Getting Everything You Can Out of Everything You've Got (partially read); The Sticking Point Solution (unread still); Influence (unread still); and Inc Yourself (partially read). I really enjoyed the Double Your Freelancing Rate book (née The Blueprint).

The above compares very favorably to my main strategy for making sales, cold outreach emails:

Amy Hoy has said that she and Alex Hillman have spent loads of time figuring out how to get 30x500 students to actually finish the course. I imagine they figured out how to break the process of building a business into stacking bricks which each give well-defined satisfaction and accomplishment (I stole and maybe warped her analogy :).

Remove grind from your life

Ask yourself: what's painful? Then ask yourself if you can delegate it, buy a tool/book/service to help you, or quit altogether (and renegotiate).

If you have high expectations for yourself, you'll frequently need to quit certain work and renegotiate with yourself. Why? The tyrant dictator part of your brain is pushing you to grind out work that is so low ROI or doomed to fail that your gut rebels. Then the rest of your brain notices your gut, catches up, and realizes it has to make a change.

Grind that you should remove from your life:

Go forth and create a virtuous cycle of energy creation in your business

Your thoughts on this would be much appreciated. What virtuous cycles drive your business? What virtuous cycles drive your personal life‡? My email is david å† dtrejo.com.

Yours,
David Trejo

PS Special thanks to Jonathan Stark, Samir Said, Philip Morgan, Brennan Dunn, Amy Hoy, Alex Hillman, and Marcus Blankenship for their writing and advice. Peter Lyons, thanks for listening so closely this morning and saying it was insightful :).

‡ I offer to cook for my friends' dinner parties. I go to and get invited to WAY more dinner parties :)

David Trejo

Engineer at Chime & consultant. Past clients include Credit Karma, Aconex, Triplebyte, Neo, the Brown Computer Science Department, Voxer, Cloudera, and the Veteran's Benefits Administration.