Since quitting my corporate job in 2015, with a few months savings and no real plan.. this question of 'hard work' torments me every day.
"Am I working hard enough? Am I just a piece of shit lazy slacker, who will never make anything of himself?"
The problem is, the more I get self-critical and down on myself for not taking action, the worse I feel about myself … and the less energy I have to start taking action.
One of my biggest issues in life, is low self-esteem. It is the reason I was never a good employee (I was an introvert and hated the corporate culture) And It is the biggest issue now holding me back from success as an entrepreneur.
I had no safety net, but I had a few $XXXX USD to throw around. I had no better plan than to try and find a way to make some money on the internet. I spent some money on some gurus' courses, and torrented a whole bunch more. I didn't know what, if not all of it was bullshit. But I had to act and do something... because I had committed career suicide in the corporate world, and I needed to start bringing in an income.
On the other hand, I was still a lazy slacker and couldn't get myself to grind and do hard work. I spent every waking hour reading and learning (ok, except for all those I was smoking weed and playing video games), but I was not really taking steps to work on my business.
Finally I pulled the trigger and followed one plan to private label an Amazon product. I was lazy as hell and put very little 'work' in keyword research, or thinking about how I would market my product. But I pulled the trigger and wired about a $1000 to an Ali Baba supplier to get a totally generic, shitty quality product. The fear of being homeless motivated me to take that much action, at the very least.
What happened? I got lucky... You couldn't do it today, but in early 2015 you could put any generic Chinese crap up on US amazon, and it would sell. It’s only that I look back now over two years later that I realize “yeah, I’ve made a full time living off of the internet”. Meanwhile, at the time there was no feeling that I had “made it”. I felt like I was scrambling and failing and at the edge of doom the whole time.
I have had to adapt and evolve since then. The first product ended up failing, the second product was a moderate success, the third was a 'home run'.
There were weeks and months where I coasted… I enjoyed autopilot income and couldn’t be motivated to do any work. There were other moments where I faced sheer terror, as Amazon changed a policy or algorithm, and I had to scramble to make changes to stay afloat. I realize that my days are numbered, what works now will not work forever. I need to proactively be working and building and diversifying income streams
So at least I could focus and work hard when I was in dire straits. My other strength was training myself to be pretty fearless with money. I’ve learned that I can leverage money, to test, outsource, and automate systems. I learned that you have to spend a few months in the negative, before you go positive. Investing in inventory and seeing the ROI roll in a couple months later taught me that.
But I’m still lazy. I want to outsource everything and most days I can’t put my nose to the grindstone and just bang out content or whatever I 'should' be doing. One lesson that rang true for me in my Amazon business is “Never outsource your marketing”. Writing of any kind is an excruciating exercise for me, but some fiverr gig to get sales copy is not going to move your product. I had to learn that lesson in the real world. Stuff like that you gotta nut up and do yourself, and do right… because those small margins are what separate the big boys and girls - from those wannabes who think and theorize but never make it work for themselves.
So I’ve rambled quite a bit now, and I apologize for that. I’ve enjoyed some success, I was able to take some correct action. I’ve found that ‘working hard’ is often doing the stuff that you are avoiding the most and what sucks the most. Whatever you fear and are avoiding, is probably what you should be working on. People spend their lives making themselves busy with tedious tasks and then taking pride in being a hard worker. You could dig ditches and be the hardest worker of them all. Unfortunately, life isn’t fair, and the economic value of that ditch digger is not as high as someone who sits at a computer all day to come up with 9,999 ideas that don’t work and 1 that does.
Thinking is the hardest work of all. Someone said that. Was it Napolean Hill? Didn't he die penniless?
I still have that low self-esteem though, and every time I hear someone say “hard work, hard work”, I internalize that and feel guilty, like the lifelong slacker I’ve always been. But beating yourself up doesn’t pay your bills, it doesn’t make your problems go away. You can’t get any leverage on yourself to take action until you love and accept yourself.
LOL speaking of lazy I just spent like an hour writing a 900 word BHW post, and meanwhile I can’t finish my first money niche site so I had to outsource it to another 'native writer'. Haha... I'm an American of Indian heritage (think 'call center', not 'casino') so I love all you Indian bros in this game trying to make a buck (or devalued Modi Rupee). That 200 years of British occupation really paid off in terms of the 'Native English' skills.
