I’m with you 100% and think I drove that home pretty well in the debate. It should never be about the money, but about enjoying what you’re doing. If you’re not, you really are little better than a salaried employee in cubicle hell..

PB

…your second comment on a blog apologizes for a grammatical error in the first.

Ah, I meant…

“from two people who HAVE done quite well.”

Sorry about that.

I don’t know whether your “takeaway” conclusion contradicts the point of the debate at all. The point of the debate, it seems to me, was simply to address the question, in turn from the point of view from two people who have done quite well, each in a different way.

My perception is that the bottom line (if there was any) was this:

“You should *consider* being a generalist IF…”

~and~

“You should *consider* specializing IF…”

Of course, that sounds a lot like:

“You *might* be a redneck IF…”

But never mind that.

I trained as an E-Myth coach some time ago. The first thing I learned — and anyone who really read the book would have gotten this also — is that the purpose of your business is to serve and support your life. Your business exists to serve you, not the other way around. Of course, your business succeeds by serving other people, so there is a bit of a paradox.

It comes down to your (implicit) question: What gets you out of bed in the morning? There has to be something in the “doing” itself that excites you. There’s no way around it for us, since a freelance writing business isn’t something you can build so that it can operate without you having to “work IN it” every day. (I mean, you could do that, but then you wouldn’t be a writer, you’d be a business builder. And most of us here want to write.)

There are trade-offs. There are advantages to each, and each one of us has to choose. So I think your “bottom line” is absolutely correct.

I see no contradiction.

Alas, your Shakespearean allusion is dead-on (to use another British expression). Alas, there’s the rub.

That conclusion contradicts the point of the debate a bit. But to casually drop a Shakespeare allusion, neither path is better except thinking makes it so. What matters is that you’re passionate and committed to the path you choose because, brother, writing for money ain’t always easy, and writing about something in which you lack interest is a short path to failure.

Bottom line (and, I’m sure, not uncoincidentally the underlying point of the Copywriting Success Summit): The best approach is to first decide what path will get you out of bed in the morning, and then learn which marketing tools are more appropriate to the path you’ve chosen. (WARNING – Shameless Plug: I just blogged about this)