by Jim Harmer
Work Energy
Finish What You Start and Fearlessly Take On Any Goal
Income School LLC © 2020
All rights reserved. Use of any part of this publication, whether reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher, is an infringement of copyright law and is forbidden.
While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. The stories and interviews in this book are true although the names and identifiable information may have been changed to maintain confidentiality.
The publisher and author shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to loss, damage, or injury caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in this book. The information presented herein is in no way intended as a substitute for counseling or other professional guidance.
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Softcover ISBN: 978-0-578-59998-4
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-578-62010-7
eBook ISBN: 978-0-578-61079-5
For more information, visit IncomeSchool.com
Published by Income School
Printed in the United States of America
Dedication
Foreword
Part I: The Work Energy Formula
1: Cold Fish Sticks
2: Identify Your Work Energy
3: Summon Your Dreaming Juices
4: Going Rogue and Buying Bricks
5: Groundhogging Success
Part II: Barricades to Success
6: Working on the Wrong Thing
7: Visionary Poison
8: The Limits of Our Optimizations
9: The Ghost Town
10: To All Those Who Have Written Failure Stories Within Themselves
11: The Purpose of Our Dreams
About the Author
This book is dedicated to the “like” button.
Okay, not the like button itself, but to those who pushed it after reading my blog posts or watching my videos over the last few years. The world is full of critics, cynics, and internet trolls, and as someone who works online, I’ve met plenty of them—believe me! This book is dedicated to those who have made themselves lovable and who treat others well—even when they are online.
This book is 60% story and 40% lessons learned. It includes so much story because I had to learn each lesson through experience. This will not be like every other self-development book, which seems to always start with a researcher who studied millionaires. The author then does a few interviews of said rich and successful people and poof! The author suddenly has an epiphany that all successful people have something in common (“There was a pattern!”). They find the key to success was X, Y, or Z. The rest of the book is filled with examples we’ve all heard before of famous entrepreneurs at Fortune 500 companies who fit the thesis. While I enjoy those business books, I wanted to produce something really authentic.
Your goals are personal and will impact who you become, so I owe it to you to open up about how I’ve taken on some of mine. I did my best not to turn this book into one long “humblebrag,” but this is a goals book after all, so forgive me. I can’t teach you how to be outgoing or eloquent or any of the other things with which I struggle. I certainly can’t teach you how to cook. But I can teach you how to crush every goal in your path. That’s what I do.
One of my goals has been to create an online business to support my family. As I’ve done that, I’ve recognized and developed a work energy formula that largely created my success. I’ve applied it to many other goals now and it is the key. As you read this story and apply the work energy formula, you will quickly find the confidence to fearlessly take on any goal.
Work energy is the personal inner drive that makes you tick.
It is the unique mechanism your mind has developed to get things done, and it has been shaped by your life’s experience. While you may apply your work energy to a career, the word “work” refers to the work you must put in to achieve a goal.
One more thing before we begin. I’ve learned after years of having over a million people follow me on social media that no matter how loud the trolls sound, the best route is for me to always be my authentic self—even when there are those who don’t like who I am. So, in this book, I will tell the story as I lived it. I’ll mention briefly my religious beliefs where they fit into the story, politics, my distaste for MLMs, and why I hate fish sticks.
If any of those parts of who I am will hurt your feelings, turn back now before it’s too late. Head for the hills! Otherwise, let’s begin a story that I have told to only a few—a story that will help you crush your goals.
Crap. I’ve already messed this book up. The dedication is supposed to be a warmhearted thank-you to someone you love, and now I’m turning it into a disclaimer about how offended you’re gonna be by reading this book. I hope you’ll give me a break—I’m new to this. Blog posts don’t require dedications.
Ten years ago, when I started ImprovePhotography.com, I could never have imagined that eventually its pages would be visited more than 72 million times. An entire 0.6% of the world’s population came to Improve Photography at some point in the last decade. That’s a rather ridiculous statistic—nobody gets excited about achieving only 0.6% of anything positive.
“Woo! I lost 0.6% of a pound!”
“Boom! I got a 0.6% return in the stock market this year!”
“Ma! I got a 0.6% on my test!”
But in this case, I’m absolutely amazed by it. That’s because 0.6% of the entire planet came to my little blog I created largely while eating Cheez-Its and wearing pajamas.
The reach of social media and websites is incredible. Every Monday I sit down on a chair and talk to a camera for 10 minutes. I upload the file to YouTube and 30,000 people watch it (sometimes many more).
That’s amazing to me because as I sit here writing this, I am typing on my wife’s aging Macbook Air with a horrendously dirty screen (does she really spit that much when she talks?), wearing basketball shorts and a T-shirt, and I have bedhead. Oh, and let’s just set a tone of perfect honesty right here from the beginning of this story: I might also add that I have a bit of a nasty smell on me right now because I haven’t even showered for the morning. Yep, that’s me. Yet the incredible reach of the internet has attracted four out of every 100 English-speaking people on planet Earth—from Russia to Brazil to China to the United States—to my little blog.
Sheesh. The dedication turned into a disclaimer about how offensive this book would be, and now this foreword is getting a little braggy.
Hold it.
I’m also pretty sure that you’re not supposed to write your own foreword. A foreword is supposed to be written by someone famous and important who barely knows you, but who you pay to write it so it will seem to the reader like you are friends. Let’s just pretend that this entire section was written by Ellen DeGeneres, with input from Gandhi.
Okay. That’s really quite enough. Let�
��s just skip these obligatory sections in “real” books and start the story about how you can crush your goals. You’ll like it better—I promise.
“To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.”
—Sir Winston Churchill
If on July 7, 2009, at around midnight, you would have driven down Pine Ridge Road in Naples, Florida, and stopped in at the dollar store, you would have found me in the back wearing a ragged apron, with headphones in and paper cuts on a couple fingers, as I stocked the shelves for nearly minimum wage. It was the only job I could get. I had a newly minted bachelor’s degree on the wall, yet I was stocking shelves for a few dollars per hour.
Every night after work I came home around 3 a.m., frustrated to no end, feeling like an abject failure, and fell on my knees. My prayers mostly went like this in those days:
“Please make this come to an end. I need a better job so I can take care of Emily and the baby. Amen.”
Improving our situation was about the only thing I could focus on (although, in retrospect, I wish I would have relaxed a bit and taken my family to the Florida beaches more often).
Maybe your goals have felt like that. There are some things you easily accomplish, but there are others that seem to haunt you. Goals that always seem outside your grasp. Problems that you know you need to solve but that your best efforts never do. I’ve been there, and this story will help you to know how to change it.
It was in these days that I learned what “soul-grinding work” felt like. I despised every instant of work at the dollar store. I remember being so transfixed on how inefficient the system of getting the product on the shelves was that I could barely pay attention to my work.
I’m not from Florida. Emily and I had been married for two years. Our son, Ruger, was still such a little baby that he couldn’t even roll over yet. Just a few months before this dollar store torture began we had lived in rural Idaho.
How It Started
I attended Brigham Young University-Idaho in Rexburg. I received a degree in Communications and got a very generous scholarship to law school in Florida. I had a wonderful family, and I was going to be on the beach soaking up the sun with a law book in my hand for the next three years. What seemed too perfect in planning turned out so imperfect in reality.
I arrived in Florida a few days before Emily did so I could find somewhere to live, somewhere to work, and something to drive. We sold literally everything we owned that wouldn’t fit into one of our three suitcases, but we didn’t care. We were so happy to be going places in life that nothing else mattered.
I had everything planned out meticulously. I had done months of research on starting salaries for lawyers, how much law school would cost, how much it would cost to buy a car and live in Naples during school—details! My Excel sheet was king, and no contingency was left unaccounted for.
I spent two days driving my rental car around this wonderful new tropical paradise, looking up Craigslist ads for used cars. I finally found a reliable, used hunter-green sedan for sale by a man named José. I inspected the car carefully, went on a test drive, and everything looked great. I plunked down $5,000 cash and signed the title just minutes before heading off to the airport to pick up Emily and Ruger.
I rolled down the windows as I drove the 20 minutes to the airport, whizzing past palm trees and smelling Florida’s warm, humid air. Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” was the new song on the radio. Then it was back to Naples with the family as I pointed out all of the great things I’d found in the city already.
It was Emily and me against the whole world.
Driving down Goodlette-Frank Road, you guessed it, ca-CLUNK! The engine revved as I pressed the gas pedal, yet there was no acceleration. Looking ahead, I spied the yellow sign for Gulf Coast Transmission on my right and we literally rolled on momentum into the parking lot. Perfect placement for a transmission shop, by the way. Just like in the movies, we coasted into the mechanic’s shop. It was a beautifully cinematic way to see a car die, and the theatrics were not lost on me.
An older gentleman looked at the car and, in his thick German accent, informed me that the transmission was broken. Frustrated, but still riding high, I said, “Okay, how long will it take to fix? How much will it cost me?” Those of you who know anything about cars just laughed, realizing that a transmission is no simple fix. I’ll include here a full and complete list of everything I know how to do with a car: drive it, put windshield washer fluid in it, and check the oil.
Consequently, the German mechanic’s message didn’t translate into my brain. I could see he was frustrated with me, and so he spoke more simply for my simple mind. “The fix costs more than the car. Kaput!”
Ah, now this I understood. Three years of high school German finally paid off. Kaput equals broken. Basically, this man thoughtfully explained to me that my car wasn’t working.
This was something I already knew. Surely this car, the product of intensive research, could be repaired for the right price. I spoke in the simplest words I could so that he would understand: “Yes, it is kaput. How much to un-kaput?”
With growing frustration, he said, “Transmission kaput, cheap crappy car that you shouldn’t have bought in the first place is also kaput.”
He also kindly took the time to show me how the seller had rigged the car to temporarily run well on a test drive, and how it was obvious to any mechanic that the car was circling the drain. Got it. Basically, I led my family into a disaster 2,500 miles away from home.
The guy who sold me the car got my $5,000, and I got a lesson in how the world worked outside the bubble of the small, very religious town I came from.
The tow guy taught me the next lesson in foolishly trusting people. Tell us the tow is $200, but then make it $200 for both coming to pick up the car and $200 to drive back home afterward. Seriously, tow guy, that was genius. I totally didn’t see that life lesson coming either. By that point, I felt so defeated that I didn’t even argue with the dishonest tow-truck driver. I just didn’t have any fight left in me.
Excel sheet—busted. Apparently, there were contingencies I hadn’t planned for.
It took a few hours for the reality of the situation to sink in, but life had placed a mountain of a problem in front of me. I knew my next goal in life would be the most challenging yet—to reach financial independence. What I didn’t yet know was that life was about to kick me while I was down.
We stayed at the cheapest hotel we could find that night. Emily put on her positive attitude that has carried us through many struggles. I suggested we go to Walmart to buy our son a $20 bouncer since we had no crib for him. We did and then came back to the hotel to put our tiny baby in this wonderfully plush, safe little place to sleep for the night, entirely unaware of his parents’ worries.
As soon as we opened the box for the bouncer, we were met with a new contingency. Someone had pooped in it and returned it to the store. Right there, in the center of the bouncer, was a load of human poop. I applaud you, random pooper, for the prank on these new parents who were getting an education in how life works. Never again have I purchased anything that was previously pooped on. It was as if the entire planet was bent on wringing out every ounce of pride we had left that day.
We were exhausted, but when we put our son back to sleep in the car seat, we opened up our other splurge from the store. On sale that day was a large bag of frozen fish sticks for about $5. We reasoned that it was the largest quantity of food we could purchase for that amount of money, so we bought it.
Hungry and exhausted, we opened up the bag and looked about our room to find the microwave, only to see an empty wall. For two days, we gnawed on thawing fish sticks until we were certain they had gone bad—because there was no fridge either.
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br /> As the morning light filtered through the curtains, Emily woke up with a fever and sore throat. It lasted for days and we knew it was strep. Another $350 at urgent care later, she was on the mend.
All of our careful planning was entirely undone in the space of 24 hours.
We were down and out, but we always knew we had family who would help us if we let them know of our situation. We did, and my parents stepped in to help us get an inexpensive but reliable car. I am grateful that both Emily’s parents and mine made safe financial decisions for so many years. Because of it, we’ve always been cared for.
We now had a basic car, and we found a little apartment.
Yet the digits on the Excel file continued to dwindle. I had to find a summer job before school, and fast. The trouble was it was summer in a city whose businesses came to a screeching halt when the snowbirds went back to Vermont. Oh, and it was 2009. Even fast-food restaurants wouldn’t take my application when I informed them I would only be able to work there for the remaining five months before the school year.
Weeks went by before I finally got an interview at a women’s shoe store in the mall. I guess I wasn’t a good fit because the teenage girl who managed the store never called back. Then I got a call from a dollar store. I dressed in my best to put on a good face for the interview—ready with my resume on which I’d bolded the parts about having a bachelor’s degree, speaking two languages, being a student body officer in college, and experience running a small business.
The manager, who was only a couple of years older than me, looked up and down the resume for a long time as I sat awkwardly waiting. Finally, he looked up and said, with a face showing obvious disappointment for what I’d become in life, “You don’t have any experience at all in stocking shelves. What makes you think you could make it here?”
