by Jim Harmer
I had too much pride to admit to friends and family what was happening. I said things like “We’re still making great money, but we realized that having the extra employees just isn’t giving us an ROI (return on investment).” It was true—kind of. But the truer truth was something I couldn’t admit to anyone else.
I felt like a failure because the shrinking business critically damaged my work energy. I wanted to appear successful in front of others. “Look Ma! I tried a business and failed catastrophically!” This hit me harder than it may have for others.
I took a selfie in front of the door to the office that day after the office emptied. It was the very lowest day of my entire life, but for some reason, I knew I wanted to remember it. Somehow I knew I’d look back and say, “Remember that? It all looked so bleak that day.” It was bleak that day. There was no light at the end of the tunnel. There were no more solutions to consider. I had no idea how to get out of the box I’d put myself in.
The very next day, I came into the office alone. I turned down the thermostat and put on a coat to save some money, as if that would save me. I mostly stared at the computer and wondered what all those numbers were trying to tell me about where I had failed.
Around 10 a.m., I heard the squeak of the tiny metal mail slot in the front door open, and a few letters slid through. I flipped through the mail and found a blue-rimmed Christmas card with a nice picture of a blue jay on the front. I curiously turned it around and found these words handwritten on the back:
“Dear Jim. It might be a little strange for me to be sending you a Christmas card since you don’t know me, but I took your photography course this year and it helped me to take better pictures. The picture of the bird on the front of this card is one of my favorites I took this year. Just wanted to let you know that your work is making a difference. Merry Christmas. —Charlene Dumas”
I’ve never met Charlene, and she’ll be surprised to see her name in this book if she ever happens to read it, but she could not have done a kinder thing for me at that moment. I still have the card. You’ll recall that my work energy is fed when I achieve difficult things so I can feel the praise of that effort being accepted or admired by others. With the numbers in my business lagging, which had always been the thing that drove me forward, I was especially low. Praise was what fed my work energy, and this Christmas card was just the medicine I needed.
I still had two months remaining on the lease of the building, so I continued working from the orange carpet instead of working from home. My desk sat in a large 20-by-30-foot space—right in the middle with nothing else in the room. Nothing on the walls, no people in the other rooms of the office—just me, working 10 to 12 hours a day, in an empty, musty office in historic Nampa, Idaho. Trains passed by regularly and shook the walls, but I barely noticed as I focused my attention on my keyboard.
I determined my best path forward was to come up with a new product type unaffected by the grenade I’d thrown into our marketing of the online courses.
It was August. I could see Black Friday on the horizon, which is the biggest shopping day of the year in the United States.
My plan was to come up with a product so good that customers had to buy. I would turn on every marketing trick I had ever learned. The offer would be time-limited for only 48 hours. The product would be something that would show well in a video sales pitch, and I’d send tremendous traffic to the sales page.
I put together my offer. I created several bundles of presets for Lightroom. These are photo filters for serious photographers. Each bundle of 20 presets would normally be $40, but I included multiple bundles and added a webinar, a new photography course, and more. I made the entire package $40. It would normally cost over $1,000 to get all of the digital items individually after the sale had ended. I figured if that didn’t sell, nothing would sell.
Bleak is the only word I can think of to describe that time. I was depressed in a way I’d never been before. In hindsight, I really should have met with a doctor as I was barely able to function. I was so exhausted I felt I couldn’t get up in the morning. The only thing keeping me going was the encouragement of Emily and the possibility of this new Black Friday sale. That was the only time in my life where I could say I was truly depressed. Like everyone, I have my own struggles and downtimes, but looking back, this was more than that.
The greatest stress for me was the loss of who I was. I had been a poor law student. I was known to family and friends as the one who went rogue and started a company. I was so proud of that little company’s growth; just about everyone I knew had seen me as a success. My company had become an essential part of the story of who I told myself I was. Now that story was one of failure, I couldn’t shake it. There was a very real possibility that the best days of my career were behind me already.
I have heard many entrepreneurs talk about not letting your company become your identity, and I then understood what they meant. I didn’t even realize it had happened, but the company’s story was my story. Intuitively I knew I was more. My family, my faith, and my friends meant more to me than money, but it was the story of failure writing itself within me that affected me so deeply.
Don’t Let Success or Failure Define You
I learned the importance of not allowing failure or success to define me. Writing these stories in your mind is dangerous. The story of failure says success does not come to you. The story of success says failure does not come to you. But every life will see both. I found that to be truly resilient, I needed to rewrite my story to be a phrase I once heard: “I’ve come through some tough spots in the past, but somehow I always seem to make it through.” It is neither success nor failure—it’s a story of resiliency.
I spent months working tirelessly in the echoey office. I was relentless. Now with very few expenses for the company, the business was earning more than enough to meet our needs, but it was the failure story that I had to rewrite. It wasn’t all about pride, though. I saw my business cut to less than half of what it was doing before in a matter of four months. If it happened again, I wouldn’t know what to do. I couldn’t allow that failure story to finish itself or I knew I’d never get out.
It was two days until Black Friday. I opened the creaky door to walk onto the orange carpet again. (To be fair, it wasn’t solid orange. There were flecks of yellow and dark brown in it.) I spent 14 hours recording take after take of my sales video for my Black Friday flash deal. It had to be flawless. I recorded it so many times that now even many years later, I can almost do it by memory. You can go back on YouTube and hear the whole pitch: “Hey photo nerds. If you’re like me, you’ve taken lots of pictures that look okay, but you just can’t quite get it to that professional level … ”
Black Friday. I woke up at midnight to press the launch button. I pressed “publish” on my carefully crafted sales video, I switched the yellow “buy now” button to the live link to the shopping cart, and I was open for business. I posted everywhere. I plastered it all over the website. I put up ads on Facebook and Google. I created YouTube videos. I did everything I could to get that message to the masses.
It felt as if my entire career was dependent on the next hour.
It all reminds me of when I was a kid on the morning of Hurricane Iniki. The storm was coming, the warning sirens were blaring along our street, which was steps away from Pearl Harbor. The military police drove up and down our neighborhood telling everyone to get out. Something was coming and we had no idea what it would be.
That’s how I felt. But rather than binge-watching the local news for weather information, I was refreshing my PayPal account as fast as I could press F5. First nothing, then that satisfying notification of the first sale.
Sales poured in with the ferocity of a hurricane. Within an hour—in the middle of the night—the sale had already brought in a few thousand dollars. I drove home in a blind numbness and slept for a few hours before rushing back to a computer to refresh.
The sale was not going
well; it was going unbelievably well! Thousands of dollars were pouring in every hour. On the first day, I made a $40 sale every 43 seconds. By the end of the sale, it had earned $150,000. In just a few days, I earned more than many Americans make in three years.
I was discovering the potential of the internet all over again. While most businesses can only reach a certain percentage of a local population, I could reach the entire world from my laptop. As long as those orange dots kept popping up on the map, and if I could come up with a compelling offer to show those orange dots, I could stay in business. The potential was far more than I had previously imagined.
It’s difficult to explain what this success felt like. Just a few weeks prior, I had one of the saddest days in my life when I had to let my employees go and admit that my business was failing. That I was failing. Then, out of the clear blue, I brought in $150,000 in a few days.
The traffic to the website was also growing strong, and more and more people began to know me through my website. In fact, often when I traveled I was recognized in airports and around town. It was really fun that people would stop me and say, “Hey, aren’t you Jim Harmer from Improve Photography?” I was just some dude blogging from a laptop, but people around the world began to recognize me. I was soon ranked as one of the top 40 most popular photographers in the world. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit it was cool.
Best of all, I had righted the failure story that was developing in my mind before it could finish embedding itself into my life story. Without realizing it, I had allowed my pride to make me start thinking of myself as a successful person. I didn’t recognize how dangerous a “success story” can be to one’s mental health, happiness, and ability to accept God’s will. Success lasts until it doesn’t, and you need to remain strong after the success fades.
“I’ve come through some tough spots in the past and I always make my way through it.” The phrase that I at some point heard from an unknown source was now my own story.
The “resiliency story” is the most liberating thing you can tell yourself. When you make a mistake or fail to reach a goal, it no longer throws you into a lengthy introspection about who you are. You’re exactly the kind of person who tries really hard and sometimes fails hard anyway. When you see success, you no longer run the risk of forgetting the true source of your blessings. A bout of depression comes, and you take it in stride because you’ve been through tough stuff before and you always seem to make it through. You end up in a divorce and you know you’ll survive.
When working in the last 10% of optimization toward a goal, it can be easy to hit mental limits—upper limits that convince you there’s no way to climb higher, or that you are out of place in a position of success.
I also saw the power of weaknesses.
None of us like our weaknesses, but I believe we are given our weaknesses for a reason.
Weaknesses are a gift. Some people stress so much over finding their talent or calling in life. Want to know what your talent is? It’s easy. Just think about your weakness. God probably gave that to you so you can grow something strong out of it.
Emily has anxiety and it helps her to be steady and reliable. Because new and unproven things make her anxious, she prefers to keep the status quo sometimes. Her weakness of anxiety helps to make our family happy by keeping us grounded and stable.
With a renewed focus on the core actions that drove 90% of my success, the business continued to grow. The next year, my number one goal was to first reinforce the two parts of my business that were working:
1. driving sales to online courses by consistently publishing content that would bring in new potential customers, and
2. reinforcing the Black Friday flash sale.
The goal was to simply build a moat around what I already had by adding marketing channels to the products and improving the products themselves, rather than going out and starting a new social media presence for the company on a new platform or creating a new product.
While I spent most of the year working on these goals, I also worked on diversifying the company’s income. The opportunity for diversifying was in increasing passive gains on the website. I maintained the publishing schedule of new content that produced 90% of the results in my company and optimized the last 10% by diversifying income streams and marketing.
The Black Friday sale that next year earned $250,000.
How that money changed my family and me is difficult to describe. Emily and I walked around the house for a few weeks constantly remarking to ourselves how insane it was that we earned that much money from a website—from one sale. While we were extremely excited, it was also very painful. This part is difficult to describe unless you’ve been there. It’s what Gay Hendricks in his book The Big Leap describes as an “upper-limit problem”—a mental limitation we put on ourselves that can cause distress when we feel we are at a level of success where we don’t belong.
The Upper-Limit Problem
Remember the YouTube video about Kony 2012 from several years ago? The video highlighted the plight of the Ugandan people and called for the arrest of the terrorist Joseph Kony by the end of the year 2012. The well-produced humanitarian video attracted over 100 million views—many of them in an extremely short amount of time. The maker of the video was a very decent person who dedicated his time to humanitarian efforts and had a family.
When his project was wildly successful and he finally got attention to the humanitarian issue, he had a mental breakdown almost immediately. A video was recorded of him walking around naked on a screaming tirade in his neighborhood, waving his hands around wildly and soiling himself. This good person who successfully accomplished a good thing had a complete mental breakdown. He later said in an interview with Oprah, “The mind is a powerful thing, and when you feed it with this chaotic noise and everything else, you lose who you are.”
Again, I’m not sure I can fully explain what it was like for us to earn a quarter of a million dollars in a week after going through such struggles with the business. It was so sudden that I felt I was losing who I was. I was spending so much time focused on money and work that I could feel myself slipping away. Emily felt the same. We were so stressed and anxious, and yet we felt like we had to double down on work in order to regain control.
We immediately threw ourselves into planning the next flash sale and working on how we would invest the money we’d earned. We started looking at investment properties and deciding which one we should buy. We spent weeks with a real estate agent finding the perfect investment property.
We went to one house with renters in it. The house had an odd odor and a freakishly weird number of mattresses spread around the floors of nearly every room. As we inspected the house, Emily reached for the dishwasher and the guy renting the house flew across the room and physically stopped her from opening it. Weird, we thought. He said there were dirty dishes in there and it was embarrassing. I had a suspicion that there was something illegal in there … then we went upstairs and looked through all of the rooms except for one room that had four deadbolts on the door. Who puts four deadbolts on a bedroom door? I thought. I looked down and saw six extension cords from other power outlets throughout the house running underneath the door to that room. It was painfully obvious this was a drug house, and it was hilarious seeing the guy living there trying to explain everything. “Oh, this is my brother’s room. He’s a very private person. And he likes to charge his phone on lots of different outlets.”
We looked at another house being sold significantly under market value because it had been torn apart by renters. There were urine and feces in nearly every room of the house. Something about drugs makes people want to go to the bathroom inside kitchen cabinets, apparently. With the extremely poor condition of the home and what we’d calculated on a total gut of the house, we saw the potential for an extremely good investment. The housing market was still depressed and it was likely we could double our money in just four years.
It was a few w
eeks before Christmas and Emily and I were driving the kids to a park as we talked about the rental property. Nothing new. The rental property was all we’d talked about for a week. We decided to buy it and that it would be the perfect investment. Property values were at an all-time low and we were in a position to invest. We were well aware of the incredible amount of work it would be and the high costs of the renovation, but the potential for a large profit would be worth it. I called our real estate agent to tell him to place an offer on the house. It was settled. We made a strong offer and would be ready to take possession soon.
I hung up the phone and we drove in silence for about 30 seconds and Emily suddenly said, “This isn’t right. I don’t feel good about this.” I was shocked. We had just spent days talking through every possible scenario and we both thought it was the right course of action. Then 30 seconds of silence pass and suddenly she’s against it? Logically, it made little sense, but I knew Emily was close to the Lord and that if she didn’t feel right about it, even though she logically thought it was a good idea, then I should trust what she felt.
I called back to the real estate agent right away and told him we didn’t want to make the offer after all, and that we decided we weren’t going to pursue purchasing a property anymore. The instant I hung up the phone, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief, like we’d dodged a bullet. Trust in that feeling has always led our family to safety. Call it a “gut feeling” or “intuition” or whatever you want; I know it’s the voice of one older and wiser than us all.
We didn’t buy the rental property, and I’m so grateful for that. I didn’t realize at the time how focused on money and work we’d become. We simply shut everything down for a few weeks. No work. No investments. No distractions. We were fully present for Christmas with our two excited little boys who only cared about Santa coming on Christmas morning. Best decision ever.
