All It Takes Is Persistence

My roughest year was, without a doubt, 2007. I had quit college after just five weeks and had barely settled down before I started having gallbladder attacks. The resulting surgery forced me into whatever work I could get to pay off the hospital bill. In my case, this work came in the form of two jobs: a hospital janitor and a Starbucks barista.

I hated both of these jobs. I spent the better part of 2007 daydreaming about my escape, about how within a year I’d be scaling Sugarloaf Mountain and operating a very rewarding (and very profitable) online empire. I’d grown up with the internet. Computers were all I knew. Surely my life’s purpose wasn’t to hang around a hospital toweling up the charcoal vomit of overdose victims.

By September I’d had enough. I put in my notice with no idea of where I’d go, just this vague notion that it’d have something to do with web design or with the web. I wanted to work for myself.

The 4 Hour Work Week

I spent a few months freelancing jobs I found on Elance. Just odd jobs. Editing audio, writing reviews, designing websites. Anything I was capable of doing, I applied to do. If you know about Elance at all, you know it’s a great place to find cheap labor. For that reason, it’s a really shitty place to find a job, but for a beginner like me it was all I knew to do.

I failed spectacularly at freelancing for nearly a year and a half, working hard, but barely making enough money to live on and doing very little in the way of empire building. It was around this time that I first read The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris. This opened me up to a whole different way of thinking about online business.

I had been focusing on all the wrong things. I’d been focused on service-based freelancing rather than the creation of so-called “Muses”. Success was, apparently, very easy to come by.

Like many, I followed Ferriss’ advice step-by-step and started planning product after product and testing (at least superficially) what would sell and what wouldn’t. I wrote ebooks, started learning how to make landing pages, explored public domain content for anything I could turn into a product.

And then I had huge success! I deserved it! I took shortcuts. I did just a minimal amount of keyword research and pushed out shit I wouldn’t buy or use myself! I made hundreds of thousands of dollars and finally found my path to freedom!

I’m just kidding. It didn’t work. I failed again and it was even harder to take than my less-than-spectacular freelance career because at least with freelancing I had no expectations. Implementing the methods used in The 4 Hour Work Week were supposed to make me thousands of dollars a month, but they didn’t… and for good reason.

The Reality of Working Online

I don’t fault Tim Ferriss or his book for my lack of early success. I fault the sense of entitlement that typically afflicts my generation and the nature of online success itself. By the time someone figures something out well enough to write about it (especially if this writing reaches a massive audience) then those methods are already outdated and not very useful.

Only in the last 6 to 12 months have I found any real success online and I can tell you the secret to it. It might sound cliché, but I promise this is what has worked…

It takes persistence.

It takes a willingness to fail to get where you want to go. I’m not saying you should aim for failure the first time around or that failure is imminent. As a matter of fact, I would even say that it’s impossible to have an outright failure in online business if you keep a look out for the opportunities that arise when things aren’t working out. It’s so easy to morph seeming failures into successes.

I’ve been in this game for almost three years. I had failed and failed and failed, but I worked through every single one of those failures and learned as much as I could from each. I started to recognize my weaknesses and implement systems that would focus more on my strengths.

As my company continues to make more money and grow and as we continue to launch new products and services, I have to look back to where I’ve come from, to what I’ve gone through, and realize that no matter how bad or how difficult it seems, it’s always possible to push through.

If success is all you want in life, pushing through is all you’re capable of.

Photo by Sergio Tudela

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