Part of the guide: Personal Brand
It’s the new year, there’s no better time to reflect on the past year as well as your actions & goals for this year. For me 2012 was an excellent year. I accomplished the vast majority of the goals I set out to accomplish.
As I was reflecting on the past year. I realized 7 lessons that 2012 had taught me:
1. Don’t Set Too Many Goals
Ok, I did accomplish a lot of my goals last year. But the truth is I set far too many goals that were simply unattainable in a one year period. So I ended up over working and feeling burnt out way too often.
Sometimes in life you have to face the fact that you can’t accomplish all your goals as quickly as you’d like to. The worst part of high-volume goal setting is spreading your energy. If you want success in any business; you have to focus on it like nothing else exists.
You only have so much energy. Don’t spread it between 5 or 10 projects. You should always set one project as top priority and 2 or 3 others that can be labeled hobbies.
2. Screw Your Clients
This didn’t actually apply to me, but it will apply to a lot of readers. You should always put your own projects ahead of your clients. Clients are cool, monetizing a skill is an easy way to make a living on the Internet. But nothing feels worse than leaving your own work behind to focus on someone else’s.
Taking on clients is a sure-fire way to put cash in the bank – faster than anything else. Launching a website, app, or product takes a lot more time and effort; but the financial reward & self fulfillment is always worth it in the end.
3. Spend Your Money
I was guilty of not doing this for a long time. You have to work hard, play hard. If you don’t put the same kind of energy and time into having fun as you do working those 18-hour days; you’ll burn out. Working hard is essential for accomplishing great things, but when it comes to having fun; jump at it with the same intensity.
Go jump off a bridge (with a rope attached), go mountain-climbing, yacht sailing, super-car racing, travel Europe, hit London, Japan, Vegas.
Buy a car, a boat, and a big-ass house; you deserve it. Sure it takes a lot of money to do those things, but if you have it; it’s essential that you use your money to enjoy yourself in order to put more energy back into work and create insane results.
4. Work On Your Best Idea
Every entrepreneur has a seemingly endless supply of ideas bouncing around their head. Most procrastinate, put off working on their best ideas, and keep doing what’s making them money in the moment.
The secret is to always be working on your best idea. If you’re not working on your best idea then you’re wasting your time. Do whatever it takes to work on your best idea, the one you’re most passionate about.
You were never meant to do this alone
Reading this changes nothing. Doing it with people who show up changes everything. That is the whole difference between the people who transform and the people who keep starting over.
Start free →5. Build a REAL Business
Don’t just build a website, a plugin, software, or app. Build a real business, a brand, an online identity. You need five things to build a ‘real’ business:
- A Problem & solution
- A purpose
- A Product
- Customers
- A Way To Get Paid
If you’re just building a blog and hoping it leads you somewhere; you’re wasting your energy. You need to know what problem you’re fixing. Who’s going to buy your product, how big the market is, and how you’re going to sell it.
Some actual conventional business tactics. Focus on building a business where you can generate repeat sales and a loyal customer base. Nothing less.
6. Plan As You Go
In the Internet Marketing space, there are no business rules. It’s a wild jungle compared to corporate industries. I always loved that fact, but thought it was kinda dumb. So I always planned everything out in great detail. So I would know exactly what I was doing, how I was going to do it, and the expected time frame to complete each project.
While proper planning is crucial, you really don’t need a conventional business plan. It’s hard to estimate figures in this space. Instead, you should adopt a strategy of ‘plan as you go’.
Start off with an idea of what you want to accomplish, how you’ll accomplish it, and some of your goals. However, things never work out how you expect them to in this business; it’s much easier to plan as you go.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments, and questions below.
Comments (carried over from the previous site)
TyronneRatcliff, December 19, 2012, 06:23
Keeping track of your expenses is an important part of doing business, great post Dave!
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The line about spreading energy between five projects and calling the rest hobbies is the one that landed for me.
Every generation makes this discovery around year three and thinks it’s new. ‘Your own projects come first’ was standard advice when I started in the 80s too, just under a different name — people called it client work versus builder work back then.
Maybe the client-first problem repeats, but the ‘build a brand, an online identity’ language in the fifth lesson is not something a plumber going independent in 1985 had to think about. Having to also be a visible personality online, not just competent at the work, is a genuinely newer demand, and it is the part I still push back on.
Fine, the personal brand demand is newer. But the post doesn’t actually require you to be a personality — it lists five components and ‘online identity’ is one line among a problem, a purpose, a product, customers, and a way to get paid. The other four are just a business plan with different words.
18-hour days, must be nice. Reading this on a break between shifts and reception, and ‘go sailing to avoid burnout’ is not the tier of problem I’ve got today.
I read the fourth lesson, the one urging the reader to buy the car and the boat and travel to Japan and Vegas because they deserve it, and I confess it does not translate cleanly to someone in my position. At sixty-one, having watched a pension fund underperform badly enough to send me back into business, the instinct to spend as hard as one works is not one I can indulge, nor would I wish to. What I take instead from the piece is the underlying point about matching intensity in rest to intensity in labour, which does not require a yacht to practise. A quiet Sunday entirely free of the business does the same work as the excess described here, and costs a great deal less, both in money and in nerve.
The claim in the last section is that planning as you go is ‘much easier’ than proper planning, but easier for whom, and measured how? Easier in the moment, almost certainly. Whether it produces better outcomes over a year is a completely different question the post doesn’t touch.
There’s a character question hiding in ‘plan as you go’ that Raj’s evidence question doesn’t quite capture — it’s easier, sure, but it also lets you avoid ever committing to something long enough to find out if it was the wrong choice. Comfortable, not necessarily honest.
Hollis’s point about never committing hits different out here — in a town of four thousand, everyone watches you pick your one project and stick with it or not. There’s no anonymous testing-in-public. Plan as you go and the whole town sees you go.