Are You A Hunter Or A Gatherer?

by Bonnie Boots

We can all trace our genealogy back to people that made their living the hard way, wandering the earth looking for anything organic they could gobble.

A lot may have changed since great-great-great-great-great-grandpop brought home the brontosaurus bacon. But we, at heart, have not. Our brows may have receded and we may have invented bread, but underneath our latte-swilling lifestyle, we're all still hunters and gatherers.

If you take a good look at yourself, you'll see that one of these characteristics holds sway over your life. If you're a car salesman that goes fishing on the weekend, for instance, you're a hunter. If you're an antique dealer that spends weekends prowling through flea markets and garage sales, you're a gatherer.

Of course, we all carry both characteristics to some degree. The antique dealer feels the thrill of the hunt when he comes upon an 18th century oil painting at the Goodwill store. And the car salesman that's amassed a collection of 1950's automobile owner's manuals knows the satisfactions of gathering.

Still, one trait is always predominant. And to really succeed, you must, as Shakespeare advised, "Know thyself."

Otherwise, you'll end up in the wrong business.

Here's a case in point. Last year, I met a writer with plenty of print credits to her name. She'd heard there was good money to be made in publishing ebooks, but after two years of working towards her goal of self-publishing information products, she had yet to sell a single ebook.

This writer came to me as a coaching client. She wanted to know why she wasn't making any money. The reason was easy to see.

This writer had hundreds of paper and digital files filled with research, enough to keep her busy writing books for the next twenty years. She had fifteen books in various stages of completion.

Two books were very nearly finished. They still needed to be formatted as PDF files, and they needed marketing material written, like sales pages, emails, and an autoresponder course to build a subscriber list.

This situation told me that the writer was a gatherer. She avidly pursues the collection of information and is skilled at organizing that information into reports.

But when it comes to writing marketing material, she stalls out. She can't get past paragraph two of a sales page. "I can't stand writing that stuff," she says. "I get depressed every time I sit down to do it."

That's because everything involved with the actual sale of her book demands the skills of the hunter. And that takes this gatherer outside of her comfort zone.

This woman made an error when she decided to go into the business of writing and selling her own work. Temperamentally, she was only suited to the first half of that business. I advised her to find a partner that was suited to the second half, someone that could pull together everything needed to sell the books. I advised her to find a hunter.

A hunter would be bored to tears at doing all the research and writing, but would thrill at tracking down target markets, putting together the right bait and luring them in to make the kill….err, sale.

The internet has lowered the bar on being self-employed. And this has enticed a lot of people to jump in and get started without really thinking through what they're suited to.

If you've been struggling to pull together a business and can't tell why things aren't working, you need to sit down and ask yourself, "Am I a hunter or a gatherer?"

Think through what's really holding you back. Then gather up your courage and hunt down someone, whether a partner, a virtual assistant or a freelancer, who can do those tasks you're not suited to.


 

 
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