If I spend $100 and get back $103, I’m not going to be a happy customer.
My relative wanted to take a massively profitable business that I would help her build and pour that money into a project that would at best earn her 3% back?
If that’s your dream, then nothing I can say will help you. I’m not here to help make your bad idea dreams come true. I’m here to help you figure out a path to escape the job you hate and make enough money to do what you want with your life.
Please don’t take smart money and dump it into a dumb idea.
74
The Dip
It’s the worst possible time to quit – but for a few deep psychological reasons, people do it all the time. The first ninety-percent of a project is done, but that last little bit proves to be too much. So people quit - right before the project was about to turn a profit.
It sounds absurd, but it’s entirely natural. You’re always going to hit moments where you are frustrated, and it feels like things aren’t going the way you want. You will have moments where you are tempted to seek outside investment or just walk away from it all and try something else.
I can’t promise that building a business is all roses and sunshine. It’s just not. It’s competitive! If you step into the boxing ring, you are going to get punched. If you understand that ahead of time, you can adapt and conquer. If you run into those days where you feel burdened, frustrated, annoyed and overwhelmed – KEEP FIGHTING! The people who quit too early are the ones stuck in cubicle farms.
There have been plenty of times when I have thought about giving up working for myself. I’ve even sent out resumes before when I just felt overwhelmed trying to do it on my own. Fortunately, nobody wants to hire me, so I have no choice but to endure. I haven’t considered working for someone else for at least four years, so don’t worry, it’s not like I was blasting out resumes yesterday! We just all have those days where we want to pass on the responsibility to someone else, a boss or a guru or a master that will take care of us and show us the way.
But the terrible and life-affirming truth is that there’s nobody that can take care of you like you can take care of yourself.
You must have faith in what you’re doing. Look at other people that are succeeding where you want to succeed. Be able to envision it for yourself. Listen to their advice and drown yourself in stories from people like me. Eventually, you will break through the dip to the other side. Some people find amazing success right out the gate, and some have to spend months slogging before they hit their pot of gold. The important thing is to keep fighting until you get what you deserve.
There will be moments when you want to quit, but never give up. You’re not fighting for me – you’re fighting for yourself and the people you love.
75
Burning the Boats
In 1519, a Spanish explorer named Hernán Cortés arrived on the shores of what is now called Mexico. He had six hundred men without armor, sixteen horses and eleven boats. That’s not much of an army. But he was determined to conquer the Aztecs and take every nugget of gold he could find. Outnumbered, he made a single choice that changed history. He burned his boats. His men had two choices - win or die. Quit was no longer an option.
Let’s sidestep the dissertation on imperialism and focus on what matters. This concept is still strong today. In Navy SEAL training, when you want to quit, all you have to do is stand up and ring a bell. When a sailor walks over and rings the bell, it’s over. But something interesting happens at that moment. At that moment, the instructor walks over and offers a second chance. Some people take that chance, but not one single person who rang the bell has ever completed the training. I know some Navy SEALs. Those guys are tough on a level that I can’t even describe. Having a drink in a bar with a buddy who can kill you faster than you can sneeze is pretty crazy.
The guys in training, the ones who succeed? They start out with two options - win or die. The guys who entertain the option of quitting never finish. Once someone rings that bell, the possibility of quitting is real for them. Some things are so hard that even knowing quitting is an option makes it inevitable.
I’m not saying you need to light your boat on fire or hang a bell in your garage. I’m not demanding that you quit your job and call your old boss something so horrible that going back to work is impossible. When I got into this game, there was no boat behind me. I was fired. With a hard kick in the pants. I had to succeed or go hungry. Many people find success when they have no other options. Right now you can keep your job and keep that revenue stream, but there comes a time when you have to leave that career behind so that your new project can explode.
Eventually, you have to light up those boats if you want to be free.
It’s scary leaving your job and knowing that those paychecks are gone forever. But there’s an advantage too. It puts you in a place where you have no choice but to succeed. That level of motivation will separate you from the masses.
XI
Skills
You know, like nunchuck skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills. Girls only like guys who have great skills.
- Napoleon Dynamite
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Skills have value
This is one of the rubber meets the road elements that will determine how many options you have for building your business. The more skills you have, the more you understand the work your hired talent is doing, the more you can customize things, the more you can get individual tasks done faster and cheaper – as long as you’re not the spoke at the middle of your whole business.
Certain abilities can make you money faster. We already talked about the services you can sell to other people. But here, I want to focus on some skills that are especially valuable in the online world. When you finally burn those boats, I want you to be able to make money fast when you need it.
In this section, we’ll dive into specific skills that you can use and market online. Some of these might seem quite obvious while others may be things you’ve never thought about before. Earlier, we went over some baseline skills that will help you get into the game. These skills are the next level. If you have a natural ability in one of these areas you can specialize and leverage it to great success.
Many of the skills that we let drift away after high school are quite valuable these days. Take some time to figure out which skill fits you best or simply the one you could see yourself enjoying. If you hate writing, trying to become a master writer is going to be awful, no matter what course you read that told you it was easy or that you should. There’s no reason to focus on something outside your natural skill set.
77
Writing
Writing happens to be my core competency. It’s the thing I’m best at. I can write fast, and I can write very well. On average, I write over 2,000 words an hour. A lot of that number depends on if I’m going back and forth from a mind map. For this book, I’m writing closer to around 5,000 words per hour. As a comparison, most famous writers averaged 250-350 per day. While that is great if you can write books that millions of people want to read, writing at that speed won’t keep your family fed unless you are one of the top writers of all time.
The problem with being a writer is that everyone on Earth thinks they can do it just as well as you can, and even if you are a great writer, you still have to find an audience. That’s tricky work, and even with all my success, I know that not every book I put out there will be a hit. Sometimes the audience just doesn’t connect with a message or something else happens in the marketplace that sinks my book’s chances. At the end of the day, business is a democracy, and your audience gets to vote.
You don’t have to be the best writer in the world. I’m certainly not. I’m very good at two aspects of writing. I’m one of the best researchers in the world, and I write fast. I can study a subject and learn enough to do it or teach it in a few days. I know how to assemble that knowledge from tons of different sources into a fantastic book without plagiarizing in
under a week. When the big boys need something done amazingly quickly, I’m the one they call – and they pay a premium because they know I can do it right.
Sometimes I get a flat fee, and sometimes I get a royalty. In both cases, the ability to write generates income far in excess of the time it takes me. You can leverage the ability to write efficiently into many revenue streams. There is always work for native English speakers who can write. In this field, you start out around 2-4 cents per word. If you can write 1,000 words per hour, you will make from 20-40 dollars in that hour. As you get faster, you make more money. If I were in perfect form and wrote out 5,000 words in an hour at that four cents a word price, I would make $200 an hour. That’s ten times more than you make starting out. Writing is a linear marketable skill; as you improve, you can quickly make more money.
Eventually, you will take over more control of what you write, creating stuff that interests you, building a reputation, and going from a flat fee to a percentage of the action. You can start putting books on Amazon. And if you want, you can follow my system to learn exactly how to do that.
I teach new writers all the time how to write fast, find a big audience, and make a living on Amazon. Writing is valuable in a host of different ways. Writing articles, blog posts, PDFs, training manuals, content for slides and so much more. All of these are jobs that need writers all the time.
There is loads of content on my site to help you make money writing very quickly. You can easily make a few hundred extra bucks this month just writing articles for an hour or two a day. This is the fastest way to make a little cash online and the only requirement is that you speak English.
78
Speaking
Is your voice pleasing to others? If you are a great speaker, then you want to focus on this area, because you can make a top-flight living online without writing a single word. The first category of speaking skill is purely based on sound. If you can read in a way that just sounds great, there is so much voiceover work out there; it’s insane. You can make a living doing voiceovers for small videos and even longer presentations. You can find jobs on the sites I list at servenomaster.com/book as well as some blog posts walking through getting into the business. With a little research, you can find dozens of places to put your voice and generate inquiries. I hire people all the time to read my audiobooks for me. There’s a good chance you are listening to some other guy’s voice reading this to you right now. Sure I sound ok, but reading an entire book without making any mistakes? That’s hard!
When you are in the audiobook game, you can get paid part of every sale or a flat fee just like a writer. When you voice an audiobook through Amazon, you get 50% of every sale that comes in. That means you and the author both have skin in the game and are both motivated to get as many people onto that book as possible. It’s a great symbiosis.
If your talent is more inclined towards thinking on your feet and being entertaining, starting a podcast could be an excellent idea. If you need to follow someone, I break the whole process down on my website. I have a blog post series breaking down my entire process from idea to execution. You don't have to be alone creating a podcast; you can record interviews with other interesting people with a fan base, and suddenly you have one of your own. Their followers will listen to your interview and become your newest fans!
You can also present webinars professionally. Someone else makes the product, and all you do is present the product’s story and explain the benefits live on a group phone call. You can use your affability to generate sales and connect with a whole new batch of customers. A webinar is basically a dry run for a live presentation, so your voice can easily be your ticket to the big stage. Think you can get booked to do a live seminar if you sell $50,000 of a product online? Absolutely, and it’s much easier than it sounds!
You can also do what I do. Record videos of your voice with something on the screen. That’s how I make the majority of my products, and I do it for other people as well. When you get really good, you also get really fast. You can make money quickly and easily. Eventually, you can make a training course teaching people how to follow in your footsteps. That's what I did when I made my video creation training course. I show you the exact process that gets me paid a thousand bucks for a single day of work.
As it is with most skills in this book, once you succeed at doing it, you can teach it. You can train other speakers and coaches and presenters to improve their talent and achieve higher levels of success with their presentations. My course only teaches how to make amazing videos; if you put together a training about improving language or sounding amazing, I would love to promote it on my website!
The sky is really the limit when you begin to grow and nourish your speaking talent.
79
Copywriting
Out of all the skills, we’re going to talk about in this chapter, copywriting is probably the most valuable skill. A good writer can get a flat fee of $25,000 for a writing project that takes a month to complete. Many of the top writers show up at a company and simply get a percentage of the growth they generate. You can earn fantastic residuals.
When you can write words that make people want to buy, the sky is the limit; you can dominate your field and live any lifestyle you want. You can accelerate this skill when you combine it with networking. That is like throwing gas right onto your money fire. You can have the best product in the world, but if the sales letter stinks nobody will ever see that product. Copywriting is an incredible skill that you can develop rather quickly. Will you become one of the top copywriters in the world in less than six months? No, but you’ll become a top gun, guaranteed.
Here's how to learn copywriting for free and become a master fast.
If you want to get good at copywriting, just research and find a list of the top 100 ads by a great copywriter from history. Every night, for the next six months, copy them by hand for 30-60 minutes. That exercise is pretty tough, especially if you haven’t been writing that much since high school. Your hand will cramp, and your eyes will get sore, but you will learn SO MUCH just copying other people’s work, it’ll blow your mind. I have an explanation of that entire strategy along with links on my website as well as a podcast episode that covers how to make money during the learning process.
Copying by hand activates the part of your brain that learns through experience. Most of the great copywriters have used this exercise to get where they are. It takes time and a little hard work, but the payoff is worth it.
The ability to write words that sell is universal. When you saw the Amazon page with this book, that entire page is copywriting. Every bit of the book cover, the title, and the description are all carefully designed to get you interested and buying. Every single page of Amazon is that way, and copywriters generate every television commercial and sales letter you run into in the wild. Copywriting is a skill that you can use forever; as you get better, you can sell it, leverage it, or simply use it to sell your own products.
The ability to write good copy will separate you from the masses. If there is only time for you to pick one skill from this entire book, then copywriting is what I highly recommend. You can quickly take control of your destiny and every month raise your prices. I know people that started out charging $97 to write a short sales letter who are charging more than $10,000 less than a year later. You really can work your way up. As your talent improves and you deliver quality results, you can take more and more control of the projects you work on and the prices you charge.
Eventually, you can create your own courses and sell them using your amazing copywriting skills. Remember, our end goal is always passive income that earns money while you sleep, and having multiple income streams is always a winner.
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Graphics
I have some basic graphic abilities, but when I want to make something that’s amazing, I have to bring in specialists, Photoshop wizards that know what they’re doing. I made a mockup of the cover of this book myself. I then sen
t my idea to three different designers to see what they could do. One of them took my idea across the finish line and created the fantastic cover that you can see before you.
Having a broad range of skills is important - my basic skills allow me to show someone what I want. Then their superior ability takes it to the next level. I hire designers for book covers, banners, flyers and a thousand other tasks. There’s always work for someone with graphics talent. You can start doing work for other people and just honing your skill. As you progress, you’ll get faster, and your income increases with your productivity. Then you can start filtering your clientele and raising your prices.
The next step is to start making graphics products. See what we’re doing with all these skills? Learn, and then get paid to share and teach. I buy bundles of graphics all the time. Whenever I need a particular type of arrow or a different simple image, I pull it from one of these resources. The ability to make graphics packs can lead to big business.
You can get into the book cover game as well. You make a ton of book covers, and you’ll figure out the types of designs that do well and move away from the stinkers. You can then create a pack of book cover templates that people can edit on Photoshop at home. You make those templates once and sell a package for $97 all day long after that. It’s a great way for a graphic designer to earn residual income. I have purchased several of these templates, and I used one to create the back cover of the paperback version of this very book!
Serve No Master: How to Escape the 9-5, Start up an Online Business, Fire Your Boss and Become a Lifestyle Entrepreneur or Digital Nomad Page 15
