My process for moving to this island started very loosely. I began traveling around the world and trying out different countries. I was planning on hopping to a new country every one to three months. I was single and making a killing online, so it was time to have a great adventure. After a half dozen countries or so, I met my girlfriend. It was random because I was only supposed to be in the country for a week. That was three years ago. I liked her so much that I decided to stay here and even have a couple of kids. But I can’t live in a big city again. I needed this slice of paradise.
After a lot of research, we came here for a month-long vacation. It was a bit of a disaster - the Internet crashed all the time, and the power would sometimes go out for a few days at a time. Great scenery! Great people! Unfortunately, it's impossible to run an Internet company without Internet access. We spent the next year and a half trying other beaches and islands. Just trying to find the right fit. At the same time, I changed my business model. My old structure required me to be online every day to send out emails and communicate with people in real time. A single day with no Internet hurt my income.
That is a very serious obstacle. For that reason, I pivoted my primary business considerably. I moved into the Amazon game because books sell whether I’m online or not. I moved into a direction where losing the Internet for a few days wouldn’t hurt me. This island became my clear goal, and I began to tackle each infrastructure challenge individually. There were two possible solutions to the Internet problem. The first was to spend around one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars setting up a satellite dish. The Internet would have been slow, but I would have had control of my connection. I decided to shift my business model to adapt to my goal instead. I’m glad I made that decision because in the time it took me to transition my business the island improved. That satellite dish would be totally obsolete now!
Once I knew the exact island I wanted to live on, I could take actions to bring me closer to that specific goal. Wanting to live on a tropical island is cool, but it probably won’t happen without a better goal. You need to pick a specific island that you want to move to. That will change your focus dramatically. Suddenly you have more information to work with. You can research the visa situation for that country. You can study the currency for that island and the cost of living there. You can look at real flight options. A concrete and specific goal turns ideas into reality.
I figured out how much rent I would need to live at the level I desire here. You can survive on this island very cheaply if you don’t mind sleeping in a hammock, with mosquitos using you as an all-night buffet. I don’t like mosquitoes. I didn’t want to survive. I wanted to live!
I did some research and established a very clear budget. There were some surprises, of course. The day after we moved here, my girlfriend became pregnant with our second child. Sometimes you have to adapt your goals.
That is the reason I told you to set specific financial goals and write them down. Having a real goal in front of you makes you much more likely to hit it, without getting sunk by the desire to “adjust” later on!
XVII
The Habit of Success
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
- Aristotle
112
Some Failure is Good
I’ve read a lot of books that pump you up for the dream lifestyle - quitting your job, starting your career, living life on your terms. They’re exciting to read; they make it seem like you’re going go right in there and start winning your first time out.
You go out all excited... with no preparation for failure. And why on earth would you be prepared for that? Who would read a book about coping with failure, preparing for failure, or recovering from failure? So that first failure destroys you emotionally. Either you feel like the system failed you, leaving you more bitter and cynical – or you feel like you failed the system. That leaves you feeling like you’re lazy, weak, stupid, and unlucky. It’s hard for me to decide which is worse!
Those optimistic books that feel like pep rallies are wonderful for selling books and getting five-star reviews, but the price is that you don’t help people.
There are two types of failure, and it’s really important to know the difference. There is random failure, and there is systematic failure. Random failure is where you have problems with different parts of your project. Maybe you try and write a book, but nobody likes it. The second book you just can’t get any traffic. The third book you have problems finding people to leave reviews. If you are starting a blog, the first issue is that something goes wrong setting up the blog, then you have an issue in the code, and Google won’t list your site, then there is a problem with images, and they all look weird.
Both of those series of events are devastating. It seems like the world has turned against you and you have no hope of success. But that is only because you have been misinformed. Those are both the random type of failure, and that is the good kind. With random failure, you run into different failures all the time. You’re learning and growing in the correct way.
Random failures are how we master any skill or process. With my very first product launch, there was a glitch in the membership signup process for my members’ area. When someone would buy the course, they would get logged into the members area. But when they came back they couldn’t log in the second time. It’s a super weird problem that you would never think to test for. When I had people test my technology beforehand, everything went smoothly. They made a demo purchase and went into the member’s area.
When the product went live; people started having problems a day or two later. I woke up one day with two thousand customers, and nearly all of them sent in support emails. Have you ever woken up to thousands of people cursing you out over email? It was a total nightmare. I eventually found the mistake – one little box that was checked the wrong way. I’d upset ALL of my customers with that one little mistake.
I could feel like a total failure at that moment and decide that this business is not for me. Or I could move forward and make sure that mistake never repeats.
Throughout my career, I have made a lot of mistakes and even had some pretty big failures. Some of my ideas were total stinkers. The key is to realize that random failure is good. When each failure is something new and totally different, you know you are on the right track. The real problem is systemic failure.
Systemic failure is when you keep making the same mistakes over and over again. Most people are so busy getting distracted by small random failures that they don’t notice the systemic failures in their lives. Having a single income stream and thus a single point of vulnerability is a systemic failure. Anything hits that one stream, and your life is changed radically. We spend our lives ignoring systemic failures because random failures are more exciting. If you misspell every blog post you write, that’s a systemic failure. If your website crashes every day, that’s a systemic failure. If you write three books and all get terrible reviews on Amazon, that’s a systemic failure.
The key to systemic failure is that you can avoid or correct those mistakes and move on.
113
Motivation
At this stage of the book, you’re probably super pumped. And you should be! These kinds of stories excite and inspire people. The thought of starting your own business and firing your boss is exciting. It happens to me too. The first chapter of a book or the first video in a training course is the most exciting. We keep grabbing new books and courses just to get that initial feeling of euphoria and excitement.
Motivational energy is a finite resource. You only have so much of it, and when that initial excitement wears off, you can lose interest in the book or project.
Your desired goal is to Serve No Master. You want to take control of your financial destiny. Your motivational energy comes from envisioning this prospect and being excited about it. By now I know that you’re not quite as excited as you were when you read that first chapter.
> If you want to recapture that feeling and have it power you wherever you go in business, you need a motivational strategy, and it needs to be a little less expensive than gobbling up every course you come across, looking for a fresh hit.
Everything that you see in this section is designed to help you build that strategy. Different strategies work for different people, but taking action early is a universal constant. That’s why I started this book by asking you to think about and write down your goals. That’s much stronger than only thinking of them.
Having a written down goal lets your mind understand why it is investing energy. Most people vastly overestimate how much emotional energy they have.
They decide they want all the information first and take it in like a murder mystery or a movie. They treat it as entertainment and at the end they’ll do the little tasks if they like it. That’s a nice plan, but let’s be honest. How often are you doing that? You’ve gone from reading something for the first time to flipping around pages, scrolling through your Kindle, trying to find that one task you think you saw back in Chapter Four.
By the time you get to the end of the book, the hype has diminished, reality has set in, and you’ve got to grind. Now you’re facing a choice; you can do all this grinding when your emotional energy is already low, or you can grab a new book, find a new story, get excited again!
Most people choose the latter. I have seen people who have fifty books about meeting women or finding the right guy or starting your own business or how to ask for a raise. They have an entire bookshelf of self-help, but they do very little helping themselves! They think that the more books they have, the smarter they’ll be.
Are you one of those people? Most people who didn’t write down three financial goals at the start of this book are going to fail – because this gap is a crushing psychological roadblock.
If you’re one of those people, stop and ask yourself how serious you are about actually reaching your goals. How many books have you read that told you to write your goals down? How many times did you do it? Is today going to be different or not?
Reading motivational books and never writing down your goals is a systemic failure. You are making that same mistake over and over again. Go back to that section and take a physical action. Get yourself in that habit. Try something different.
All the reading in the world doesn’t help you to implement.
For example, this woman just can’t meet the right guy. She buys a book on the topic and tries the method on the next guy she meets. He’s not up to snuff, so she decides the book doesn’t work, and then she’s off to empty her purse on a new one. She hit that first random failure and then quit. But now she’s got a real problem. She’s introduced a systematic failure into her life.
She buys a book, implements incorrectly, and then goes to buy a new one. That repeating mistake is going to be fatal!
Many people don’t even get that far. They buy the books but never read them, or they only read the first chapter and move on. They don’t even notice that they’re failing their one life because they’re on this treadmill of excitement, powered by buying a new book every few days!
Obviously, this problem doesn’t apply only to women. I have heard some amazing stories about guys in the dating world. I met one guy who’d spent three years trying to learn how to talk to women. He spent three years reading books, watching training courses and hanging out on forums. He was full of excitement, talking about every technique he’d studied. He threw out so many acronyms and insider terms; it was like he was in a cult! He knew all these insider terms but didn't have any personal stories to share. I asked him how many women he’d dated in the past three years. Zero. I asked him how many women he’d even TALKED to in the last three years. Another zero. He broke my heart. All that “knowledge” and he never once had a conversation with a woman. He never even tried to implement it. He should have just spent those three years watching movies.
Knowledge without action is garbage.
Unfortunately, people do this all the time. Having a motivational strategy is the key to success. Taking real actions in the real world that match your desires is how you create a motivational strategy. There is a reason that I have mentioned ServeNoMaster.com/book so many times. If I can get you to look at that page, you will be sitting in front of a computer. I’m using every tactic I can think of to get you in front of your computer. Once you are sitting there, it’s a little easier to get you to open a new tab, sign up for something, start a website, and get your journey going!
I’m not smarter than you. I’m not quicker on my feet. I’m not lucky. Those are not the reasons I’m writing this book, and you’re reading it. The reason I succeed where other people fail is that I approach every task I take on with a street fighter mentality. I look for a way to fight to the top, and I don’t quit. If I can inspire you to do that, and then teach you how to build those habits, you’ll be able to get anything you want from this life.
114
Micro Steps
The first step in creating a habit for success is figuring out what you need, and then breaking it down into usable chunks. Remember a few chapters ago where I talked about the software tool I used called Scrivener? I’m using it to write this book right now. It breaks the process of writing a book down into tiny steps. I write one section at a time. Each time I finish one of these little units, I get a feeling of euphoria and success. Instead of having to write the entire book to feel good, I get a little jolt every twenty minutes or so.
With any new project or habit, you want to start with an outcome goal. That’s your objective. It can be losing twenty pounds or making ten thousand dollars a month online. That is your outcome goal, your final destination. Then cut that goal into tiny process goals. The smaller you can make the pieces, the better.
Our brains aren’t very good at focusing on long-term goals, so you need to set targets you can hit quickly. I rarely think about my big weight loss goal. I have a process goal. I try to work out every day. Whether I kayak, surf, stand up paddle, run or ride my exercise bike, I want to sweat every single day, because that will at least maintain my weight. I also try to eat healthy every day. When I hit my two daily goals, my weight decreases. I’ve been trying to drop my weight for about nine months now. If I approached only the outcome goal, I would have failed and quit by now.
Addiction programs don’t start you off talking about getting your “five years sober” chip on day one. They tell you to take things one day at a time. You might not be able to imagine yourself sober, or loving, or productive forever. But can you stay sober, be a better parent, build your business for just one day?
Maybe on day one, you are going to pick a website name and get your first blog set up. That’s your first goal. You can break it down into smaller steps. Pick a name. Buy the name. Buy hosting. Connect the name to hosting. Install Wordpress. Choose a look that you like. Write the first blog post. You get to feel a sense of accomplishment seven times instead of just once. I break down each of those tiny steps for you on my blog so that it all feels manageable.
This micro-step process connects to your brain in a powerful way. A significant cause of failure is negative emotions. Most people try something, fail on the first try, and feel worthless. This can happen as early as step one. You think of a great website name, and when you go to buy it, you find out someone already owns it. Suddenly, you feel like every good name is taken already!
When I was thinking of the name Serve No Master, I had a different original concept. I just wanted to start a new blog about traveling and having a cool life. I tried out like a dozen names. I don’t remember all of them, but one was called Blogger Without Borders. It’s a decent name for that old idea, but it certainly wouldn’t make sense for this book! That name was already taken. I hate when I check out a name I want, and someone is not using it. It happens.
When people see ServeNoMaster.com, they’re impressed. It’s easy to remember and clearly explains my mission. W
hat they don’t know is that it was my thirtieth idea. It turns out that failing to get that Bloggers Without Borders domain was a good thing. I failed my way to a MUCH better name.
When you are building your first website, you might not realize that a dozen little screw-ups happen every step of the way. It happens all the time. The problem is that you think of it as a failure. Please focus right now because this is super important. When you do this, you are attaching a negative emotion to the act of trying.
I have to say it again:
When you focus on the failure, you attach a negative emotion to the act of trying.
That process will destroy you. You train your brain that when you try things, it leads to feeling bad. You can train your brain to stop trying. I see people do this all the time. The secret of my success is my micro steps. I attach positive emotions to each tiny step. This allows me to feel good even when I fail. I’ve had projects crash and burn in spectacular fashion. But along the way, I experienced hundreds of feelings of success before that moment of failure.
Break down each goal into process goals. Then break those down into tiny steps. I have a process for ghostwriting a book for a client. I wrote it out for a friend once because he wanted to see. It has nine phases and sixty-one process goals. Think about that for a moment. Most people think of writing a book as a one step process. Either you wrote it, or you didn’t. As someone who has written over a hundred books, I see it differently. I may have written over one hundred books, but I have accomplished thousands of goals.
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 21
