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For those who are just starting out or have less than 1 year of "grinding it away," a commonly recurring theme of dread arises.
I know because I personally go through these bouts.
My last bout of self-doubt lasted for about a day, and I recovered. I no longer fear them and have mentally trained myself to ignore them.
It goes something like this:
- You get pumped and work 10 hrs/day (including weekends) to make something happen for 2 months.
- Sometime along the way, your brain starts playing tricks on you.
But what if everyone else is doing the same thing?
What if I'm not as good as they are?
Who the hell would want to buy my stuff?
etc.
My response is:
1) Read this -
If You Are Reading This, You Are Already Ahead – Darius Foroux – Medium
2) Think about the statistics for a moment.
80%+ of people in life are Sidewalker's with nothing better to do with their time than loaf around/sit on their asses or Slowlaner's who bought the script hook, line, and sinker.
Sidewalkers + Slowlaners are the small fish.
15% of people are self-employed.
MJ doesn't talk about the self-employed too much in his book(s), but I see it this way: the self-employed have business potential but practically no scalability/free time - their income stops when they stop working.
The self-employed are NOT a threat to members of the Fastlane AT ALL.
They are the "big fish."
5% of people are business owners. Business owners range from small sharks to titanic whales.
Now here's something you should realize.
Not all businesses are created equal. In fact, of the 5% of people who ARE business owners, fewer than 20% are using a model that even remotely resembles a "Fastlane" paradigm (which is presumably what you should be doing).
Just to give you an idea how behind most business owners still are, I remember attending a local "Small Business Owners" meeting.
Most of them run a consultancy, a "web design" business, a landscaping company, or whatever.
I looked at some of their work/portfolios and concluded the majority of them suck at what they do.
They can't even set up a Wordpress website properly, let alone run convincing ads, execute well-managed email marketing campaigns, and write good copy that ACTUALLY CONVERTS.
If you've spent even a couple of months studying those subjects, you should ALREADY be ahead of most small business owners.
When you think about it this way, you are quite literally competing against less than 1% of the entire working population.
BTW I made those statistics up...but before you start pointing fingers at me, look around you.
Those made-up statistics mirror the "real" distribution very closely. Ask people at random what they do for a living (not at work/gym/whatever, which would inevitably give you a biased sample; I mean LITERALLY walk around town and ask people at random), and see for yourself.
You will be hard pressed to find someone similar to yourself.
Whether it's the 30 yr old living at home playing video games, or the 45 yr old self-employed plumber who "makes $150/hr" but only has 2-3 hours of real work a day, or the 62 yr old gray hair who made it to "CEO" status of a Fortune 1500 after toiling/slaving away for most of his life with 60 hr weeks...
Once you take this in, realize the Fastlane is quite arguably the BEST option (if you are even remotely intelligent, adaptive, and hard-working).
And here's one last thing...
Now the catch is, that 0.5% - 1% is very competent, so you have your work cut out for you. Mediocrity won't cut it.
But if you can even capture, let's say, 0.1% of market share in a $5 billion dollar industry, that is quite literally several million dollars a year.
0.01% still puts you at high six figures a year, which is much more than you would make as a software code monkey/doctor/lawyer/whatever.
And if you've market-tested your product with $250 - $500 in ad spending/landing pages/email lists (thank you Eric Ries...), you should know whether to continue, pivot, or kill the business idea.
TL;DR Stop worrying about "other people" and focus on doing your shit. A bad execution that earns you $15,000 per month (when you expected $60,000 per month) after 3 years is much better than twiddling your thumbs in angst.
I know because I personally go through these bouts.
My last bout of self-doubt lasted for about a day, and I recovered. I no longer fear them and have mentally trained myself to ignore them.
It goes something like this:
- You get pumped and work 10 hrs/day (including weekends) to make something happen for 2 months.
- Sometime along the way, your brain starts playing tricks on you.
But what if everyone else is doing the same thing?
What if I'm not as good as they are?
Who the hell would want to buy my stuff?
etc.
My response is:
1) Read this -
If You Are Reading This, You Are Already Ahead – Darius Foroux – Medium
2) Think about the statistics for a moment.
80%+ of people in life are Sidewalker's with nothing better to do with their time than loaf around/sit on their asses or Slowlaner's who bought the script hook, line, and sinker.
Sidewalkers + Slowlaners are the small fish.
15% of people are self-employed.
MJ doesn't talk about the self-employed too much in his book(s), but I see it this way: the self-employed have business potential but practically no scalability/free time - their income stops when they stop working.
The self-employed are NOT a threat to members of the Fastlane AT ALL.
They are the "big fish."
5% of people are business owners. Business owners range from small sharks to titanic whales.
Now here's something you should realize.
Not all businesses are created equal. In fact, of the 5% of people who ARE business owners, fewer than 20% are using a model that even remotely resembles a "Fastlane" paradigm (which is presumably what you should be doing).
Just to give you an idea how behind most business owners still are, I remember attending a local "Small Business Owners" meeting.
Most of them run a consultancy, a "web design" business, a landscaping company, or whatever.
I looked at some of their work/portfolios and concluded the majority of them suck at what they do.
They can't even set up a Wordpress website properly, let alone run convincing ads, execute well-managed email marketing campaigns, and write good copy that ACTUALLY CONVERTS.
If you've spent even a couple of months studying those subjects, you should ALREADY be ahead of most small business owners.
When you think about it this way, you are quite literally competing against less than 1% of the entire working population.
BTW I made those statistics up...but before you start pointing fingers at me, look around you.
Those made-up statistics mirror the "real" distribution very closely. Ask people at random what they do for a living (not at work/gym/whatever, which would inevitably give you a biased sample; I mean LITERALLY walk around town and ask people at random), and see for yourself.
You will be hard pressed to find someone similar to yourself.
Whether it's the 30 yr old living at home playing video games, or the 45 yr old self-employed plumber who "makes $150/hr" but only has 2-3 hours of real work a day, or the 62 yr old gray hair who made it to "CEO" status of a Fortune 1500 after toiling/slaving away for most of his life with 60 hr weeks...
Once you take this in, realize the Fastlane is quite arguably the BEST option (if you are even remotely intelligent, adaptive, and hard-working).
And here's one last thing...
Now the catch is, that 0.5% - 1% is very competent, so you have your work cut out for you. Mediocrity won't cut it.
But if you can even capture, let's say, 0.1% of market share in a $5 billion dollar industry, that is quite literally several million dollars a year.
0.01% still puts you at high six figures a year, which is much more than you would make as a software code monkey/doctor/lawyer/whatever.
And if you've market-tested your product with $250 - $500 in ad spending/landing pages/email lists (thank you Eric Ries...), you should know whether to continue, pivot, or kill the business idea.
TL;DR Stop worrying about "other people" and focus on doing your shit. A bad execution that earns you $15,000 per month (when you expected $60,000 per month) after 3 years is much better than twiddling your thumbs in angst.
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