Your Why Matters

I had the opportunity to relearn an valuable lesson in the real world, sometimes what is clear to us is not always clear to the people we are trying to reach.

I recently published an e-book titled, “How I won, my battle against a disease with no cure.” It is a really personal story about my journey over the last decade of personal growth and emotional and physical healing. I was really excited to publish it. I put it on gumroad.com and started to promote it on everything I had access to, my Facebook groups, pages, business pages, email list, and the sites I run. I wanted to get my book in the hands of as many people as possible.

My posts looked like this,

Do you want to know what happened? Nothing, no one downloaded my book, a dozen or so people visited the page but no one downloaded it.

I didn’t know what to do.

It happened to be encouragement Tuesday in one of the groups I am apart of and I shared my brief story, and shared the post I was sharing. A couple people encouraged me and then someone gave me some really good advice.

“I don’t give a #$%# about your free book, everyone gives away free books… I do however care about your story, and your journey.”

This person was absolutely right; no one cared about the fact that I was giving away a free e-book that was evident in the lack of downloads.

What happened? I got wrapped up in what I was doing, and I forgot why I was doing it. I forgot that what I really wanted was to share my story with people who might be fighting a battle they believe they will never win. I forgot that what I really wanted was to encourage people, to love people and to connect with people.

I started again; I reworked the title page of my book, I changed the PDF file name, I killed a bunch of my posts and I started to share my story in the posts, I started with why I wrote the book.

The amazing thing, people started to download it, and not only that they started to pay for it without me even asking.

One of my favorite quotes is by a guy named Simon Sinek, he says “people don’t buy what you do they buy why you do it.” When we share out why people have the opportunity to buy into what we are about. It becomes about more then a product -it becomes something that we can identify with. So what ever you are doing make sure people know the reason behind it.

Now go out there and share your story and share the reason you do what you do.

Dan Byl is a Purpose Guru and a Millennial Leadership Specialist.

If you have a project that needs a clearly defined why, you can contact me through kingdom spark to begin.

Get more from Dan as well as a copy of his Discover Your Purpose and How I Won e-book at DanByl.com

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