At the recommendation of Jeff Sheldon, a few days ago I ordered Dale Partridge’s new book, People Over Profit. I’m half-way through, and the book is about so much more than running an honest and successful business.

Partridge’s book is about character, integrity, honesty, serving others, being transparent and generous, and investing in quality. People Over Profit is encouraging and thought provoking for anyone with a platform, an audience, an entrepreneurial spirit, and/or a role in leadership or management.

I’ve highlighted several passages and quotes so far, and a couple of them I want to write about today.

Here’s one of the first idea from the book that really struck me. Partridge writes:

All good companies must have some level of efficiency, which can be a tool to help achieve noble goals. But problems arise when efficiency becomes the goal — when it is no longer a means to an end but the end in itself.

The context here is that Partridge is talking about how most companies start out with honest values and goals, but as their business grows these companies seek ways to improve their efficiency and to keep growing.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with seeking to improve efficiency and to keep growing. In fact, I touched on this recently when I wrote about value, price, cost, and profit. In order increase profit without decreasing value you have to either: (a) add more value; or (b) lower costs without sacrificing quality.

Increasing efficiency without losing value or quality is not so easy. But what Partridge had to say about efficiency becoming the main goal stood out to me on a personal level as well.

Take the same quote from above but replace “all good companies” with “any individual” and the text still rings true:

Any individual must have some level of efficiency, which can be a tool to help achieve noble goals. But problems arise when efficiency becomes the goal — when it is no longer a means to an end but the end in itself.

This past November I recorded a whole podcast episode on the issue of focusing too much on focus. The idea is that distractions and resistance are universal things we all face when trying to get things done. It’s important to know what to focus on, to be good at working through distractions, and to reduce to the essentials when it comes to projects and our environment. But it’s also possible (if not easy) to obsess so much on focus that we’re not even getting the most important things done because we’re too concerned about being efficient.

As a husband, a father, and as someone who makes things I would much rather move slowly in the right direction than quickly in the wrong direction.

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The second quote that stood out to me is actually a quote Partridge pulled from Jim Collins’s book, How the Mighty Fall.

Launching headlong into activities that do not fit with your economic or resource engine is undisciplined. Addiction to scale is undisciplined. To neglect your core business while you leap after exciting new adventures is undisciplined. To use the organization primarily as a vehicle to increase your own personal success—more wealth, more fame, more power—at the expense of its long-term success is undisciplined. To compromise your values or lose sight of your core purpose in pursuit of growth and expansion is undisciplined.

I’ve read so many times about how success for a company can be more deadly than failure. Because with success comes opportunity and options. Which, in the words of Jim Collins, can open the door for a company to loose discipline and focus.

When companies lose focus from doing their primary mission — doing what they are best at — then they slowly begin to lose ground.

And the same is true for individuals. When you or I lose focus on doing what is most important then we begin to drift.

They say 70% of lottery winners spend their entire winnings within 5 years of hitting jackpot and are oftentimes worse for wear afterward. They “finally” got their big break but it didn’t improve the quality of their life.

Another study I recently heard about discovered that people’s baseline level of happiness does not grow proportionally to their income. They said that after someone’s annual salary reaches $65,000 their general mood and happiness sort-of plateau relative to their income. That even if that person were to double their annual income to $130,000 their “happiness level” would only increase by 7%. (The study went on to say that people were more happy when they spent their money on experiences and generosity rather than on things.)

As a company or as an individual, we all go through seasons of plenty and seasons of want. And I’m not just talking about finances. We go through seasons of plenty and seasons of want with our quality relationships, our quality of life, our health, our areas of influence, and more.

The challenge is to live with intention no matter the season.

We hear that term a lot: “intentional living.” Basically it just means we have the wherewithal to take a moment to pause and think. It means we respond to things instead of reacting to them.

So, when you’re in a season of plenty — as a business or as an individual — then invest your resources wisely and take time to pause and think so you can stay on focus.

I’m serious. Re-focusing is not a sign of weakness. Nor does it mean you’re in over your head. Every human needs regular “re-focusing” to stay on track.

Life happens, and our priorities and circumstances change. Give yourself permission to spend a week or a month taking stock of your values and priorities. Re-assess how you’re spending your time and energy. Doing so is a sign of maturity and motivation.

I built the Focus Course on 3×5 notecards.

While there were other tools — such as highlighters, binder clips, the world’s greatest pen, iA Writer, MailChimp, WordPress, a Baron Fig notebook, and a stack of paperback books taller than my 3-year-old — the notecards proved to be instrumental.

The idea to outline and build the Focus Course on notecards came from this awesome video about how Dustin Lance Black creates his movie screenplays:

So, earlier this year, I opened up a fresh pack of 3×5 cards from my pals a Nock and wrote down all the ideas and topics for the course. Putting only one idea, topic, assignment, or lesson per notecard. Then I laid everything out to survey what was there.

Being able to see it all visually like this proved to be immensely helpful. I could quickly move stuff around and get an idea for the overall flow of the course.

I had 7 “rows” of cards: the Introduction, the five modules, and the conclusion. At first I had just shy of 60 days worth of cards in there. But I knew that I had to keep it to 40 (in the end I cheated by not counting the introduction or conclusion day, so technically it’s 42 days).

The challenge of paring the course from 60 days down to 40 wasn’t easy. Some of the cards I just tossed out altogether. Others I ended up combining. When friends would come over, I’d bring them down to my office and show them the outline and ask what they thought.

Finally, once I had the 40 days settled, I went through the order over and over in my head. I wanted Day 1 to lead into Day 2 to lead into Day 3, etc. I wanted all of Module 1 to lead into Module 2. And so on. I wanted there to be an ebb and flow to the lessons, so that the more fun days were interspersed with the more challenging introspective day, etc. And I wanted the course to start with something easy and fun note and to end with something fun but challenging.

In short, the information architecture of the course was just as vital as the contents. And the notecards were instrumental in helping get the architecture just right.

With the order of the course finally finished. I started outlining each lesson. On the front of each card was simply the focus for each day. On the back of the card I could put any notes, ideas, and references for that day, but it had to fit on the card. I didn’t want to have so much content it’d be impossible to get through each day’s lesson in a timely manner, so my outlines were literally constrained by the physical size of a 3×5 notecard.

Then, I put the whole stack of cards in order, placed them next to my desk, and started writing. Each day I took the topmost card and wrote the corresponding lesson for the course.

It took me 47 days to write the course. I began on March 19 and finished on May 5. During that month and a half, I wrote 40 daily lessons, plus the course’s introduction, conclusion, and the 5 module overviews: roughly 55,000 words in total; an average of 1,170 words every single day.1

It was this outlining and writing workflow that got me into the habit of having a pre-defined topic to write about. Writing the Focus Course in 47 days may sound like a huge task, but actually it was pretty easy.

For one, because I was so deeply immersed in the topics and content, everything was top of mind. Secondly, the rhythm and routine of writing every day got pretty easy after the first couple weeks.

Lastly, the constraints of the notecards themselves — a single topic with a pre-defined outline — took away much of the ambiguity involved in the writing process. All I had left to do was expound on the ideas I had already written down.

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This workflow could be used for so many other things: A book, a weekly email newsletter, a month-long series of blog posts, etc.

If you’re struggling to write daily, consider giving it a try. Pick a subject, write down a handful of singular ideas, give yourself a constraint about how in-depth (or not) you’ll go on each idea, and then give yourself a timeline for when you’ll write about and publish each of those.

Two years ago I launched my first real product.

I remember waking up the morning of the launch and feeling sick. I didn’t have the flu. I was scared. There was a big knot in the pit of my stomach. I felt like a fraud. I was afraid people would buy my book, read it, and feel ripped off.

The book I’m talking about is Delight is in the Details.

On the day I was to put it up for sell all I could think about was how I felt like a fraud and an imposter. I was scared that I was charging for something that should be free. In short, I wasn’t confident that the value of the book was greater than the price I was charging.

Who was I, I thought, to make something and then ask people to give me money for it? I didn’t trust my ability to create something of value.

It was such a bizarre feeling. I chose to ignore it and stick with my plan. I put Delight is in the Details up for sale when I said I would and I didn’t lower my price.

Delight is in the Details has since gone on to sell more than 2,000 copies. I have heard from so many people who have read the book, listened to the interviews, and have been inspired. I’ve even gone back and referenced my own writing from the book multiple times, to re-take my own advice and remind myself of those values and ideas.

* * *

Over the past two years, I’ve thought a lot about that day and those feelings: the fear, doubt, and even the shame that can accompany a product launch. Here you’ve got this thing that you’ve created for someone else, and you’re trying to assign a value to it. It’s not easy to do.

But since that initial product launch two years ago, I’ve since had two more times through a launch: last summer (2014) I published a big update to Delight is in the Details, and then a couple weeks ago I published The Focus Course.

Here’s an interesting data point: I charged more each product. In part because I learned how to add more and more value, but also because I learned to trust my ability to create something of value.

If you’ve got a product you’re trying to assign a value to, here’s something to consider:

Your product has three adjustable numbers: Cost, Price, and Value.

Cost is the time and money it takes to make the product.

Price is what you sell the product for. (Assuming it’s higher than your cost, then the difference is your profit.)

Value is what your product is worth in the eyes of the people who buy it.

These three numbers must be in balance.

Your price has to be more than your cost so you can make a profit. But you also want your price to be less than the product’s value so the people who buy from you are getting something worthwhile.

This is why pricing is an art, not a science. You need to make a sustainable and worthwhile profit from your product. But you also want to provide as much additional value as possible.

In my experience, there are two ways to adjust my cost/price/value ratios in order to have a price that is sustainable for me while also being fair to the people who buy my products.

1. First is to cut your costs in a way that doesn’t simultaneously sacrifice value or quality. Sometimes this is as easy as not wasting money on trivial minutia. Sometimes it requires thinking outside the box, working smarter, finding better help, scaling your production to get price breaks, or cutting out features that maybe can wait until a future update.

2. Second is to add value in a way that doesn’t unnecessarily or dramatically increase complexity or cost. I think one of the best ways to do this is by sweating the details. When you add empathy and delight to your product and the experience surrounding it, then the people who use it feel honored and excited.

The packaging that an Apple product comes in is an excellent example of both empathy (the boxes are easy to open and unpack) and delight (the boxes are high quality and well designed). It’s one of many ways Apple adds value to their products without dramatically increasing the cost to make the product.

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Here I’m going to share my own examples of how I did this, by sharing what I did to add value to The Focus Course. I’m using the Focus Course because it’s a real-life example that’s still very fresh in my mind.

I’ll first share about the real costs associated with the course, what I did to make the course as valuable as possible, and then where and why I landed on for the price.

Cost

For me, The Focus Course has two costs associated with it: the initial cost of building it and ongoing cost of running it.

I spent at least 1,500 hours (and probably more) of my own time to research, write, and architect the course. I also invested $9,600 to pay for the design, development, videos, editing, research material, and a few other miscellaneous odds and ends.

The second cost is the ongoing expense of keeping the course going. I pay for hosting the website (Flywheel), the webfonts (Hoefler & Co.), the SSL cert and domain registration, the video and media files (Vimeo Pro; Amazon S3), the forum (Discourse & Digital Ocean), the email servers (Mandrill and MailChimp), and the membership service and payment gateway (Memberful).

All in all, the services which power the Focus Course cost $211 / month to run. And the more people who sign up for the course, the more these monthly expense go up. This is certainly not a massive expense right now, but neither is it insignificant.

Additionally, I have to be able to pay a designer / developer for any updates, changes, or improvements to the website.

All this may sound like a lot when it’s listed out, but actually I think it’s quite reasonable. The moving parts all fit together quite nicely to make an overall awesome product that I’m proud of and that I believe is sustainable to maintain.

Value

The big question I kept asking myself over and over was this: How can I make The Focus Course as valuable as possible?

In fact, it was this question that led me to build the course in the first place. As you may know, The Power of a Focused Life was originally going to be a book. But once I finished the initial draft of the book, and I began to read other books for research, I discovered that so many of important actionable items within these books were mostly buried underneath all the ideas and theory. I realized that my own book was suffering from the same fate, and so by asking myself how I could make the product more valuable I realized that it needed to be something other than a book.

Then, as the course began to take shape and I decided that I wanted to charge $250, I knew that I needed to build something that looked and worked like a $500 product and had the foundational content of a $1,000 product.

Basically, when people sign up, I want them to instantly feel as if they’ve already gotten more than they paid for. I want them to feel excited and refreshed. And then, by the time they finished the course, I want them to feel an even greater satisfaction — that they got what they were looking for and more.

It is critical to me that the value of the Focus Course be far greater than its price.

The foundation of the course’s value is, obviously, the content itself. There are 40 days of assignments and lessons, and if those 40 days don’t flow well and offer something of substance, then the rest doesn’t matter. And, fittingly, this is where I spent the bulk of my time and energy. Then, once I had the course outlined and written, I worked with nearly 100 “beta” testers to go through it and get their feedback on the contents alone.

The early pilot version of the course was ugly. And when I say “ugly” what I mean is “ugly.” I sent out ugly looking emails every day and I had a generic WordPress theme. It was just the raw content of the course with nothing to hide behind.

But once I knew that the content itself was right, then I got to work sweating the details.

And so, in addition to the content, there were a few other things I set up to add additional value to the course.

• Design: I wanted everything about the course to be beautiful, readable, unique, professional, and responsive. Not only does a well-designed product feel more professional and high-quality, but I also wanted to use design as a competitive edge. There are other similar types of products out there and I wanted the Focus Course to be the best-looking.

• Community: Having a thriving community forum that’s filled with other people going through the course is a massive value. It provides accountability, encouragement, help, and just a great sense of camaraderie.

• All the little details: everywhere I could I tried to add fun extras. This includes a friendly welcome video when you first sign up, a welcome page and email that tells you everything on the website, personal follow up emails to check in on, an easy sign-up process with single sign on for the course and the forums, as well as some really fun easter eggs you naturally discover once you start the course.

Price

One of the hardest aspects to building the Focus Course was coming up with a price. I went back and forth with all sorts of different numbers.

I wanted to charge an amount that was fair to those who bought the course — making sure the value given exceeds the price they paid. But I also needed to charge enough to make back the time and money initially invested, as well as being able to cover the ongoing costs of hosting the course.

Moreover, by charging a fair price, I can do more than just maintain the course, I can keep working on it and adding more value. I already have a clear roadmap for the next update.

I’ll also add that by charging a fair price relative to the content and commitment required, it means the people who buy The Focus Course have something invested in it. If I were to charge $5 then people would value the course as something about on par with a latte.

However, by charging $250, people see the course for what it actually is: something incredibly valuable that requires sacrifice. Which means those who do sign up are far more likely to actually to commit the time an energy needed to work their way through the 40 days.

You can’t buy word of mouth

When the value of what you’re selling is more than the price you’re charging for it, people who buy your product feel honored. (Conversely, if the value is at or below the price, people feel ripped off or cheated.)

When you sweat the details and add empathy, joy, and delight into your product then it makes people feel happy and excited.

And who doesn’t want happy, honored people as customers?

Wow. What a wild and awesome past few weeks. The Focus Course has launched (as you well know, haha), and now things return to their regular schedule. (Well, technically, they’ll return this coming Monday. I’ve got a birthday and a holiday weekend, so I’m taking some time off after today.)

Over the coming months I will be sharing a lot of the behind-the-scenes stories, information, and motivation about building and launching the Focus Course. If you have any questions for me that you’d love to see answered, please just email me. I’ve been doing this self-employed, work-from-home-as-a-full-time-writer racket for more than four years and I want to do what I can to encourage you that, yes, you can do your best creative work every day.

But today, I want to share something different. Simply a video of a man ironing a shirt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylQtbXFZ4yw

Now, this is no ordinary video. This is one of my favorite YouTube videos of all time.

I can’t say exactly what it is about this ironing video that I love so much, but it’s just awesome.

Maybe it’s the meticulousness and skill with which the man irons that shirt. Maybe it’s the neat-freak in me loving to see that wrinkly shirt get ironed out. Or maybe it’s because this gives me hope that I don’t always have to be horrible at ironing.

Who knew that ironing could be a craft?

It makes me wonder how many shirts this man has ironed. Would he even tolerate the cheap Black & Decker iron and squeaky ironing table that are hiding in my closet feeling very insecure and inadequate at the moment?