“Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming…” ~ Dori
Madi T. responded to yesterday’s No Silent Cheerleaders by first calling out John Acuff’s quote that stated, “Never compare your beginning to someone else’s middle.” and added:
More often than not a super successful man in his early 30s who has literally millions of dollars in the bank is telling me, “just go for your dreams and it’ll all happen!” I wish these big shot [internet marketers] would create email campaigns acknowledging that it doesn’t happen overnight, that it’s a series of steps and habits over time, and build / sell courses around that.
Annoyed by the same lack of connection to their beginnings, I stopped listening to other internet marketers a few years back. It took me a while to figure things out, but it was easier for me to be creative when I wasn’t constantly admiring would-be peers.
Entrepreneurship is rarely filled with venture funding and IPOs. The media amplifies the successes of unicorns like Facebook, Uber, and Slack to the point where it’s easy to lose touch with the reality of the practice. Even modest success comes at a price.
Back in November, and somewhat serendipitously, someone sent me this Inc. article.
I deleted my dating apps, stopped going to bars, became habitual with my medication, committed to my fitness, and turned down events that didn’t bring immediate value.
I also opted to “package” myself more clearly. I promised myself that if someone wasn’t interested in Ghost Influence and didn’t fit my day rate consulting structure and minimum project size I would refer them elsewhere. This act alone freed up a significant amount of my time and made colleagues quite eager to support me in return.
Suddenly with an abundance of freedom to work… I needed something to work on. I’d become somewhat of an expert at crafting excuses for creating new content and it was depressingly standard to see a two month gap between my posts.
One day, while standing in line for the bathroom at the cafe, I said “fuck it” and opened Promis to commit to emailing my list (you lovelies) every day in 2016. I had no clue how it would play out, but dubbed it an ‘experiment’ and thus gave myself permission to fail.
I sent the first email, you loved it, and I kept writing — simple as that.
I had no idea people would see my excessively profane rants about how fostering sex and conversation are fundamentally the same… and then jump to contact me about helping them market their billion dollar company (happened twice in two months). I would never have guessed pestering you daily would result in a Forbes feature. Most astoundingly of all, I had no clue there was this much shit in my brain that people wanted to hear.
To Madi T’s. request, while I don’t have millions of dollars in the bank, I will say this:
You’re right. It doesn’t happen overnight and it certainly won’t happen if you sit around waiting for it to drop in your lap. It’s a series of steps and habits that are build over time.
Let’s talk about those “steps and habits” she so desperately craves.
To fulfill this monumental request for guidance I must reference a powerful resource… the sage wisdom of Madi’s email. In the paragraph that followed, she responded to my prompt to ‘tell me the story of how you’ve brightened someone’s day’ in yesterday’s email.
You mention how expressing gratitude involves being vulnerable. Recently I mentioned that I’d reached out to 3 different influencers and gotten a no-response, a scammy response, and a genuine response. I can tie those responses directly to how vulnerable I myself was being in each of the emails I sent, where the least vulnerable got nothing in response and the most vulnerable expression of gratitude got me a very detailed and love-filled response. I made her day by being interested in her work, by giving solid advice, and by showing vulnerable gratitude. It was great because not only did I start a new relationship—likely to be quite mutually beneficial—but I got make to her day and help her as well! What a wonderful feeling.
Madi was building her portfolio of Priceless Real Estate one email at a time. She didn’t know what would come from it when she started and she still doesn’t know now, but she will most surely continue and find out soon enough. You can create and execute a series of plans, but the most monumental of advances are made when you’re the first ship to adjust your sails to capture the winds of a storm.
You don’t always need to know where you’re going to start moving forwards.
Take one step.
What’s yours?