Day 1 - Announcing 100 Days to 10,000 Copies

100 Days to 10,000 Copies

You are my friend, so I am going to share my big goal with you.

I’ve been hesitant to do this publicly, and I’m somewhere in between being nervous and losing my mind, but I am going to do it anyway. Because that’s how I roll, how I get things done, and how I lived my life so far.

100 Days to 10,000 Copies

My book, Easy Discipline – An Unconventional Way to Achieve Ambitious Things, comes out in 100 days (July 14th). And I am going to sell 10,000 preorder copies before the book comes out.

And I am going to do it publicly, and document the journey here on this newsletter.

You might be asking: what’s the big deal? Don’t all books sell 10,000 copies?

Hardly. There are approximately 3 million books published every year. Most sell less than 300 copies. For traditionally published nonfiction books like Easy Discipline, the median lifetime sale is 7,100 copies. Only one in three ever reaches the 10,000 copy threshold.

And I’m trying to get to 10,000 preorders BEFORE the official publication date.

Without Oprah’s audience or James Clear’s newsletter empire, this goal lands somewhere between extremely tough and impossible.

But again, this is the type of challenge that turns me on.

So how will I do it?

Well, 100 days are about 14 weeks. So for the next 14 weeks, I will accomplish 14 audacious weekly goals to make the 10,000 copies happen. I will alternate between traditional book-marketing goals, like getting on a dream podcast, to non-traditional things and downright weird things like the World Series of Poker and standup comedy, using Easy Discipline principles for all of it.

The core idea of Easy Discipline is to turn audacious, ambitious, impossible goals into reality by turning the pursuit into play.

It teaches you how to make the journey the reward itself, so the resulting success becomes the by-product of your effort and play.

It helps you to build a floating giant dining table, so your pie-in-the-sky goals become edible and delicious. Or grow artificial swine-friendly wings, so pigs can really fly.

100 days for 10,000 copies is my pie-in-the-sky and pig-flying goal. And what better use for a book than selling the book itself?

So… why should you care?

To be honest, you probably shouldn’t. With how things are going, who knows what the world would be like in 100 days.

But:

1. If you want to take a break from doomscrolling, watching your friend Jia try to sell 10,000 copies might be an OK distraction.

2. I will be documenting daily on everything I do, everything I learn, and everything you can apply to pursuing your own goals.

3. Speaking of your own goals — do you have an audacious, ambitious, impossible goal you’ve been marinating for a long time? Maybe get promoted at work? Start a new business? Get in great shape for summer? Learn a new language?

   If you do, share your goal with me. And we can do it together in the next 100 days. We can be accountability buddies.

Sometimes we pay too much attention to the big world – the macro environment which we can’t control. Wars, economy, AI, all these trends that we can do nothing about. But we let them take over our emotions and attention.

We overlook there is so much we can try, so much we can control and so much we can accomplish in our micro-environments. And sometimes, all it takes is 100 days.