Know Your Hard Limits

A wet bulb temperature
(100% humidity)
of 31C/87.8F
will kill a healthy person
in three hours.

That’s a hard limit.
Nothing we can do
will change it.

We could stay still,
hydrate,
sit in the shade,
and none of that
would help us.

While building our businesses,
it is important
to set our hard limits
also.

One of my hard limits
with the romance novel business,
for example,
is I would never
write a romance novel
that didn’t have
a romantic happy ever after.

A romantic happy ever after
is my definition
of what a romance novel is.
I wouldn’t try to trick
the reader into reading
a different type of story.

Decide now
what you would never EVER do.

Write it down.

Stick to that hard limit.

Are You Truly The Exception?

Polio is making a resurgence.

There’s a vaccine for Polio, of course.

But there is a tiny percentage
of our population
who can’t get vaccinated.

If everyone else
is vaccinated,
however,
the virus doesn’t spread
and
those fragile few are protected.

Except…
it isn’t merely the fragile few
who aren’t vaccinated now.

More and more people
are choosing not to get vaccinated
and that is putting
EVERYONE at risk.
Viruses now have an opportunity
to spread and evolve,
possibly evading vaccines.

This applies to business
also.

If 20 percent of books, for example,
placed in the romance category
didn’t have a romantic happy ever after,
readers would no longer trust
books in the romance category
to give them that happy lift.
Sales would plummet
for ALL romance writers.

If everyone is the exception,
programs or concepts
won’t work for anyone.

Think hard
before being one of those exceptions.