By the Ocean
Sunny and Cool 69 Degrees
6:43 a.m.
When I look out into Internet Land and see the rat race that building a business online has become, it’s no wonder people who do this burn themselves out.
When you’re racing against millions of other rats vying for even the tiniest sliver of attention, you can’t stop running or you get trampled.
But this obviously doesn’t work. Even if you make money, it’s not sustainable, or enjoyable, or healthy or smart.
Can you succeed slowly?
That’s a valuable question to ask.
To succeed slowly, you need a magnification of your effort. You need leverage.
You need to figure out how to multiply 1 unit of effort into 100 units of result.
I don’t mean outsourcing all your rat work to a team of 50 people who will do it for pennies on the other side of the world. That’s just giving yourself a brand new problem to manage. It’s just more rats who, for now, are charging rates low enough to make that arbitrage seem like a good idea.
But that’s not fundamentally shifting how the business runs. That’s just finding people who aren’t you to do all of the grunt work.
I mean REMOVING THINGS completely from your todo list, from your strategic plan for creating success.
You don’t have to chop up that video content into a million pieces and contribute to the destruction of the human mind by spraying your 30 second clips all over social media.
Succeeding slowly requires a better strategy than the rats have. The rats only have the strategies the gurus hand them. And most all of them are short term, labor intensive, repetitive, boring and unsustainable activities. Which is why the guru people show up again every 6-8 months with the NEW thing that you should do.
Better strategy requires thinking. It requires contemplation. It requires the ability to see opportunity that hasn’t been printed in some guru’s course. It requires the ability to deeply understand the problems being experienced by those you want to serve and the skill to help solve those problems in new and effective ways.
My strategy is the plant a field and tend it strategy. It’s created every single piece of opportunity I’ve experienced in business in the last 13 years.
For lack of a better way to describe it, I’m a high-tech farmer who knows how to write. I write every day. I’ve done it for 13 years via this media platform. (If you want to do this in your own business, here’s your chance.)
I plant “seeds” in the ground, I tend the soil, I watch the weather, I nurture the plants, I see what happens and make my decisions from there.
Perhaps it’s time to “make farming great again?”
What would happen if the internet rats stopped chasing and started attracting?
Attracting is slow. Growing is slow. It’s deliberate. It’s conscious. And you can build a huge amount of momentum over time. It just depends on what you want to do, who you are, and how you are best wired to work. (If you don’t know this stuff, find out.)
The farming life is nice. It doesn’t happen overnight, but really, nothing good ever does.