Life-Changing Email: One-Hit Wonder or Life-Long Practice?

Creating Luck

Lottery tickets are a bad buy. Lottery operators make a profit because the expected value (the payoff times the chance of winning) of each ticket is less than the ticket's cost.

But if you could print tickets at home, for just the cost of paper and ink, suddenly the lottery would be a great deal. Obviously, that's illegal. Don't do that. But how great would it be to have a machine that prints luck?

You can build that machine. It's called your email practice. It's a combination of skills, habits, and attitudes.

Your email practice isn't free. It requires a small slice of two very valuable resources: your time and energy. But with it, you can manufacture luck.

Life-Changing Email

I had worked in three different six-figure jobs by the time I turned twenty-three. I got each of them by writing and sending a cold email.

There's little difference between sending an email for a 100-dollar opportunity and sending one for a 100,000-dollar opportunity. The email needs to be clear, concise, and high-value. There's no secret ingredient.

But having the skills and confidence to send a great cold email for big opportunities doesn't just happen. It comes from practice.

Life-Long Email

Let's be honest: change is terrifying. I don't want to completely change my life every single day. But cold email isn't something that I save for big moments. That would be like a football player trying to play in the Super Bowl after sitting out all season.

Your email practice can become the foundation of your success in any industry. I've used cold email in the past year to:

• Appear on podcasts (thus getting thousands of dollars of free marketing for my products),
• Interview people for writing projects,
• Create consulting opportunities,
• Even take over an abandoned project on the Python Packaging Index to secure a short, recognizable name for a new open-source library at my job.

Cold email's versatility makes it possible to practice consistently across different projects and circumstances. And consistency is, in itself, life-changing.

Consistency to Compounding

Compound interest is the most powerful force in finance. It's how a hundred bucks a week invested over a forty-year career turns into a million-dollar retirement portfolio (seven percent returns, compounded quarterly).

The same principle applies to your email practice. Success begets success, and the more luck you create, the more luck you'll be able to create.

Even if it achieves nothing, the most life-changing cold email you will ever send is the first one. Because without that first email, you'd never be able to send the ones that work.

Best,

Philip