A Very Important Lesson About What Might Be Keeping You Stuck

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1. Hey Gary, I agree with you 100% about our mind set. Most people are in the mindset of working for others and to be successful online that definitely has to change. 

   The best investment we will ever make is in ourselves and in our education. This is the formula needed to become successful in our own business.

   If you want to succeed you should follow the advice and information of those that have been doing it successfully do. I can see 100’s of people getting clarification and value from this article.

   • Thanks, Lisa. Entrepreneurs tend to plough their own furrows in life and that can be a daunting prospect for some people who may feel they’re not up to it. 

     But, if you never take great risks, you never get great rewards. 

     I’ve had bad and lean periods in my affiliate marketing journey and friends of a certain mindset encouraged me to bite the bullet and go get a “real” job. 

     But, once you’ve been master of your own destiny, it’s very hard to go back to building someone else’s dream. 

     I know in my bones that I’d now be a terrible employee, not in terms of the quality of the work I’d do, but in speaking up about office injustices, calling out what I’d see as bad decisions  by management, not working a minute more than I’m paid to do, and so on. 

     In truth, I was already on this track after lousy management in the company I was working for, pushed one of my colleagues over the edge into a nervous breakdown. I hit the roof over this while others stayed quiet. 

     I was fired for being a disruptive influence and my colleague, a 22 year veteran of the company, was also fired because he was now deemed to be unreliable and they could never trust that he wouldn’t fall apart again on future projects.

     We raised the issue with our union who negotiated a nice settlement for both of us. We both left the company on the same Friday, and we both started new jobs, in different companies, the following Monday.

     Karma’s a bitch, so they say. Turns out one of my relatives was a long-time friend of the CEO for the company we’d left (I didn’t find this out till much later). My relative related my experience with the company to his friend as a simple anecdote and the CEO looked into in the incident off his own bat. 

     Many months later, I heard that the division manager had been sacked, his second-in-command had been moved sideways into HR (essentially a demotion) and a third manager who’d been in the company as long as my colleague and had been considered a friend, resigned from the company.

     A year or so after I started in my new job, I left it to form my own software consultancy firm and leased out my services for 10 years. 

     By then, I’d had a bellyful of office politics and long commutes and I took a year out and played around with making money online. This was back in 2004. 

     I’ve been doing that ever since. 

     And I’ve been answerable to no one but myself. 

     And that’s just the way I like it!

2. Hi, You said it best here…. 

   “The only way to change your situation is to make sacrifices and be willing to make a different choice than what you’re currently making because your best thinking and choices got you to the exact point you’re at today.”

   I was in the same situation.  I found a few ways to earn a little bit of coin, while I was learning the ropes of Affiliate Marketing.  Now that I have some coin coming in, I am able to put the money into the next steps of Paid Traffic.

   You have explained your route and have taught me a couple of new ideas.

   Thanks for sharing

   • Thanks for the Feedback, Rob. 

     I’ve found that as I get older, my thinking is becoming more rigid and I’m less open to new ideas.

     This is a terrible handicap! 

     I sometimes have to force myself to look at things from a different angle or try a new a strategy when I’ve become locked into one way of thinking or doing things. 

     Still, it’s good to be challenged. It forces you to adapt to new situations.

     And sometimes, you just have to throw out an old mindset because it’s not serving you well and embrace a completely new way of doing things. 

     That seems to be all the more important these days with what the pandemic is doing in causing mass layoffs. 

     People in certain dying industries are being asked to re-educate themselves for something more modern which involves working from home to a greater or lesser degree. 

     It’s especially hard for the over 50s who generally find it harder to transition to a new way of working and a new kind of business. Ageism is a problem in many industries and, while 50-somethings have amassed a huge amount of knowledge and experience, youth, dynamism and being able to react quickly to change are often valued more these days. 

     Anyone can build an online business over time. Ageism isn’t an issue in the online world so building a business there is a good strategy for anyone, but especially for people on the wrong side of 50.

     It does require a change in mindset from employee to boss/entrepreneur.

     The biggest obstacle to success is often yourself and how you think. 

     Essentially, people don’t succeed because they don’t get out of their own way and that, most frequently, comes down to how they view the world, their place in it and how self-worthy they feel.

     And something as simple (though it may not be easy to do depending on your disposition) as a mindset change can alter all of those perceptions.

3. It’s true that how a person thinks will greatly influence how well they do at anything. One mistake that too many potential entrepeneurs make in this area is to let themselves be influenced by negative friends and relatives. They will either give up too soon, or not even get started, because of naysayers. 

   • That’s a very good point, cpascal. I’ve been lucky that those closest to me have not been negative about me ditching a well-paid job for the perceived risky life of an affiliate marketer. 

     There’s been envy that I’m able to live life on my terms but also a recognition that income isn’t always regular. It can come in fits and bursts with long lean periods in between.

     And, if you’re not good at managing your own finances, you can end up running out of money during those lean periods. 

     But you learn to adapt and put money aside to cover those periods. And you keep building your business so that those lean periods become smaller and less frequent.

     No one close to me has ever told me to “get real”, “stop messing about online” and “get a real job again”. 

     What they have seen is that I’ve been a full-time affiliate marketer for 16 years, longer than some of them have stayed in a single job, or even a single industry.

     So, they know it works but they’re risk averse. 

     They liked the comfort of a regular paycheck even though they hated the 9-5 routine, the unpaid overtime they sometimes had to do, the increasingly long commutes, the interminable office politics and all the other stuff that’s part of working for someone else. 

     And now, in the midst of the pandemic, some of them have been furloughed and some have lost their jobs. 

     They’re now getting social welfare payments, desperately trying to make ends meet, looking for replacement jobs that just aren’t there. 

     It’s terrible to see that level of worry and anxiety gnaw at those friends who’ve been affected this way.

     I’ve been encouraging them to start building online businesses if for no other reason than it’s a nice change to staring at 4 walls day in day out. 

     When they eventually do find a job, they’ll still have a second income stream, at least if they keep the online business going. 

     Or they may find that they end up making more from their online business than they ever did in their “real” job.

     Zach Crawford, my own mentor, talks about the negativity he himself faced when he decided to become an affiliate marketer. It’s worth watching his short documentary.

     But negativity also comes from within – it’s the self-doubt, not seeing yourself as worthy and believing what others say about your capabilities negatively.

     These self-perceptions can be changed by altering your mindset. 

     It’s not the power of positive thinking as a lot of that is just wishful thinking. It’s about understanding why you think the way you do, why you need to change some aspects of that and how you go about that. 

     Negativity from other people often stems from their own inadequacies. They son’t want their contemporaries to do better than them because then it shows them up as slackers, underachievers, stupid or whatever.

     People like to tear others down because it makes them feel better about themselves. 

     People who self-aggrandize do deserve to be taken down a peg or two because they make themselves feel better by belittling other people.

     Neither mindset is a good nor acceptable one. 

     The best mindset is to believe in yourself, that you are worthy of being successful in both your personal and business lives and you get there, not by walking over or exploiting other people, but through compassion and a willingness to help and collaborate with others. 

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