Let me ask you a question… and you have to promise to really think through the answer, no knee-jerk replies OK?
Does money bore you?
When you think of the most fulfilling, exhilarating, and enjoyable experiences you’ve had in your life, is making money one of the first things that comes to mind?
I think most (though not all) people would answer NO.
But in fact, I think most people, unbeknownst to themselves, DO find money boring. After all, money is just numbers on a piece of paper from your bank, or in your wallet. You can’t kiss, cuddle, throw a football, play chess, laugh, cry, scream, or take a nap with money. (Well, I suppose you COULD, but it wouldn’t be very fulfilling, would it?)
This, I believe, is one of our greatest obstacles to amassing true wealth. Something to consciously work on correcting in order to sustain a solid financial growth curve over the long haul.
I suppose this message would be more palatable if I spoke personally. So here it is.
I was a total idiot to enter 17 niche markets. My justification at the time was that I needed to prove my formula across a multitude of markets so I could really roll it out and/or get out there as a teacher.
But you know what? I was full of crap, because the formula was already proven after the 4th one, … and despite the fact they were all profitable and I developed a cool story to tell, I created a massive diversification of time, energy, and money which prevented me from developing any ONE of them to its fullest.
This not only meant seriously slowing down my trajectory, but in the end it meant I failed to deliver the back end products which would have been most helpful to people in any one given market.
Know why I really did it? (Hindsight is 20/20)
Because it would have been TOO EASY to just keep building out ONE of the markets. (We can’t have that, right!??)
I loved the challenge of making the front end profitable. This required an immense amount of research, immersion in the market, surveys, actually talking to (and connecting with) people, figuring out the puzzle. It challenged my comfort zone, requiring me to push my four core skill sets to the limit (psychology, computers, marketing, and research), and to find creative ways to combine them.
In contrast, the activities required to optimize and build out a market once it’s already profitable are much more executional and, well… kind of boring.
Testing and tracking, paying others to write and record more products, monitoring my spreadsheets, running regressions, doing a few joint ventures, getting interns to write and submit articles, working with SEO vendors, etc.
Yet THOSE activities are incredibly profitable once you’ve got an in-the-black traffic stream running.
So if I’m honest, I guess I chose to be “creative rather than rich”. (Thanks to Gary Halbert for that phrase). Getting rich, in my mind, was associated with being progressively more isolated, locked up in some ivory tower crunching numbers… BORING! Unfortunately, if I’m honest, it still kind of is.
It was quite a shock when I had this insight.
I already had all the skills I needed to go to the next level. I could have maintained a consistently upward trajectory. I only needed to find a way to re-connect this goal with my true purpose in life, with the people I loved, with the people I wanted to help, with the life I really wanted to live.
I just needed to choose this path, nothing more.
So I’m asking you all to take an honest look at where you are right now.
Is it possible you already have all the skills and knowledge you need to get where you want to go? Is it possible you’ve got some negative association with financial success which is causing you to make the wrong choices?
Does money bore you?
Let me know what you think below please!
Dr. G 🙂