IMPORTANT NOTE: Your first instinct might be to click away from this article. A good dose of truth isn’t what most people come on the internet for. If you stick around though, you might just have the breakthrough that you’ve been hoping for in your internet business. If you can’t handle reading a little bit and would rather your information come in picture format or 140 characters, this post is going to deeply disappoint you. But then, so will your broken online business.
Very Strong Probabilities:
You are never going to drive this car:
You are never going to live in this house:
You are never going to own one of these…
Or one of these…
And it’s not because you’re a bad person. You’re not incompetent. And you’re not a fool.
Well, except maybe for one thing: if you’re still dreaming of improbable things happening in your life, you’re going to continue to make bad choices and serious mistakes with your business.You are barking up the wrong tree. And it’s not a quaking sapling.
You’re barking up a freaking 3500 year-old Redwood tree of statistical improbability.
Being filthy rich, if you haven’t noticed, doesn’t make you popular and loved in this day and age. That was the 80’s and 90’s. Those times are over with. Today we’re living with the fallout from those eras. Today we know the price of striving for an improbable outcome such as massive wealth.
We’ve found out that a lot of people who were at scary levels of wealth were crooks. Many others, we’ve found, are miserable despite having the world at their beck and call and absolutely no limits on the life they can live. In short, we know more now than we did when we were younger, dumber, and when we glamorized the wealthy lifestyle.
What do we have to show for it today? Incredibly busier lives. With technology and the constant drive to have more “things” and live like rockstars, we saved time but we quickly filled up the savings with more work to pay for more things. We never reached the promised land they talked about when Andy Griffith’s generation dreamed of the future. Aunt Bea actually had it way better then than we do now. THAT was unexpected! Irony is a bitch.
I say all of this to ask this…
What happened to simply making a good living? After the crash of 2008 and a still-reeling economy, doesn’t that just sound fantastic?
A good, comfortable living. A living that provides for a quality of life which enables us to have free time. Go on vacations. Spend time just sitting on a porch reading a book that has nothing to do with your business.
Wisps of Smoke
Over the last 14 years, I’ve seen a lot of people “succeeding” online and I’ve watched the hordes of others who wish to emulate the vision that is projected. But it’s just a vision. It’s not the whole truth. Knowing the work and pressure all of those people are under to appear care-free and instantly successful makes the illusion vanish like a wisp of smoke. Knowing this makes it impossible for you to ever fall for the guy standing in front of a luxury Yacht selling overnight riches again.
I’m not saying they’re not successful at growing a business and actually making it provide a great profit. I’m saying that what they’ve given up to make it happen is far too great a price to pay for the average person. Hence, average people never get to drive the car, live in the house, or go on exotic vacations like they thought they would.
I see people who are making a good living online lamenting that fact as some sort of failure!
A lot of people don’t realize they’ve accomplished something else in the process: the miracle of owning a business that provides or has the potential of providing for all their real needs. Without working a body-breaking, mind-numbing job for fixed income and worrying about the next wave of layoffs.
Knowing what you really need for a great retirement, to pay your bills, and for your personal fulfillment is the first step in changing the way you look at your internet business. And it is the beginning of real success. The car and the mansion could still be in your future, but that’s a crap shoot. In the meantime, for goodness sake, take the low hanging fruit and be happy with an extra $1000 a month!
Winning The Lottery Is Not A Business Model
What Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did was win the lottery. Neither one of them did what they did to become billionaires. They started out doing what they were passionate about and what they loved. They never dreamed it would lead where it did.
What every Ferrari-driving entrepreneur has done is win the lottery. Some planets lined up, the time was perfect, and they happened to be in the right place working on the right thing when everything exploded. They caught the perfect wave. Yes they worked their asses off! But a whole mess of luck and timing had to come into play for every single person who made it big. Like – REALLY big!
We tend to put a magical Hollywood screenplay over these success stories and fast forward through the tough times everyone goes through before they make it big. And that makes the improbable seem more probable to us. And then we forget why the hell we signed on to this internet lifestyle thing in the first place: the freedom to be your own boss. The ability to call the shots and be independent. The possibility of bigger things, but at least for the ability that you could live a different life than everyone else that was a life rich in freedom from the 9-5 grind.
This is not an all-or-nothing game.
There are people who will do nothing but dream of the life you are currently working toward or that you already enjoy. And they’re not dreaming of exotic cars or mansions. They simply lust after your freedom and the balls to go for it. Be happy that you are in a crowd that loves providing for their families in an utterly non-traditional fashion. You’ll get what you want out of it when you decide what’s really important and what you really, deeply want out of it.
And no normal person over the age of 24 deeply wants a stupid car. Not after you’ve had kids or lived enough years to gain the experience and knowledge of what’s really important in life. You know that the hollow, shallow existence of “thing acquisition” isn’t going to really make you happy. Hell, think of all the rich people who have made it really big just to turn around to write books and do interviews telling us it isn’t anything like they expected. Just before they simplified their lives and started doing important things that fulfilled them.
I say all of THAT to say this…
Don’t knock a $100 affiliate check. Don’t turn your nose up at 100 visitors to your site just because someone else gets 1,000,000. You’re not here to be a guru and show copies of outlandish checks to everyone on the internet. Not really. That’s a very rare bird indeed. You want what comes with a reasonably successful internet business: freedom and a comfortable living. All the bills are paid and your debt is going down, not up. The ability to take time off and enjoy life by knowing when to stop picking up new projects and start saving time with the same passion that we fantasize about saving money. Having the time and the ability to enjoy life is far more valuable than gold, even at current prices.
Final thought…
Have you ever considered that you might not be where you want to be yet with your business because you have lingering, unreal expectations for what it should be providing you by now? You should sit and think about that. I did awhile ago and it changed the way I do my business and what I strive for every day. With the right goals and by going straight back to the roots of why you really wanted to start a business in the first place, you can re-evaluate what success really means to you and be a hell of a lot more efficient and effective in getting there.
What will likely happen is that you’ll start to seek advice from people who are real instead of people who stand in front of helicopters (that they rented!) to look rich and important. You’ll start seeking out reason, logic, and experts who are grounded. Experts and peers with a track record which proves they must know something simply because they haven’t disappeared after one product launch.
And your online business will finally take off. You’ll enjoy it more and you’ll see progress daily. And you’ll started getting back on the track that will take you to whatever is in your future that gets you out of bed everyday.
