For now just, put a big number there that covers all your costs of living plus your dreams. How much money do you need if you are still determined to send your kids to college? It’s super expensive, and the price goes up every year. Maybe that number is ten or twenty thousand dollars a month. Maybe it’s a hundred thousand dollars a month. I don’t care. Just be honest. If you are honest with me right now we can hit that goal. It just has to be a real number that you feel connected with. If you write down a number that is low, then you won’t feel properly motivated, and you will put a glass ceiling in front of your progress. If you put a number that is super high, then you won’t feel like it’s realistic and you’ll never hit it. Be serious before you go on to the next chapter.
24
Financial Mistakes - Control Costs
There is nothing more important when starting a business than controlling your costs. We have already talked about blowing all your money on courses and stuff like that. That’s one financial mistake. Another one is not paying attention to the actual costs of running your business. Every website name you own costs around a dollar a month. Not a big deal, until you go hog wild and own one hundred names. That’s twelve hundred bucks a year on the expense side of your balance sheet.
That’s enough money to buy traffic for one of those websites and make ten times your investment back. These little things add up.
I don’t want you to go too far in the other direction and cheap out. For example, you don’t want to set up your first website on someone else’s domain. Like jonathan.wordpress.org or something. Yes, that’s an excellent way to save pennies, but advertising I’M A HUGE CHEAPSKATE on something your customers will see is too far in the wrong direction.
There is a balance. Every time you spend money, just analyze if you think it’s a sound financial decision. Is this cost necessary to maintaining your business? Will this investment pay for itself? If you spend ten dollars now, how long will it take to earn that money back? Often we spend money on things that are shiny but offer a terrible return on investment.
Have a little talk with yourself before you spend any money. Decide if paying someone else to do it is cheaper in the long run than trying to do it yourself. Sometimes spending time is a better decision than spending money. And sometimes it goes the other way.
I’m a big believer in waiting to spend money. Make some money first and then spend from the profits. That has always been my mindset, and it helps me control my money. The more money you have leaving your account, the more money you need marching in to make up for it.
25
Focus Mistakes
Buying a lot of courses is more than just a financial mistake. It’s also a focus mistake, and that is about ten times worse. Here is your new philosophy:
I work on a project until it is making money. Only then can I try something else.
Most of us buy an online course and go through a few modules. We try the idea for a few weeks, and it doesn’t work right away. So we quit and then buy the next new course we see that makes even bigger promises. We end up on the customer hamster wheel and never break free.
There are thousands of great systems for making money online out there. Many of them work. But you have to pick one and stick with it until you experience success. Otherwise, you are trapped in a failure cycle. It’s impossible to focus on three things at once. There are a few ways that I’m going to share with you throughout this book. I’m going to make you pick one. If you change your mind later, well…please just don’t do that. If I let you change your mind once, you’ll do it again and again and then you won’t make any money. You will break my philosophy and then blame me that you failed.
Failure of focus destroys most people trying to make money in the wild west of the Internet. They hop from idea to idea because they are all exciting. People come to me with phenomenal ideas for making money online all the time. When it’s outside my knowledge or experience, I turn them down. I’ll tell you right now. I have no idea how to sell physical things. I have no idea how to sell bicycles online. I hate that type of business because you have to buy parts or stock, and it’s sitting in a warehouse somewhere until someone buys it. I don’t like spending money in the hopes that later on, it makes me money. That honestly scares me. I like a business that I can scale infinitely. This book is digital. It doesn’t exist. Yes, you can buy the print version. But that version is print on demand. Amazon only prints it after you order it. There is no musty bookstore or warehouse with boxes of copies.
Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t go down that path. If you are determined to sell physical things, then I can point you to a friend of mine who teaches that. He’s an expert and has helped a lot of people. But if you go down that path, you can't change your mind in six weeks when you realize it’s not as glamorous as you imagined.
You don’t have to get all your training from me. Once you get through this book, you’ll have the pieces you need to make money online. I don’t care if you then choose someone else’s method. I just want you to only choose one method and stick with it until you are profitable.
Show me that you can focus. Finishing this book would be an excellent way to demonstrate that!
26
Letting Fear Hold You Back
Most people live fear-based lives. They tell you that you can’t start your own business. You’re not smart enough to write a book. You’re too ugly to put videos online. If you move to another country, you’ll get stabbed a thousand times before you leave the airport. They live disappointing lives and use fear to keep everyone else down.
I suggest that for now, you keep your mouth shut about what you’re doing. I know, I know, if you tell your friends how awesome and exciting this book is I will probably sell more copies. Yay for me! But then a lot of your friends will start to give you reasons why this book won’t work, and it only takes one or two of those to ruin your day.
They are terrified that if you follow this book, you will get rich and become truly free. Then they will be trapped. Either they have to break free too or admit that they have chosen to remain a serf.
Most people don’t want to admit that their lives are a result of their actions. We live in a society based on victimhood. Everyone blames everyone else for the things that their lives lack. When you start your project, you don’t have the option of blaming other people. You have to take responsibility for your destiny. No master is looking out for you and feeding you scraps from his table for being a good little doggy. When you go out into the wild, that is gone from your life.
Most people secretly enjoy their financial slavery. They like having a boss that makes them feel safe and warm. And they love it so much that they’ll react violently if someone tells them there’s a better way.
Rather than telling the people around you how you are about to change your life, just keep your mouth shut, keep your head down, and do the work. That way they can’t give you a fresh dose of fear. Fear and lack of faith are mind killers. They’re the reason that I live on a tropical island, and you don’t. When you let go of fear and focus on action, you become limitless.
27
Your Friends are Your Enemies
You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. If you take your five closest buddies and add up their income, then divide it by five, the number will be pretty close to your salary. The people around us affect us, and we have a tendency as humans to average out. If you have five friends who make less than you, you will never ask your boss for a raise. You’re already an outlier.
When I started my own business, a lot of my friends told me how I was going to fail. They told me the same stuff when I decided to move across the world. I’m used to hearing it. Every time I hung out with them, they would pour more negativity into my ear. They didn’t have the same goals as me.
And so, we started to drift apart. It happens. I don’t want to give you bad news, but when your friends notice your success, they will NOT be cheering. Most of you
r friends will want to hold you back because they are afraid of you changing. They have this idea that once you succeed you will leave them behind. By the way, they'll be the same friends who will ask to borrow money when you succeed and then never pay it back saying, “You don’t need the money anyways.”
I left a lot of my friends behind. I loved them, but they hated seeing me happy. It was a hard lesson to learn. My success cast a light onto their lives, and they didn’t like what they saw.
When you want to succeed at something, it’s better to surround yourself with people on the same path. If you want to run a marathon, you don’t hang out with a bunch of couch potatoes. That’s not going to work. Every time you say you are going for a run, they will give you reasons not to. Then they will try to make you feel bad for running. Like you’re working out just to make them feel guilty for being fat.
When you tell your buddy that you can’t go out Friday because you have to work on your new project, he will do the same thing. He will give you a million reasons to skip your project for just one night. What is missing a few hours going to hurt?
Of course, he’s willing to destroy your destiny for a few hours of fun. People who don’t believe in your future don’t care about ruining it. This is how friends keep you from quitting smoking and make sure your diet fails. What will one little dessert hurt things?
And if you’re able to resist their charms, they start in about how you think you’re better than them. I want a good life for my family. I don’t wish ill on anyone around me. But I do choose to limit the time I spend with people who are slaves. I don’t like hanging out with drones. It’s like aliens came and sucked out their personalities. They are both afraid of and hate freedom.
Let me give you a specific example. I give people ideas for businesses all the time. I have a natural ability to turn someone’s skills into money. This is my basic drone test: I say here is what you could do to make ten times more money than you do right now and break free. Drones then respond with hundreds of reasons why my idea is a bad one. They’ve never started a business and have zero knowledge about how it works, but they sure seem to know all the things that will make my business fail. I’m like King Midas. Every project I touch turns to money. And yet drones have an unending list of reasons why I don’t know what I’m talking about.
They take the winning lottery ticket that I’ve just handed them and rip it into shreds. Then they head back to their cubicle.
Does the guy who gave up crime spend time with guys that are still on the bad side of the law? Nope. He understands that if he spends time with them, he will end up back in jail.
28
The People Around You
I know I sound like a real killjoy right now, but I’m not telling you to throw your friends away and move into some deep dark cave that happens to have Wi-Fi access.
That’s not what I’m about – I want you to enjoy your life, and the memories you share with people are a big part of that. What I’m saying is team up with people who are on your path, or at least respect it. If your friends cheer you on, that’s great. But if they want to stop you, then you need to find other champions.
Connect with other people you find online or in person that on the same path. People that get the sacrifice and understand that you are dedicated to creating an awesome future. My social circle is filled with people who make a lot of money online. The more time I spend with people like that, the more money I make. It’s the positive version of that five friends effect.
You want to ally with two types of people. People on the same path as you and people further up the mountain. I’m further up the mountain so I can be your guide and trailblazer. I can show you the footholds that worked for me and help you to avoid the places where I slipped. You also want people at the same level so you can feel a sense of shared victory as you achieve things together. These are the two types of people that you want to invest the most time in right now.
Over time you will notice that some of the people beside you will fall off the mountain. They’ll quit, and you have to find new people. This still happens to me. I had a friend who was learning the Amazon game with me at the same time last year. He made a poor decision and fell off the mountain. In that moment his entire mindset changed. I offered to work together on one of my projects, but he turned me down. That was about six months ago. He isn’t making any money anymore, and he’s back in drone town. It stinks but it’s reality.
Now I have different people I talk to about my projects. I surround myself with people who are good at what I want to work on next. Once I master that skill and make money from it, I look for people with the next thing I want to learn. I’m always growing, but I only learn one thing at a time. The people I invest time in change all the time, but it doesn’t mean I don’t like them. I just don’t invest my time in people that bring negativity into my life.
I don’t want to hear about reasons why something won’t work. I want to hear ways to overcome that challenge. That’s the world that I believe in. If you surround yourself with other freedom seekers, then you have a much better chance at finding actual freedom.
IV
The Art of the Favor
The person who receives the most favors is the one who knows how to return them.
- Publilius Syrus
29
Elite Weapon
We just talked a great deal about mindset, but we ended that section talking about friends. I want to teach you how I leverage all my relationships. This section will show you a path that you never knew existed.
Most people have abysmal social skills. If you read this chapter and apply it, there is an excellent chance you could become my new best friend. This technique works on everyone - including me.
I leave my island very rarely. But when I do, I go to conferences. Sometimes I’m a speaker, and sometimes I’m just networking or working on a project there. People recognize me. My face is everywhere on my website, and I use my real name for everything. Someone will recognize me and walk up to me. People approach a lot more when I speak at the event, but that’s normal.
They walk up and just start dumping questions on me. I’m at this conference to connect with people to grow my business and income. But they don’t see that. They are completely unaware that I have motivations and desires. They don’t see me as a human. They simply see me as a knowledge repository. They ask questions, and I’ll answer some for a few minutes… but then a few bad things start happening all at once. First of all, most people keep asking stuff until you make them leave. I answered one question and then three more. How many do I have to answer before you feel that I have fulfilled my social obligation to a stranger?
Every once in a while, I meet someone on my level. I meet a real social assassin, and I love it. If you read my blog and read this book you know all the things that I like. I talk about them all the time. If you walk up to me and offer value first, then you get a lot of time with me. If you research me and find out what I like, then you can offer me something that interests me FIRST.
I like when a guy walks up and goes “I’m a big fan, can I buy you a drink?” - Now he’s in the game. How often do men get free drinks? I’m not a beautiful lady, so it happens very rarely. When a guy orders a White Russian, then I know he’s researched me. That’s how a professional handles it, and I like it. If you can see the other person as a human being and approach them correctly, people will give you amazing things for free.
Another great move is to buy a coaching session. You can buy an hour of my time from my website. You can get me on the phone that way. Once we’ve connected, we have a relationship. I’m way more likely to respond to your emails because you’ve shown you believe in me. That counts for a lot. I know a lot of guys who meet their heroes that way. They buy some coaching and use that to form a relationship.
You can also just purchase a course from someone and leverage that. This works on ANYONE. Imagine what happens if you walk up to me and tell me that you bought my
bestseller course, and it was incredible, and now you’d like to shoot a video testimonial for me. Guess what? That’s a lot of value. Now you are willing to help my business grow? You are in the inner circle immediately. That’s a way you can add value and offer something to someone who you feel is way up the mountain from you.
Just think about how that person is a human and try to give them something of value.
If you approach like a fan, then that’s where you get trapped.
30
Jar of Debt
Let’s talk about a little jar that every stingy person owns.
Most people in the world have a jar sitting on their emotional shelf where they store favors. They look at it and remember every person they have ever helped. When someone does something nice for them, they look for the fastest way to repay that favor to escape any emotional debt.
They’re so busy tracking this favor ledger that they miss the way the world works. Living like that is extremely stressful and it makes people wary around you. It takes a lot of mental energy to track the favors you’ve put out into the world. All of that effort could be better spent in so many ways. By treating favors as a finite resource you are limiting yourself.
Serve No Master: How to Escape the 9-5, Start up an Online Business, Fire Your Boss and Become a Lifestyle Entrepreneur or Digital Nomad Page 6