A question I get asked a lot (especially if I've just been emailing about the importance of communicating regularly with your audience) is “why would anyone listen to me?”.

Sometimes I ask myself that question. Rather more often than I'd like to be honest.

It's especially easy to have a mini-crisis of confidence when you've just read something especially good from someone else like I did last week when I got an email I subscribe to from James Clear.

James is the author of Atomic Habits which has sold over a million copies. And what dropped into my inbox was an excellent article about “Why Facts Don't Change Minds” (click here to read it on his site).

It was the sort of article that makes you think “ugh, I'll never write anything as good as that. Why should I bother?”

Fortunately, two things stopped me wallowing in self-pity for very long.

The first was that I actually knew James “back in the day”.

About a decade ago he contacted me to ask to do a joint webinar to promote some ebooks he was selling on a site he ran for freelancers called “Passive Panda”.

We spoke for a while on the phone and I got to hear his story of how he was paying his way through medical school with his website (I think he later abandoned that plan and did an MBA instead).

Back then I can promise you his writing wasn't anywhere near as good as it is today.

But it was good enough and it helped him built a really successful business.

The other weapon I had was archive.org.

I looked up previous incarnations of his website to see how it had evolved over time.

Back in 2010 it started out as a personal blog with stories about his love of his local (American) football team and his vision for the future of healthcare.

Then he started blogging about photography and online business. Then app development. Then travel.

It was only a few years later when he started to include information about habits as part of a focus on “superhuman health”. 

And it was only in 2015 when habits became the main focus of the site.

If you compare your writing against what James does today it's very easy to get disheartened and think your own stuff isn't good enough.

But if you compare your writing to his material from 2012 or 2015 or 2017 it probably compares pretty well.

And James' writing in 2012, 2015 and 2017 was easily good enough to build him a very successful business.

As long as we're writing (or making videos or podcasts) about topics our clients find important and tricky, there'll always be enough people who find our material useful.

You don’t have to be Peter Drucker or Jim Collins or Seth Godin or James Clear to have something valuable to say. If you're good enough to help clients solve their problems, you're good enough to write articles or make videos or podcasts they'll be interested in tuning in to.

Over time, your writing abilities will improve. You'll get better on video. Your podcasts will be less clunky.

If I look back at my early articles and videos I find them cringe-worthy today.

But back then they still found an audience. They were good enough that they helped people. And so people followed me, and some signed up to be clients.

No doubt when I look back in a decade my emails of today will induce much cringing too.

But they work today. They help people today. They get me clients today.

Don't compare yourself to the finished article version of someone else. Just focus on helping clients and sharing your knowledge and ideas the best you can.

It'll be enough.

And it will get better too.